BEAUTY CUBE advanced niche has been praised as the most innovative & influential niche beauty shop in Spain, pioneering an informed selection of directional, selective and hard-to-find niche brands. Cruz Calvo, founder and creative director, will be part as a jury member to the 2010  BEAUTY  CHALLENGER  AWARDS – Beyond Beauty Paris.

We  asked her few questions :

1. How do you view the positioning of niche brands into the cosmetic market?

Cruz Calvo – Beauty Cube : We are undergoing a huge structural, economic and cultural change that is affecting everything.  In the next years, production, distribution and sales processes will probably be quite different from what we knew.  Signals of this ‘revolution’ have already started to show up:  in the USA, completely re-designed and upgraded mass market drugstore chains have been appearing, ready to integrate both selective niche brands and the coolest emergent ones -those you clasically used to find in specialty or department stores.  At the same time, a new kind of niche context is slowly starting to blunt.

The Internet and the new bred of hyper-informed customers are shaping the new conditions of the market.  It’s probable that we will start to differentiate several kinds of niche from now on.

In the last few years, the niche beauty market has been somehow commodified.  Now, we have both to adapt and to discover new ways to give niche brands a new relevance, by changing the old perceptions and methods that were prevalent until now within the niche market.

We have to work for niche to continue to resonate, and also to create new ways of resonance for it.  It’s challenging and fascinating.

2. What is the Beauty Cube positioning?

Cruz Calvo – Beauty Cube : Beauty Cube is the independent retailer discovering and introducing new brands in the Spanish market, simultaneously acting as a cool-hunter, pointing to new beauty concepts, active ingredients, microtrends, technologies, styles…  Despite being small retailers, we embrace the whole proccess and strategy implied in the niche phenomena, not only the point-of-sale viewpoint.

We provide a curatorial approach to the brands, highlighting and conceptualising the brands concept within a wider, multidiciplinar context (that is, ‘beyond beauty’).

Beauty Cube is positioned as the spot to look at for innovative, interesting beauty content though our informed, always in-progress selection and info edition (website).  It could be said that, in the Spanish market, Beauty Cube is a channel on its own.

3. What would be your key advice to niche brands?

Cruz Calvo – Beauty Cube : To stay selective and very attentive on what is happening at the other end.  We would need niche brands to work in the same directional way all along the complete process to keep niche resonating in the market.  We would need this kind of comminment from the brands.  Innovative retailers are more than shelve maintenators, and brands could turn this fact into profit.

Changes in distribution and corporate strategy are key in order to keep the niche market evolving.  It’s important to work on the medium/long term vision, instead of strongly focusing on the short term strategies.  It’s easy to surrender to the ‘list of shops’ strategy for launching or growing fast a brand.  We need to re-think a lot of things now, such as if ubiquity is the single way to secure the long term endurance and the stronger presence in the market.

New interactions between consumer, channels and brands are emerging.  This will bring the need for new and more integrated market protocols.

4. What are the key strenghts of Beauty Challenger Awards?

Cruz Calvo – Beauty Cube : I think Beauty Challenger Awards not only empowers emergent brands, but also contribute to a bigger hybridization in the niche cosmetic/wellbeing scene, by integrating a mix of categories and channels.  Uniformity kills niche market, and hyperdifferentiation is key in order to survive, so expanding the niche environment to new alternatives appears to be a great strenght just now.Retailers and brands will find the event of real interest for growing their business and establish new relationships.

The Beauty Challenger Awards ceremony will be held on 13 September at the next Beyond Beauty Paris.

Kristel Milet –Editor in Chief Blog