Prime Highlights
- Yatsen Holding used AI to cut a two-year product development cycle down to six months.
- Domestic brands account for 57% of China’s cosmetics sales but still trail foreign rivals in the premium segment.
Key Facts
- Yatsen Holding is a Chinese beauty company that develops skincare and cosmetics products.
- Florasis is a Chinese colour cosmetics brand that uses AI to analyse livestream customer data.
Background
Chinese beauty companies are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to speed up product development, as the industry looks to close the innovation gap with global rivals amid slowing growth in the country’s cosmetics market.
Beauty company Yatsen Holding used AI to compress a development cycle that would typically take more than two years into just six months for a new serum featuring PDRN, a popular regenerative skincare ingredient. The company launched the product shortly before China’s Singles’ Day shopping festival last year. Researchers used AI to narrow more than 50 ingredient candidates down to three within a single week.
Across the industry, companies are using AI to analyse vast volumes of social media posts to identify emerging trends, work with biotechnology partners to discover new cosmetic ingredients, and bring products to market far faster than before.
Domestic brands currently account for 57% of cosmetics sales in China, according to the China Association of Fragrance Flavour and Cosmetic Industries, though they continue to lag behind foreign brands in the premium segment.
According to Adam Knight, co-founder of YASO, a platform that assists Western beauty brands in breaking into the Chinese market, Chinese brands went from lab to shelf more quickly, whereas Western brands today use more AI capabilities for discovery and validation.
China’s highly digital consumer market is accelerating this shift, with livestreams, e-commerce platforms and social media generating constant streams of consumer data. The colour cosmetics brand Florasis is one of the companies channelling AI to examine customer interactions and online reviews following livestream broadcasts to refine its marketing and product development.
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