Tower28 x Jell-O: Beauty Brands Embrace Food Partnerships
The trend sees brands like Tower28 collaborating with Jell-O on scented cosmetics, aiming to capture new audiences and drive early holiday sales through unique offerings.
Cross-Industry Collaborations Surge
Beauty, fashion, and wellness sectors are increasingly seeing collaborations with food brands, driven by a desire to evoke nostalgia, offer novelty, and reach new consumer demographics. This trend extends beyond traditional industry lines, as noted by Ana Andjelic, a fashion executive and co-founder of the Tasteful industry symposium.
Andjelic, whose symposium on October 15 in New York will explore food's role in fashion, states that brands are increasingly operating across traditional industry boundaries. She suggests companies are exploring how their intellectual property can exist beyond their core business, playing multiple roles in culture to create cultural capital.
Tower28 and Jell-O Launch Sephora Exclusive
A key example of this trend is the collaboration between clean skin-care brand Tower28 and Kraft Heinz-owned Jell-O, which launched this week at Sephora. The partnership, initiated by Jell-O, marks its first foray into cosmetics.
Tower28's CEO and founder, Amy Liu, stated the goal was to "surprise and delight" customers, create media buzz, and drive early holiday sales in the competitive attention economy. The collection includes a Jell-O-scented lip gloss duo for $24, packaged in a retro Jell-O gelatin box, and a $20 pack of mini pudding-inspired balms in a peel-off pudding pack.
The scents for these products use actual food-grade ingredients, mirroring Jell-O's top-selling flavors like strawberry, lemon-lime, banana cream, and chocolate vanilla swirl. These limited-edition items replace Tower28's usual holiday value kits.
Broader Industry Adoption
The Tower28 and Jell-O partnership is part of a wider movement of beauty brands engaging with food. Other recent collaborations include Too Faced and Yogurtland, Malin+Goetz and Carbone, as well as Dedcool and Emi Jay hair accessories. Beyond direct partnerships, some beauty and personal care brands are launching food-inspired products independently.
Examples from the past few weeks include Brach's candy company introducing a Candy Corn perfume, Touchland releasing caramel-scented hand sanitizers, and Snuggle offering a sweet vanilla fabric softener. This trend has shown commercial success, with Beekman 1802's Nestle cookie collaboration generating $1 million in sales in just one hour in 2023.
Implications for Asia's Beauty Market
Asian beauty brands can observe this global trend of food-beauty collaborations as a strategy for consumer engagement and market expansion. The focus on creating "cultural capital" through unique aesthetics and community fandom, as highlighted by Ana Andjelic, aligns with the innovative marketing often seen in K-beauty and J-beauty.
Brands seeking to capture new demographics or enter international markets could explore partnerships with popular Asian food brands or local culinary icons. This approach offers a distinct way to generate media attention and differentiate product offerings, particularly in the competitive holiday sales periods, by tapping into shared cultural experiences and preferences.
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