After a period of expansion in 2018 that saw The Detox Market open three stores, including a flagship location in New York and the creation of its own in-house brand called Detox Mode in October, the beauty retailer is looking to rein in its external growth strategies.
The plan is to bring the focus to its existing brick-and-mortar locations, including moving its Toronto flagship to a larger location in 2019, as well as focus on a website redesign set for January 2019. Its strategy is in sharp contrast to fellow clean beauty retailers like Follain and Credo Beauty that are continuing their fast pace of brick-and-mortar expansion amid a growing natural beauty market that reached $1.3 billion in sales in 2017, according to Nielson data.
The company, which sells brands like Tata Harper and Vintner’s Daughter, is now less focused on increasing revenue via physical retail. Instead, The Detox Market is switching gears to home in on existing locations and experiences as a means for growth, said Romain Gaillard, founder and CEO. Although Gaillard declined to specify company revenue or sales, he did note store sales have doubled every year for the past five years.
“We are more into intensification rather than diversification [right now],” said Gaillard. “We now have online sales, in-store sales and our own brand. We’ve already covered a lot, so the key for me is to focus on the existing stores and the experience.”
One of the latest diversification efforts by the company was the launch of in-house brand Detox Mode in October. The Detox Mode launched with body oil — something not previously carried — and the next “several” products will focus on body care, Gaillard said. But in addition to filling a white space for product offerings, the idea for Detox Mode is that it can also be useful in introducing those uninitiated to clean beauty.
The next major project for Detox Market is a website redesign and is aimed at adding more mobile-friendly capabilities such as faster web-page loading times. The majority of e-commerce traffic comes from mobile, said Gaillard — traffic from mobile has grown 40 percent year over year for the past three years. This is on par with a wider retail trend, where 35 percent of consumers shop via mobile only — that’s expected to grow to nearly 50 percent by 2020 and to 54 percent by 2021, according to a 2017 report by Statista. However, the majority of sales still come from retail stores, Gaillard said, but declined to further specify.
“Instead of spending crazy amounts of money [in ad targeting] to drive traffic, I want to focus on the redesign and the [in-store] experience,” he said.
These in-store experiences include moving the flagship in Toronto to a new bigger and better location with 2,000 square feet to accommodate more retail and a wellness area; the wellness area will host events like clean-beauty master classes and speaker-series with brand founders. There will be only two new stores opening in 2019, including the Toronto relocation, before picking up expansion speed again with three to six stores in 2020.
