完美收官｜首届BAE美妆艺术节于西岸艺术中心圆满落幕！

This article is a recap of the first BAE Beauty Art Festival, compiling key information and highlights from the event.

1. Basic event information: The festival opened on May 9, 2026 at the West Bund Dome Art Center in Shanghai, co-hosted with the Self-Pleasure Coffee Lifestyle Festival. It gathered over 100 global beauty and coffee brands, drew nearly 2,000 industry guests and channel partners, as well as hundreds of KOLs and buyers. The event included new product launches, an awards ceremony, a red carpet event and a cross-industry party.

2. Core event highlights: The festival adopted an "inside-outside connected" curation format. In the indoor section, over 90 brands focused on showcasing their products, with each building a branded, distinctive booth aligned with its positioning, and KOLs even served as one-day store managers to interact with consumers face-to-face. In the outdoor section, over 20 brands set up installations along the riverbank to create a laid-back atmosphere. Additional highlights included the BEAUTY ICON 100 Awards, a KOL red carpet themed around iconic classic roles, and an immersive Audrey Hepburn exhibition, delivering a rich, multi-faceted experience to attendees.

The first BAE Beauty Art Festival provides new insights and actionable references for beauty brands’ marketing and brand building.

1. Innovative marketing approaches: The festival adopted curation-style marketing, cutting back on excessive decor to center products themselves, which aligns with today’s consumers’ focus on product-centricity. Multiple brands already tested this model with success: Chando built a Himalaya nature-themed booth to tell its origin story in honor of the brand’s 25th anniversary; Liby Master Perfume created an immersive garden to deliver an olfactory narrative matching its fragrances; and Frog Prince used playful displays to deliver a youth-focused brand expression. All earned significant attention from attendees.

2. New approaches to connect with consumers: Inviting KOLs to serve as one-day store managers enables genuine face-to-face interactions with fans, eliminating the pressure-driven anxiety common in live-stream promotions. This allows brands to convey their value more naturally and build authentic trust with consumers.

3. Direction for industry development: The beauty industry today increasingly embraces long-term product-centricity. Sales built on traffic and discounts are unsustainable, and only brands that prioritize product strength can deliver resilient performance through market cycles. Sustained long-term growth depends on deep investment in product development.

The first BAE Beauty Art Festival reveals the latest trends in the beauty sector, offering new opportunities and guidance for sellers.

1. Product selection guidance: The beauty industry has entered an era of product-centricity. Sales built on influencer partnerships and limited-time discounts rarely stand the test of time, and only long-term brands that consistently invest in product strength have the risk resilience to withstand market cycles. Sellers should prioritize building out assortments centered on these product-focused brands.

2. Partnership and connection opportunities: The event gathered more than 100 global beauty and coffee brands, alongside nearly 2,000 channel partners and professional buyers. It gives sellers the opportunity to meet brand representatives in person, exchange the latest industry insights, and expand their supply and partnership networks.

3. Operations adjustments: Consumers today place growing value on product experience and branded aesthetic expression. Sellers can draw inspiration from the BAE event model to add in-person experience and authentic sharing to their sales processes, reduce the anxiety of over-promotion, build trust with consumers, and boost customer retention.

The first BAE Beauty Art Festival reveals the latest demand shifts from consumers and brands, offering valuable insights for factories’ production, design and long-term development.

1. Adjustments to production focus: The beauty sector is increasingly focused on product-centricity, with both brands and consumers prioritizing inherent product quality. Excessive packaging and traffic-driven marketing are no longer core competitive advantages. Factories need to refocus on refining core technology and product quality, improving core capabilities in formulation and craftsmanship to meet brands’ demand for stronger product performance.

2. Shifting demand for design customization: Brands now prioritize building differentiated visual and experiential identities aligned with their core brand narratives, as seen in Chando’s nature-focused origin design and Frog Prince’s playful, youth-oriented design. This requires factories to support brands in delivering customized, differentiated products that match specific brand storytelling needs, and to build more flexible service capabilities.

3. Business expansion opportunities: The BAE event demonstrates that the beauty industry still maintains strong growth momentum, and new industry events generate substantial new demand for brand partnerships. Factories can leverage these industry events to connect with more brands and channels, and expand their own business cooperation scope.

The first BAE Beauty Art Festival reveals the beauty industry’s development trajectory and brands’ core pain points, clarifying the future direction for service providers.

1. Industry development trends: The beauty sector has shifted from pure competition for traffic to competition centered on product strength and aesthetic identity. Brands are no longer satisfied with pure traffic投放 services; they increasingly need services that help them convey product value and build a cohesive branded aesthetic.

2. Core pain points for clients: Most brands today face widespread traffic anxiety, as online traffic投放 alone cannot build long-term stable consumer trust. Brands need new ways to build genuine connections with consumers, and to create differentiated marketing scenarios aligned with their specific brand positioning, and these demands remain largely unmet.

3. Direction for solutions: Service providers can develop curation-style marketing services to help brands build immersive experiential scenarios aligned with their positioning, arrange in-depth face-to-face interactions with KOLs, help brands move past traffic anxiety, convey product value, build long-term trust with consumers, and grow sustainable long-term brand reputation.

As an innovative offline industry event, the first BAE Beauty Art Festival offers multiple valuable references for the operation and development of beauty platforms.

1. Direction of industry demand: Both brands and channels are placing growing importance on in-person experience and offline connection. Pure online traffic operations can no longer meet brands’ need to build long-term consumer trust. Platforms can explore hybrid online-offline operation models to provide brands with more diverse showcasing and connection scenarios.

2. Reference for operation management: BAE designed a connected indoor-outdoor event flow: the indoor section focuses on letting consumers and industry attendees engage deeply with products, while the outdoor section prioritizes a laid-back, exploratory experience. This layered approach caters to the distinct needs of general consumers and industry professionals seeking partnerships, making the layered operation strategy worth adopting for platforms.

3. Insights for merchant recruitment and risk mitigation: Cross-sector collaboration has become a clear industry trend, and BAE’s integration of beauty and coffee categories delivered strong results. Platforms can attract multi-category brands for cross-sector collaboration in recruitment, while prioritizing long-term product-centric brands to avoid short-lived brands built purely on traffic hype, and improve the platform’s overall risk resilience.

The first BAE Beauty Art Festival represents a new exploration for the beauty industry, reveals new directions for industrial development, and provides a representative case study for industry research.

1. New trends in industrial transformation: China’s beauty industry is undergoing a holistic transformation, shifting from historical traffic-driven growth to product and aesthetic-driven growth. Growth built on influencer partnerships and limited-time discounts is unsustainable, and only brands that make long-term investments in product strength have the ability to navigate market cycles. This is the core direction of the industry’s ongoing transformation.

2. Innovation in exhibition business models: BAE breaks away from the traditional exhibition model that relies solely on booth rental and deal facilitation. It uses curatorial thinking to build connected indoor-outdoor aesthetic storytelling, integrates resources from brands, channels and content creators, and builds an industrial ecosystem that combines experience, awards, networking and cooperation, creating an entirely new offline exhibition business model.

3. New shifts in industry philosophy: The industry is no longer fixated on tags like "internet-famous" or "imported", and is now pursuing a shared, universal aesthetic recognized across the sector, with a growing focus on the inherent product value and aesthetic expression of brands themselves. This reflects the growing confidence and upgrade of China’s beauty industry, and opens up new research directions for industrial research.