Marketplace Briefing: Beauty and wellness brands were clear winners during Amazon’s biggest Prime Day sale
This is the latest installment of the Marketplace Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail+ column about the ever-changing e-commerce marketplace landscape. More from the series →
Amazon’s biggest sales event of the year got off to a slow start, but many beauty and wellness brands were standouts during this year’s supersized Prime Day.
Amazon’s four-day Prime Day event, which kicked off on July 8 and run until July 11, drove a 30.3% year-over-year surge in online spending across all U.S. retailers, reaching $24.1 billion — beating Adobe Analytics’ initial forecast of 28.4% growth. During last year’s Prime Day event, Adobe Analytics estimated that U.S. shoppers spent $14.2 billion. “This year’s Prime Day event was bigger than any previous four-day period that included a Prime Day event,” Amazon said in a statement on June 12.
As Modern Retail previously reported, many Amazon sellers who source products from China and other heavily tariffed countries are contending with supply chain challenges, inventory woes and waning consumer sentiment as prices go up. But U.S.-based beauty and wellness brands that aren’t heavily dependent on overseas manufacturing reported positive Prime Day sales.
Front Row, an e-commerce accelerator, reported strong performance across its portfolio. Of its 528 clients, roughly 38% are in the beauty and wellness category — and more than 90% of those participated in Prime Day. Front Row’s clients saw an 88% year-over-year sales increase during the four-day Prime event compared to the same event last year.
According to Alexandra Carmody, svp of brand strategy at Front Row, part of the reason beauty and personal care brands performed well during Prime Day is that many of them manufacture domestically. That has helped shield them from tariff-related disruptions.
“A lot of the time, with the beauty brands we work with, they’re getting raw ingredients from somewhere else and then bringing the raw ingredients here and actually manufacturing completely in the U.S.,” Carmody said.
What’s more, beauty and wellness brands often have more agile inventory operations, allowing them to restock within weeks and further buffering them from supply chain shocks. “For a lot of beauty product components, … some brands have shifted and figured out, ‘How can I get bottle caps for what I need for a serum in the U.S.?’ and actually built that buffer in,” she said.
At Apothékary, a herbal wellness company known for its powdered adaptogens, sales during Prime Day were up nearly 38% year-over-year. Director of growth Ellen Kang said she was initially concerned that spreading the event across four days instead of two would dampen urgency.
“The first two days were softer than the year-over-year this year,” she said. “But the last two days ended up making up for that sales volume.” Kang described a slow Friday morning that gave way to an evening surge as last-minute shoppers checked out. “It all panned out really well for us,” she said. “We were really happy with our sales volume.”
To sustain momentum across the extended sales period, Apothékary directed more traffic from TikTok, a channel the brand hadn’t heavily leveraged in prior years, by regularly posting content and working with affiliates. The company also diverted some of its Meta ad spend to TikTok, Kang said, though she did not specify exactly how much.
When looking at attribution links for Apothékary’s ads, TikTok ended up being the brand’s strongest channel. “We just wanted to keep reminding everyone, ‘We’re still on Prime,’” Kang said. “The TikTok Shop customer is actually pretty similar to the Amazon customer, and it just made sense in terms of being seamless together for both channels.”
Amazon itself ran ads on TikTok encouraging users to link their accounts directly to the app to shop Prime deals without leaving TikTok.
Other brands reported similar trends. Borghese, a prestige beauty company that manufactures most of its products in the U.S., said Prime Day sales rose 148% over last year. COO Dawn Hilarczyk told Modern Retail that over 90% of Prime Day customers were new to the brand. The company’s hero product, the Fango mud mask, was a top performer, but the surprise breakout hit was the Bagno Di Vita shower gel, which sold out.
Still, Borghese didn’t quite hit its internal sales targets. “Full transparency, while we had a very strong performance, we did not meet the Borghese sales target, which was rather aggressive,” Hilarczyk said. In hindsight, she said, the company could have ramped up its off-Amazon advertising sooner. “With the additional days, we would have boosted our social ads starting day one,” she said.
Indeed, the first day proved to be the strongest for many brands, accounting for 31% of total sales during the four-day event, according to Front Row. Friday night — the final hours of the event — also delivered a powerful last-minute bump. “Some brands saw 20x sales lifts during that hour,” Front Row said.
Beauty has consistently been one of Amazon’s strongest-performing categories during Prime Day. Last July, health and beauty sales rose an estimated 16% year-over-year during the event, with makeup sales up 30% and skin care climbing 14%, according to Salesforce — outpacing Adobe Analytics’ estimate of overall Amazon Prime Day growth at 11%. Roughly 32% of Prime members purchased items from the health and beauty category during the 2024 event. In response, many beauty retailers have started launching their own parallel promotions to compete against Prime Day, per Glossy.
At the same time, Amazon has made a concerted effort to grow its portfolio of beauty brands, many of which once shunned the e-commerce site. In the past year, major beauty and skin-care brands have joined Amazon, including Estée Lauder Companies’ Aveda, The Ordinary and Smashbox.
For sellers hit hard by tariffs, this year’s Prime Day was more challenging. Chuck Gregorich, who runs the outdoor brand Net Health Shops, said his Prime Day sales were down about 10% compared to last year’s four-day total — and that was a relatively optimistic outcome. “We were happy with that because our best products we could not do deals with this year due to being out or low in stock,” he said. If not for those supply-chain woes, Gregorich said he was “confident” the company could have exceeded last year’s Prime Day sales performance.
What I’m reading
- Fortune spotted a glaring absence from Amazon’s Prime Day recap: The e-commerce giant didn’t disclose the number of items sold during the four-day sales event, a metric Amazon usually reveals.
- Amazon has quietly dismissed some warehouse employees whose work authorizations were revoked amid the Trump administration’s intensifying immigration enforcement, per CNBC.
- Amazon’s carbon emissions rose for the first time in three years in 2024, driven by data center construction and fuel consumption by its delivery providers, per Bloomberg.