How to win over Japan’s beauty consumers

To understand J-beauty, it helps to know the language. Mochi-mochi (squishy, like a Japanese rice cake), puru-puru (plump and dewy), kime (healthy-looking, poreless), sube-sube (smooth and sleek), are all terms used in Japanese to describe how skin looks and feels. The Japanese beauty and personal care market is currently worth 4.4 trillion Japanese yen ($30.4 billion) and is expected to climb 3.4% next year, according to Euromonitor. Fragrance, color cosmetics, deodorant and suncare are particularly buoyant categories — growth of the latter two is driven partly by Japan’s increasingly hot summers. J-beauty: Savvy, but cluttered “The Japanese beauty market is defined by two things: savvy customers and cluttered distribution,” says Loic Rethore, CEO of Australian brand Jurlique and an expert in selling to Asian markets. The savvy consumer means that brands need to have a strong narrative attached to their products, especially when it comes to skincare. “Japanese consumers like to research. They like to know the story behind the product,” says Rethore. Building loyalty takes considerable investment. “The Japanese are not early adopters,” he adds. “It takes a lot of time for them to develop trust and understanding and then compare [products].” Grape, a Japanese beauty content creator who posts under the username @grapeintokyo to over 280,000 followers on TikTok and 170,000 on Instagram, echoes this sentiment. “I think [in Japan] we love craftsmanship and attention to detail, for example talking about where it’s made, what’s in it, which field did we get [the ingredients] from,” he says. Addressing concerns for the Japanese market means, increasingly, to offer products that are marketed as clean, natural or gentle. Data from Mintel Global New Products Database shows that between April 2023 and March 2024, Japan led in new product launches featuring “free from” claims for sensitive skin, accounting for 39%, surpassing the U.S. (28%) and France (12%). Jurlique is responding to these demands with its new calendula range, which Rethore hopes will resonate with Japanese consumers who experience hay fever symptoms and other sensitivity issues — external environmental factors such as UV rays and pollen are something that Euromonitor reports as being a driving factor in the growth of Japan’s beauty sector. Grape, whose audience is 35% to 40% Japanese, has garnered attention among male and female viewers for his “clean” approach to makeup — this resonates well in Japan, where an understated look is valued. “People think that when you wear makeup you have to wear eye shadow, but I never do,” he says, “I have comments saying, ‘Thank you for changing that [perception].’ I feel like even the girls nowadays prefer something a little bit more natural.” Success is ‘suginai’ For a product to be successful in Japan, Grape says it has to be what Japanese call “suginai,” or “not too much”. “If a product is suginai then it’s going to do well,” he says, adding that there is a gap in the market for brands who are able to channel a sense of “Japanese-ness” well. He says that inspiring new launches in Japan are few and far between, but points to FAS, a luxury skincare brand founded in 2023 whose ingredients utilize fermented rice and curved, wabi-sabi packaging, as a rare interesting newcomer. “I feel like FAS is establishing themselves as the next SKII,” he says. What about “cluttered distribution”? While department stores and boutiques are places to onboard customers, the lack of a central distributor in Japan means there is little place for new discoveries in the beauty market. “In Japan, you don’t have a key player that is actually doing this job. You have a few players that are small, but it’s cluttered,” says Rethore. Retailers like The Fruit Gathering, Isetan Mirror, and Cosme do offer consumers a selection, but don’t pass muster when compared to leaders like (LVMH-owned) Sephora, Mecca (Australia) or Olive Young (South Korea), says Rethore. “There’s no one or two players that are really [dominating],” he says. “So, if you want to scale, then it’s not an easy job.” Heritage brands, new pathways to discovery The J-beauty landscape can also make it hard for new brands to get noticed, especially when trusted heritage brands like Shiseido, Fancl and Hada Labo have decades of brand equity in Japan. Taka Miyake, who launched his wellbeing-focused skincare brand Euer in 2023, has built up 20 stockists across the country, mostly in select shops, but says that it is slow going. “[Skincare] isn’t as much a part of a lifestyle as I expected in Japan, so it’s categorized as very separate to clothes, for example,” he says. Getting recently stocked in menswear retail giant Beams, he says, has been crucial to getting recognition elsewhere. “Beams has definitely opened the doors for other stockists,” he says. Euer has also been holding regular pop-ups in buzzy culture-focused locations such as Daikanyama T-Site, which Miyake says has been key to growing brand awareness and meshes well with Japanese retails focus on experiences. “It also helps build a community,” he says. One outlier on the retailer front that remains ripe for new brand discovery is the hyper-stimulating megastore Don Quijote (known colloquially in Japan as Donki), whose vibrant skincare sections are filled with the latest buys from upcoming brands in South Korea like Medicube and Ma:nyo, making it a cult destination for skincare fans looking for something new that they won’t find in the department stores. It’s working: the store’s parent company Pan Pacific International Holdings (PPIH), reported record profits — 140.2 billion Japanese yen, up 33.2% YoY in 2024. “If I find interesting brands online at more affordable price points, I’d go to Donki to see if they have it,” says Grape. “It’s more open compared to other drugstores and the department stores in Japan — it’s very exciting to be there.”

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How to win over Japan’s beauty consumers