The impact of Covid-19 on Beauty and Personal Care in South Africa

This month’s Fashion Friday podcast series by Euromonitor International analyses beauty and personal care in South Africa in light of the global pandemic.

Since the start of the pandemic, we saw a hard lockdown being implemented to countries across the world with South Africa being one of them. During this time, sales of products that were deemed non-essential were banned both online and offline. This included the beauty and personal care industry. However, not all categories and brands were impacted in the same way. Premium brands for example were the biggest losers. Personal care and hygiene products on the other hand proved to be quite resilient.

Consumers are increasingly under pressure due to economic challenges, as many of them are still buying beauty product, however, compared to last year, data shows that they are spending less on them. Some consumers are prioritising and allocating a bigger portion of their budget to health products, and therefore, have less to spend on beauty products.

Some purchasing patterns have emerged as a result of COVID; the most dominant trend is the rise of e-commerce. Due to fear and lockdown regulations, many consumers shifted to shop online. Restrictions such as the number of people that are allowed in stores led to long queues, making the whole shopping experience rather time-consuming. From the retailers’ perspective, those who had an online presence prior to COVID had a competitive edge when the country went into lockdown.

There is uncertainty and fear of another hard lockdown as some provinces are seeing a second wave of infections creating fear of a hard lockdown during the festive season. The risk that stricter regulations may become a reality leading to consumers holding back on expenditure for beauty and fashion seen as popular gifting items locally but also tends to see some traction over the festive.

Written and created for FashionUnited by Euromonitor. Explore a variety of fashion-related podcasts by Euromonitor here.

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