Amazon India banks on luxury brands for growth in beauty segment

By

Maverick Martins

Published
Mar 21, 2018

Global e-commerce giant Amazon is focusing on luxury brands to drive sales in the booming beauty segment in the country and expects double digit growth for the year.

The battle is heating up in the online beauty segment with etailers trying to gain an upper hand by offering something different to consumers in the billion dollar beauty market.
 
Amazon India is relying majorly on its luxury offerings to drive sales in this category and has tied up with almost 30 luxury brands. The company’s Aluxury brand portfolio includes Indian brands such as Forest Essentials and Kama Ayurveda as also brands such as Elizabeth Arden, Calvin Klein, Paco Rabanne, Moschino, etc.

The online beauty market is currently dominated by Nykaa, however other etailers like Flipkart and Myntra are also catching up and scaling up their beauty portfolios. Myntra has recently launched 15 new brands on its platform and eyeing a $100-150-million business in the next two years.
 
“Luxury is an emerging but very fast growing segment. That segment is growing strongly at the rate of 3x in 2017. We have introduced new brands as well and now have 30 brands in luxury beauty,” said Meghna Apparao, Category Leader of Beauty, Amazon India.
 
“The growth in the beauty category has more than doubled in 2017. We introduced a slew of brands in the fourth quarter of 2017 so I expect that growth to reflect this year. Beauty is a strategic category that we are focussing on as we go forward,” said Apparao.
 
Amazon India currently has over 30 luxury brands offering 2,000 products on the platform across make-up, skin care, hair care, body and perfumes. It retails 2 million beauty products across 19,000 brands in this category.