Health and beauty retailer Superdrug has launched their earliest ever reductions across their own brand range of Christmas gifts, meaning shoppers don’t need to wait until the January sales to get their hands on offers.
Superdrug has extended their Black Friday deals across 15 products, including own brand make-up range Studio London, with over 80% off their 5pc brush collection and over 70% off the 8pc collection, to ensure that shoppers are able to spread the cost of Christmas this year. Further discounts on an additional 64 products will be introduced ahead of Christmas Day.
Jamie Archer, own brand director, Superdrug, commented: “We started our Black Friday offers earlier than ever this year with the understanding that our customers want to spread the cost of Christmas now more than ever and so we’ve decided to extend some of our Black Friday deals, as well as offering more fantastic prices across a further 64 gifting products.
“As an accessible retailer we are committed to help make Christmas more affordable and have decided to continue giving our customers big savings up until the end of the year, with the aim to help shoppers make the best of their festive budgets and treat their friends and family this Christmas.
“At Superdrug the customer is always at the heart of what we do. With this in mind, we have focused on offering quality and value to our shoppers, ensuring the beauty and health products we know our customers want and need are accessible for all budgets.”
The recently published ChannelX European Marketplaces 2023 report highlights how Superdrug has not only made beauty products accessible for consumers but has done so by promoting small, niche and start-up health and beauty brands.
An exclusive marketplace profile in the report looked at how Superdrug became the UK’s first high street health and beauty retailer to have a marketplace – beating Boots to the draw by a matter of weeks – the drive to create Superdrug Marketplace was the same as for any retailer: to rapidly expand online inventory and grow customer base as shoppers pivot to online.
However, it has also been used as a means to helping promote and sell small, niche and start-up health and beauty brands.
For these smaller brands, Superdrug Marketplace offers the chance to leverage the larger company’s online presence and delivery infrastructure in order to grow sales – something that many start-ups and niche players struggle to achieve cost-effectively on their own.
And it appears to be a successful strategy for Superdrug. As a result, after being in operation for a year at the time of writing, the platform has 300 brands signed up. Of these, many are, as said, smaller, niche players such as skincare brand UpCircle Beauty, Women’s razor brand FFS Beauty and makeup brand Jecca Blac.
However, 3.6% of Europe’s Top1000 retailers are also present on the site, with half of them UK based. Traditional – and more luxury orientated cosmetics brands – based in Italy and France also make a showing, at 20% and 10% respectively.
This lack of ‘big names’ is all part of the plan, according to Superdrug, which positions the marketplace as the ideal platform to bring new brands to market, to help support startups in the health and beauty sector and to give a wider platform to black-owned brands – something the retailer has been focusing on instore for a number of years.
While there are obvious sales and revenue benefits in running a marketplace alongside its existing business, Superdrug is also positioning itself as wanting to be seen as the next logical step in ecommerce growth for startups in the sector – an interesting and worthy approach to growth in an increasingly crowded sector.
This marketplace profile was authored by Paul Skeldon and features in the ChannelX European Marketplaces 2023 report. Download the report in full for the Top 15 marketplaces by traffic in Europe. We drill down into their structure, operation and how they service both consumers and merchants. Includes: Aliexpress, Temu, Amazon, Decathlon, Zalando and many more.
