Once again Beauty Packaging’s annual report on the Top 20 Global Beauty Companies—which this year includes seven U.S.-based companies and 13 with international headquarters—provides a fascinating look at the strategies these leading manufacturers adopted to navigate a rapidly changing market in a difficult year.

Worldwide, beauty companies showed their incredible resiliency and creative thinking, rallying quickly to maintain their foothold by setting key priorities for a new way of doing business. Many implemented goals similar to those that Robert McDonald of P&G (again No. 1 on our list) set forth: “We focused on three specific choices: to grow P&G’s core brands and categories with an unrelenting focus on innovation; to build our business with unserved and underserved consumers; and to continue to grow and develop faster-growing, higher-margin businesses with global leadership potential.”

While tenets such as these couldn’t completely put the brakes on the worldwide decline, the strategies followed resulted in 2009 sales for these Top 20 Global Beauty Companies reaching an estimated $137.8 billion in beauty and personal care items. Granted, this total falls about a billion below that of last year’s report—but it doesn’t reflect the even-more-brutal damage many anticipated would result from the global economic crisis that overshadowed the year. And results from the end of 2009 through the second half of this year show favorable results and an upward trend, indicating that effective strategies may indeed be leading the beauty business out of the tunnel of darkness.

Perhaps one of the most critical points taken from these beauty leaders is that today’s market is indeed a global one, and in this economy, that is the path toward growth and expansion. In this new way of doing business, packaging suppliers as well as beauty manufacturers face unprecedented opportunities to reach new customers through targeted product goals, R&D and innovation.

This perspective was brought home at last month’s HBA Global Expo, where buyers, suppliers, and conference speakers spanned the globe, bringing ideas from all over the world (please read more in the show report on p. 64).Innovation in packaging was honored with HBA Global’s presentation of the highly regarded International Package Design Awards.

As this issue goes to press, I am heading to Luxe Pack Monaco for another perspective on what ideas are driving innovative packaging in today’s global beauty market. I hope to see some of you there. If you’re not attending, please drop me a line. I’d love to know what types of packaging you’re developing—and what your new ways of doing business are.

Jamie Matusow
[email protected]