The rising cost of living has affected spending habits across various industries, and the beauty industry is no exception. As the cost of basic necessities continues to increase, many women are becoming more selective about how they spend money on beauty products. What was once an everyday purchase for some is increasingly being treated as a luxury.
This doesn’t necessarily mean women are abandoning beauty products altogether. Instead, their purchasing habits are changing. They are becoming more intentional about what they buy, prioritising essentials such as skincare, patronising trusted brands even when they cost more, and planning their purchases rather than buying impulsively.
In an interview with Allure Vanguard, a woman described this shift in her spending habits:
“I still prioritise skincare, but I’m more intentional about what I buy and I plan my purchases instead of buying things impulsively. If I find a more affordable product that works well, I’ll buy it, but for products that are important to my skin, I still prefer trusted brands, even if they cost more.”
For African beauty brands, what does this change in consumer behaviour mean for their pricing strategies? Should beauty founders lower their prices to remain competitive and attract customers, or maintain premium pricing and give consumers stronger reasons to believe their products are worth the cost?
Let’s examine this question through the example of the African skincare brand, Uncover.
Understanding Uncover’s Market Positioning
Uncover is an African skincare brand that combines Korean beauty technology with African botanical ingredients to create skincare products for women with melanated skin.
To understand its pricing approach, it’s important to look at how the brand positions itself in the beauty industry.
The brand was founded by Sneha Mehta, Catherine Lee and Jade Oyateru. Its story began with problems many African women could relate to. Sneha had struggled with acne and experienced a severe reaction after visiting a dermatologist in Kenya, which left her with burns on her face. Catherine, who is Korean and lived in Kenya, had also noticed that women frequently asked her to bring skincare products from Korea because they struggled to find suitable options locally.
These experiences highlighted a gap in the African skincare market: the need for products that properly address the concerns of women with melanated skin.
Rather than simply follow trends in the beauty industry, Uncover set out to develop products around specific skin concerns. It combines African botanical ingredients with Korean skincare technology to create formulations that address concerns such as acne, hyperpigmentation and dehydration.
Why Uncover Doesn’t Have to Compete on Price but on Value
Uncover has established itself as one of the notable emerging skincare brands in Africa. Its approach to African skincare began with providing solutions for an underserved market.
This customer-focused approach helped the brand build a recognisable identity in an increasingly competitive African beauty market, and gave customers a reason to consider its products, even when their prices are higher than those of some alternatives.
But you might be wondering, as you should, if that’s all there is to Uncover’s pricing approach. After all, quite a number of brands now claim to make products specifically for melanin-rich skin.
That’s not all there is to Uncover’s differentiation.
The brand combines three important strengths to distinguish its products: African botanical ingredients, Korean skincare technology and educational content that communicates product value.
African Botanical Ingredients
African botanical ingredients have a long history of traditional use and are increasingly attracting attention in the global beauty industry. According to Punch Newspaper, Nigeria exports approximately 350,000 to 500,000 metric tonnes of shea nuts annually, generating between $5 million and $15 million in export earnings. This gives us an idea of the commercial value attached to some of Africa’s natural resources.
Uncover’s approach goes beyond incorporating these ingredients into its products. The brand also places importance on understanding the people it wants to serve. Its early research included a survey that received responses from over 1,000 Kenyan women, helping the founders understand the skincare challenges and needs of their target market.
This understanding informs the brand’s approach to product development. In an interview with BellaNaija, co-founder Jade Oyateru shared that developing Uncover’s popular sunscreen took more than two years. The team went through several formulation rounds, SPF clinical testing and compatibility testing before settling on the final product.
This is important because using an interesting ingredient is not enough to create a product that customers will value. Founders need to understand the concerns they want to address, determine how their chosen ingredients can contribute to the formulation and invest in developing a product that delivers on its intended benefits.
Interestingly, some of the African botanical ingredients used by Uncover were not particularly popular among consumers before the brand began incorporating them into its products and communicating their benefits.
Why Does This Matter to Beauty Founders?
