Why Beauty’s Biggest In-Store Opportunity Is Replacing What Nobody Questioned

Walk into any pharmacy or mass beauty retailer today, and you’ll find yourself surrounded by something most people never think twice about: printed headers, vacuum-formed trays, promotional inserts, and brand glorifiers. The visual infrastructure of beauty retail. They look polished enough. They do the job. And every few weeks, they get pulled off the shelf and thrown away.

It’s the most normalized waste in our industry. And it’s also, quietly, one of its greatest untapped opportunities.

A $665 Billion Market Still Running on Paper

The global beauty and personal care market is projected to reach $664.6 billion in retail value this year, according to Euromonitor International. The U.S. alone closed 2025 with $36 billion in prestige beauty sales and $72.7 billion in mass beauty, with growth across every major category, from skincare to fragrance.

That’s a thriving industry by any measure. And yet, when it comes to how beauty brands communicate at the shelf (the most decisive real estate in the entire purchase journey) we’re largely stuck in a model that hasn’t fundamentally changed in decades.

Think about what goes into a single promotional campaign across a national retail footprint. Hundreds or thousands of stores, each receiving printed headers, branded trays, backcards, and promotional inserts. These materials are designed, produced, packaged, shipped, installed by store associates (often incorrectly), and discarded the moment the campaign rotates. Multiply that by four to six campaign cycles per year. Then multiply it by every beauty brand competing for attention in that retailer.

The cost isn’t just financial. It’s environmental. It’s operational. And increasingly, it’s strategic, because in a world where shoppers expect brands to behave digitally, print is a medium that can’t listen, can’t learn, and can’t respond.

The Shift Nobody Talks About

There’s been a lot of conversation about retail media networks, in-store digital screens, and the transformation of physical stores into ad-supported media channels. According to EMARKETER, U.S. in-store retail media ad spending is expected to climb 33.1% this year. The global retail media market has surpassed $145 billion and continues growing at double-digit rates.

But most of that conversation is about adding screens on top of existing store infrastructure: endcaps, aisle displays, checkout zones. What rarely gets discussed is the opportunity to replace what’s already there. Not to add another screen to the store, but to evolve the beauty fixture itself.

Meanwhile, 73% of beauty shoppers visited a physical store last year, with footfall actually up 2% year over year, according to Outform. And 78% of beauty shoppers report being more likely to purchase when they can interact with a product in-store first. The physical store isn’t dying. It’s being asked to do more. And print simply isn’t built to meet that ask.

There’s also the question of who owns the conversation. Beauty brands and retailers have become remarkably sophisticated about their digital investments: e-commerce personalization, social media strategy, influencer campaigns. But the in-store experience, where the majority of transactions still happen, often gets treated as an afterthought. As one industry analyst noted, even though 80% of consumer spending occurs in-store, 90% of retail media investment goes to online channels. That asymmetry won’t last.

The Opportunity

The print elements embedded in beauty retail furniture (headers, shelf talkers, promotional graphics) are not sacred. They are habits. And habits, once recognized, can be replaced with something better.

In our next piece, we’ll lay out exactly what that replacement looks like: a concept we call Digital Over Print, a maturity model for transitioning from static to interactive at the beauty shelf, and why the brands that start now will build a compounding advantage that print, by definition, can never offer.

Charles Dallaire is a co-founder and executive at Axis4, a Montreal-based company that designs, engineers, and operates interactive digital experiences for retail environments.