Market Overview

The home beauty appliance retail market was estimated to have generated 165,550 million yen in 2020, 108.8% of the size of the previous year. As people began spending more time at home in 2020, the term “ouchi-biyo” meaning “beauty at home” was often used in beauty magazines as well as in the promotions by major home appliances manufacturers. These factors encouraged many women to spend their ample time at home for beauty treatment, which boosted the whole market.

The home cooking appliance retail market also saw prosperity in 2020, as it was estimated to have generated 731,900 million yen, 119.5% of the size of the previous year. As people stayed longer hours at home, the opportunity to cook and eat at home increased. In addition, the government distributed 100,000 per person as the special cash payment to support the economy, which stimulated the replacement of electric cooking appliances. All such factors led the market to attain double-digit growth. 

Noteworthy Topics

Subscription Services Expanded to Household Electric Appliances

It was 2018 when “sabusuku”, the shortened way of saying “subscription service” in Japanese, has tremendously spread in Japan. As listening to music and watching movies through internet were already popular, the well-digitized music or video distribution services were psychologically easy for users to accept and the subscription services in these genres spread at once. To the contrary, the subscription services of beauty appliances that need to directly attach to skins, or of cooking appliances for cooking food to actually eat, were felt resistance by many consumers and were difficult for users to actually use them, due to sanitation or damage concerns, though the awareness of the services in these genres increased.

However, after April 2020 as the state of emergency was announced, more companies adopted telework, which changed the working and living environment. In order to arrange and improve such new environment, using of subscription services accelerated. There has traditionally been a demand for trial use of a product, especially furniture and electric appliances that tend to be large and expensive, to see if the size or the atmosphere fits the user/room or not, or whether he/she can continue using the product or not. Consumer demand in the COVID-19 calamity matched the usability of subscription services that can be started easily by paying monthly fixed rate at the time when people needed to rapidly respond to sudden teleworking.

Nevertheless, there is no change in that many service providers offer secondhand products in the services, which cannot eliminate the concerns over sanitation and damage. The service providers hereafter are expected to contribute in the growth of the future home beauty/cooking appliances market by offering safety to consumers when using the products and providing the opportunities of knowing and purchasing the products, while at the same time, building reliance with each manufacturer.

Future Outlook

The home beauty appliance retail market in 2021 is projected to generate 170,140 million yen, 102.8% of the size of the previous year. The home cooking appliance retail market is estimated to attain 806,700 million yen, 110.2% of the size of the previous year.

It is still vague in 2021 to decide when COVID-19 infections will end, and people are not able to recover comfortable lives yet. With continual declarations of a state of emergency and semi-state of emergency coronavirus measures, people kept on being required to restrain themselves from going outside as much as possible. In such a situation, consumers, since last year, have started thinking positively and tried to have satisfactory time at home. The sales of home beauty/cooking appliances seem to remain their favorable sales in and after 2021.

Research Outline