Uncover’s approach presents an opportunity for beauty founders to look beyond trending ingredients and explore lesser-known botanical resources that could offer valuable benefits to their target customers. Rather than competing with several brands to incorporate the same popular ingredients, founders can investigate what other local ingredients have to offer and how they can be used to address specific customer needs.
The opportunity isn’t just in using ingredients consumers already know and love. It can also lie in introducing them to ingredients they haven’t considered and helping them understand their potential benefits.
For founders interested in exploring this opportunity, Anera Research Hub is one resource to consider. It can help with discovering the potential beauty applications of different ingredients and accessing science-backed research to inform product development.
Founders also need to make their customers feel valued by involving them in product development. Conduct surveys, listen to their feedback and pay attention to the concerns they want brands to address. When customers see that their opinions influence the products being developed, they are more likely to feel that the brand understands them and their needs.
Ultimately, the value isn’t simply in incorporating African botanical ingredients into a product. It’s in combining them with customer insights and the right formulation expertise to create products that customers have a genuine reason to choose.
Korean Skincare Technology
Uncover’s second strength is its use of Korean skincare technology and formulation expertise. South Korea has a well-established beauty manufacturing industry, with specialised manufacturers, formulation scientists and laboratories supporting product development and innovation.
By working with Korean manufacturers, Uncover gained access to technical expertise and manufacturing capabilities that helped it combine African botanical ingredients with formulations developed for the skincare needs of women with melanated skin.
This was an advantage because the brand could draw on expertise and manufacturing capabilities that might have been difficult to access independently. It also allowed Uncover to bring together two distinct strengths: the potential of African botanical ingredients and Korean skincare formulation expertise. Rather than simply sourcing local ingredients and adding them to existing products, the brand could explore how to incorporate them into carefully developed formulations.
This also gives customers more to consider beyond the ingredients listed on a product label. They can see that the brand has invested in the expertise and development process required to bring its products to market. When communicated clearly, these efforts can strengthen customers’ perception of the product’s value and give them more reasons to consider it over cheaper alternatives.
For Uncover, the advantage isn’t simply that its products are made in South Korea. It’s how the brand uses the expertise available there to develop products around the needs of its target customers.
Why Does This Matter to African Beauty Founders?
It challenges founders to rethink how they approach product development. Rather than limiting their product ambitions to the manufacturing capabilities and resources they currently have, they should first consider what they want to create and identify the expertise required to make it possible.
For example, a founder developing a skincare product with a specialised delivery system may need expertise in pharmaceutical formulation. Another developing products for textured hair could benefit from research into fibre structure, friction and tensile strength from the textile industry.
The expertise doesn’t necessarily have to come from outside the country or require outsourcing production. It could be accessed through a local university, research institution, independent formulation scientist or manufacturing partner.
The important thing is to identify the capabilities your product requires and find the right people or institutions to help you develop them.
Don’t limit what your business can create to what it can currently do in-house. Start with the product you want to develop, then find the expertise and resources needed to bring it to life.
How Uncover Uses Content to Communicate Product Value
Another interesting aspect of Uncover’s strategy is how it uses educational content to help customers see beyond their immediate skincare concerns and understand why certain products deserve a place in their routines.
A woman shopping for sunscreen might be primarily concerned about finding one that doesn’t leave a white cast. Uncover addresses this practical concern through the way it communicates the benefits of its Aloe Invisible Sunscreen, highlighting its lightweight texture, hydration and suitability for women with melanated skin. But the conversation around sun protection can go further than finding a sunscreen that looks good on the skin. Customers also need to understand the importance of consistent sun protection and the effects of prolonged UV exposure.
The brand applies a similar approach to skincare education. Its article, The Ultimate Skin Hydration Guide for Harmattan in Nigeria, explains how Harmattan’s dry air affects the skin, the symptoms people may experience and how to adjust their skincare routines. Rather than simply promoting its moisturiser, it helps readers recognise why their skin may need more attention during the season before introducing its cleanser, serum and moisturiser as part of a hydration routine.
Why Does This Matter to Beauty Founders?
