LuxePulse by Gusto Intelligence is a quarterly market analysis of beauty, fashion and hospitality industries, available on an annual subscription.
The latest Q4 2020 LuxePulse in Fashion, Beauty and Hospitality provides a market scan looking ahead to 2021. It looks at new retail activity, influencer and celebrity collaborations, reports from outside agencies, market trend analysis and more.
This excerpt from the last quarter looks ahead at the booming infant & child market in relation to luxury:
The ‘little emperor syndrome’ is the effect of the decades-long one-child policy where children of wealthier families were showered in excessive attention by parents and grandparents.
While the policy was lifted in 2015, allowing all couples to have two children, touting parents and grandparents abound. This could be because birth rate continues to decline. In 2017, the birth rate declined 1.27% from 2016 to 12.086 births per 1,000 people. In 2020, the birth rate declined 2.2% from 2019 to 11.416 births per 1,000 people.
Nevertheless, China’s maternal and infant market, covering everything from toys to food to baby care to maternity products, reached USD537 billion in 2019, growing 11% year-on-year. By 2023, the market is expected to reach USD767 billion by 2023.
Growth in the market is driven by younger generation of parents. Tmall Global data reveals that post-90s and post-95s consumers make up almost 50% of all related purchases.
As Euromonitor noted, while the consumer base is not necessarily growing, the amount spent per capita is increasing. This is perhaps unsurprising as almost 50% of parents surveyed by Quest Mobile in 2020 spent 30-50% of their income on their children.
In the beauty sector, the biggest sellers currently are body lotions, sunscreens and shampoos, all having experienced three-digit revenue growth in the past year. Children’s facial and body lotions witnessed revenues grow 30-fold between 2019 and 2020. Brands, such as Minois Paris, are successfully tapping into this children’s skincare trend via Tmall. The #babyskincare# hashtag on Weibo (#婴儿护肤#) has been viewed over 670,000 times.
When it comes to fashion, children’s ready-to-wear is among the fastest-growing clothing categories growing 9% growth year-on-year, compared to 6% growth for the sector overall. On Tmall Global, keywords ‘trendy’ and ‘fashion’ appear more often than others for children’s apparel. As a response, we have seen a steady stream of launches of children’s fashion lines in China by luxury brands, such as Burberry, Fendi and Gucci since 2016.
On social media, videos of post-90s generation ‘hot mamas’ with their kids wearing similar clothing and tagged with hashtag #spicymamasandcutebabies (#辣妈萌娃) have been viewed over 110 million times on the short-video platform Douyin. On the short-video platform Kwai (Kuaishou or快手), live-streaming of maternity and infant related content increased by 115% between January and August 2020.
Family travel (亲子游) has boomed in China over the past few years. Back in 2018, we conducted proprietary research with the Luxury Conversation to identify how hospitality brands can best target the luxury family traveller segment in China.
Today, family travel remains as strong as ever – it accounted for 34% of all 2020 summer holiday bookings on Ctrip, China’s largest online travel platform, making it the single biggest segment. This is an increase from being the second biggest segment during the 2019 summer holidays, accounting for 31% of the total. The Weibo hashtag #familytravel# (#亲子游#) has been viewed over 660 million times.
In a post-COVID-19 China, children continue to dominate family purchases and activities.
As travel is restricted to domestic destinations, and most Chinese travellers preferred local, short-distance trips, parents (and grandparents) can afford to spend more to keep their little ones looking and feeling healthy and happy as well as entertained.
Find case studies, news on campaigns and offline events, social media and influencer happenings, sources and references in the full report
Read more:
China’s ‘Hot Mamas’: Millennial Parents, The New Force in Luxury Spending
China’s New ‘Wonder Dads’ Go Big on Luxury for All the Family
Sex, Love & Marriage: Chinese Millennials Do It Their Own Way
