A few weeks back, I opened my email to see an innocuous forward from my mother. It read something along the lines of, “Trade your full closet for a full life.” On its own, this seemed like a perfectly harmless thread, which I opened, skimmed through and promptly deleted.
The email gave me flashbacks of myself at 2am on a Friday. With a full cart, blurry vision, a faint ringing in my ears, and a laptop starting to age because of the countless open tabs. The timing of this email couldn’t have been more accurate.
You see, we’ve entered into what is often the most difficult time of the year for shopaholics, the holidays. These days induce a combination of worry and excitement, which should have us avoiding Black Friday like the Black Plague. There’s extreme advertising, triggers carefully knit into words and images. Sales that are designed to give us a “now or never” attitude about purchases, leading to reckless adding to carts, non-stop deliveries and dwindling real estate to store them.
My dear readers, it’s time to come clean. You see, my entire life, I’ve been great at rationalising ridiculous expenses. I can talk myself into buying almost anything at exorbitant prices. I get really technical too, with spreadsheets and cash backs, sales, long-term wardrobe goals, and convince myself how buying this one thing right now will save me so much money down the road.
A lot of this changed for me over the last year, and as someone who’s working in the beauty industry, I have something to say: Beauty brands do not have sales because they like you. Sure, sales are always nice. You get a little rush of adrenaline when that limited edition palette that was on your wish list goes on sale. If you realise how supersaturated the beauty industry is, and how they’re essentially competing to grab a spot in your over-jammed beauty budgets, you’ll realise that adrenaline is exactly the reaction they are looking for. Brands don’t do sales because they are nice, or generous.
They go on sales to squeeze out the last segment of their target market who they haven’t managed to capture. To break down the restraint of a person who says, “I already have 40 lipsticks, and don’t need another.”
The formula is always the same: create a novel, attention-grabbing product. Get a rush of early adopters paying full-price to rave about it, comfort the doubters with a 10 per cent off later, and continue to aggressively market to those who are waiting it out after. What you think is such a good deal now will likely be replicated again till you’re tempted to make the purchase. Sales come every two months so keep that in mind if you’re getting tricked into buying something because of the FOMO.
A safe way to navigate a sale would be to ask yourself: Would you buy this if it was on full price?
Having said that, I’m happy to report that not all of the buying I did the past week was ill-advised. In fact, most of the beauty shopping I did was on my list anyway. I’m not sure if I’ll ever completely put compulsive shopping behind me, but small revelations along the way have been helpful. What did you buy this sale season?