Customers want products that work for them, but understanding an obvious product benefit doesn’t always make them willing to pay a higher price.
A customer may be looking for sunscreen because she doesn’t want a white cast, or a moisturiser because her skin feels dry. Educational content can help her understand the wider concerns behind these immediate needs, the importance of addressing them and what to look for in a suitable product.
Beauty founders should therefore create content that goes beyond describing what their products contain or the immediate problems they solve. Help customers understand the underlying concerns, why they matter and how the right formulation can address them.
When customers see the full value of a product rather than just its most obvious benefit, they have more reasons to consider it, even when cheaper alternatives exist.
These three strengths work together to give customers more reasons to choose Uncover beyond price. Its ingredients provide a point of differentiation, its formulation expertise helps translate those ingredients into products, and its educational content helps customers understand why those products are worth considering.
When Should Beauty Brands Compete on Price?
Reducing the price of a product isn’t necessarily a bad business decision. However, competing on price should be a deliberate strategy, not a reaction to what other brands are doing.
Before deciding to make their products more affordable, beauty founders need to consider their target customers, the type of products they sell and what customers are willing to spend to keep using them.
Here are three situations where competing on price may be worth considering.
1. When Affordability Is Central to the Target Market
Every brand has a target audience, and its pricing should reflect the purchasing power of the people it wants to serve.
For instance, if a skincare brand targets university students with everyday products such as face moisturisers and face masks, pricing these products at ₦25,000 may put them beyond the reach of many potential customers. A brand can understand their audience’s purchasing power through customer surveys, conversations and even small product tests.
They can also explore ways to manage production costs without affecting the product’s performance. This could include sourcing quality ingredients from reliable local suppliers where commercially viable, choosing packaging that protects the formulation without unnecessary design costs, reducing avoidable production waste and starting with manageable production quantities to avoid tying up too much capital in unsold inventory.
There is little value in creating a product for a particular market if the people in that market cannot afford to keep buying it.
2. When the Brand Wants to Compete in a High-Volume Market
Some beauty products are everyday essentials. Think of body lotions, petroleum jelly, lip gloss and hair creams. Customers use them regularly, and they can easily find alternatives from different brands.
In a market like this, customers may not have a strong reason to pay significantly more for one product when another offers similar benefits at a lower price. This makes price an important part of the buying decision.
For brands targeting this market, competing on price can help attract more customers and encourage repeat purchases. The brand will need to understand the prevailing prices in their category, identify what customers expect at those price points and determine whether they can offer a competitive product without sacrificing their margins.
A lower profit on each unit can still make business sense when enough units are sold. But this only works when the brand has the production capacity, distribution and customer demand to support that volume.
3. When Customers Are Abandoning Products Because of the Cost of Maintaining a Routine
This is particularly relevant to skincare brands. A customer may be able to afford a cleanser, serum and moisturiser individually, but purchasing all three every month can become expensive. Eventually, she may stop buying some of the products, simplify her routine or switch to cheaper alternatives.
For a brand, this is an opportunity to look beyond the price of individual products and consider the total cost of maintaining a routine.
Which products do customers actually need to keep using? Are there essentials they would like to purchase regularly but struggle to afford together?
One approach is to develop a competitively priced essentials range that makes it easier for customers to maintain a basic routine. The brand can keep specialised products at higher price points for customers who need or want those additional benefits, rather than making every product premium-priced.
This way, affordability doesn’t have to define the entire brand. It can be built into the parts of the product range where customers need it most, while the business retains room to earn higher margins from more specialised offerings.
Conclusion
Competing on price and competing on value are not mutually exclusive strategies. The right approach depends on the customers a brand wants to serve, the products it offers and the advantage it brings to the market.
African beauty founders don’t have to lower their prices simply because consumers are becoming more selective about their spending. They need to understand what their customers can afford, what they value and what makes their products worth buying.
Ultimately, a sustainable pricing strategy isn’t about being the cheapest brand or charging the highest price. It’s about finding the balance between what customers are willing to pay and the value the business can consistently deliver.
