
If you’re anything like me, you’re still trying to get your head around what’s happened over the last couple of years. To try and make sense of a small piece of the pandemic chaos, I’ve laid out how beauty commerce has transformed since early 2020, and how this transformation is rippling out into the way beauty brands work.
Is The Rate Of Change In Commerce Really That Huge?
Yes. From 2009 to 2019, ecommerce grew at a steady pace in the US, from 6% to 16% of total retail sales. And then we arrived in the fateful month of March 2020, and from the first lockdown it took eight weeks to grow by another 10%. McKinsey called it ‘the quickening’: “If you’re feeling whiplash, it might be the ten years forward we just jumped in 90 days’ time.”
A similar picture has been painted around the globe. According to…