What We Took Away from CEW's Beauty Expo
Our founder Natalie Vaulin spent Thursday evening at CEW's Beauty Expo at the Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th Street in New York. Here is what stood out from a manufacturing point of view.
The finalists wall is a category report you can walk through
The Beauty Awards finalists are displayed shelf by shelf, grouped by category: skincare, hair, bath and body, makeup, and sustainability. Seeing a whole category lined up in one place tells you things a spreadsheet does not. Which formats are repeating. Which claims are showing up on the front of the pack rather than the back. Where the packaging is doing the talking and where the formula is.
Personalization moved from concept to booth
One activation let visitors build a custom applicator on the spot. That is a small detail, but it is the same shift we see in briefs coming into our lab: brands are no longer asking only what goes in the bottle, they are asking who the bottle is for and how it is used.
The room is the point
CEW gathers the people who decide what reaches a shelf next year: buyers, brand directors, investors, and founders who are still doing most of the work themselves. It was a pleasure to meet Elana Drell Szyfer, President of CEW, and to hear how the organization is thinking about the year ahead.
For a contract manufacturer, an evening like this is not marketing. It is the fastest way to hear what brands are about to need, six to twelve months before it shows up in a formulation brief.
What we are bringing back to Clearwater
Three things are already on our bench: more requests for refill and reduced-packaging formats, more questions about substantiating a clean claim with documents rather than adjectives, and steady interest in smaller launch runs that still have to meet retail standards.
If you are building a clean beauty brand and working through any of these, we are happy to talk it through.