Last Week end (24-26 of April), I went to the COSMOBEAUTE VIETNAM EVENT showcasing the growth of beauty industry in Vietnam, in district 7. I was looking forward to it since months, did my pre-registration online and everything!
Like at every beauty show, conferences and contests are organized and a lot of different stands are here to present their brand/concept/products, at least that’s what I always saw…
Sadly I was very surprised that all of them were only looking for distributors and interested in selling the more products they have at the event. The difference in culture was terrific compared to the beauty events I have been to in Europe, where brands were really there to introduce their concept and products and more than happy for people to try it. As a Blogger I felt the exhibitors were not seeing any interest in this area. And they didn’t even see the opportunity, as they were not here to give away samples and make people try their products. On the other side, they brought a very large stock of products to sell. And most of the visitors were only interested in buying the ‘new’ products, 10 or 20 of each! Personally I felt like most of the visitors were like tenants of Spa in HCMC and were filling up their stock in order to have special products to suggest to their clients. I might be wrong, but this is really the feeling I had.
Bloggers are not very well-considered in Asia, compared to Europe. People don’t really see yet the online opportunity they could have by working with a blogger and this is very interesting from a communication’s point of view…
Also, I was surprised to see brand from all Asia and very few from Vietnam (there was one or two only). I am not sure a lot of people knew about the event, but still… Again, they might not have seen the opportunity there, which is for me very shocking. Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, Japan, France, Singapore, Bulgaria and even Italy… Majority were from Korea and Taiwan.
Let’s talk about the important things now: What are the brands that caught my attention?
To be honest, not a lot. There wasn’t a lot of amazing and original concepts as I saw at the Cosmeeting in Paris for example. But amongst the 150 exhibitors, few of them were very interesting:
NATURE’S ORGANIC SENSE from Italy: I fall in love with their packaging, very simple and clear, but so professional and catchy. They have an interesting range of products, specialized in hair care and hair color. Products are organic and natural, and are 100% Ammonia and Parabens Free, a PLUS for me as I am very careful with the ingredients used. They have an amazing branding and I really hope to see them on the market soon. Too bad they didn’t have any samples to test, but as I said earlier, it might not have been the main point of the exhibition.
ATRUE from Korea: They had a very beautiful stand, standing out of the others because of their primary ingredient: black tea from France. This is where you see that France is playing an important role in the Cosmetics industry. Black tea as a base, replacing water in all their range. Why not? I mean their branding was nice: True Value and True Beauty from a ‘cup of the finest black tea’. Ingredients are not the safest in their list, depending on the products but they believe in True Personal Care with unique textures and outstanding benefits from the black tea. I found the concept nice, they associate a pure and qualitative ingredient to their branding, plus it gives it a touch of luxury, making people try tea and making each product special. I found that they had a very large range of products, too much. But they gave me a very nice little box with samples (and they are the only one I have to say) containing 2 bags of black tea and 3 samples of one of their product range. I have to say I am very curious to test it!
THE PLANT BASE from Korea: What I liked the most is their ingredients list: no Paraben, no Ethanol, no Silicon, no Petrolatum, no Polyethylene Glycol and no testing on animals. Wah! They have a different range of products, all based on plant base extracts instead of water base. They use a lot of different Plant Extracts like Bamboo Extracts, Centella Asiatica, Korea Ginseng Extracts, Cactus Extracts… and this is what make their different range of product. Personally I found they had too much and I couldn’t choose an adapted range for myself. Sometimes, classical cosmetics range with less than 10 products is enough, I think they had around 25 different products. I got some mini samples (you know the little pack thing that you can use only once) that I will try but not sure I will see anything on my skin as one application is, of course, not enough.
Ps: As you can see, not a lot of them are using online communication tools as they are all missing a real website. #Interestingfact
An amazing time and a great experience 🙂 For those who are interested in the Cosmetics market in Vietnam, I have created a dedicated LinkedIn group where everyone is invited to contribute 🙂
Homemade lipstick activity 🙂
Frenchy Diary 