Welcome to The Discovery Channel, travel retail style

by Martin Moodie |
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Martin Moodie

Martin Moodie is the Founder & Chairman of The Moodie Report.

‘The Discovery Channel’. What a brilliantly pithy description of what travel retail could and should be.

The three-word epithet is courtesy of the typically eloquent Sue Y. Nabi, CEO of US beauty powerhouse Coty, whom I was honoured to meet a few years back at the launch of the company’s Orveda skincare line.

I am pictured with Sue Y. Nabi at the blockbuster Orveda launch in May 2024

Ms Nabi used the mantra during Coty’s post full-year results’ earnings call this week when asked about the performance – and role – of travel retail, a channel worth 9% of the company’s heavily fragrance-skewed business.

“We are reinforcing the ability of this channel to become a destination to discover newness,” she said.

“I think what has happened recently – and the shift is happening hand-in-hand between us and our partners in travel retail – is really to make this channel a discovery channel.

“Hence, our decision to make the key innovations of this new fiscal year travel retail-exclusives for 1.5 months. [For example], you could see the BOSS Bottled Beyond in travel retail [before the 1 September global roll-out; click here for our story]..

“That’s also a great warm-up, if I may say, before the products hit the global distribution outside of travel retail. So this is a way to make sure that the consumers who are travelling… are more attracted towards these kinds of exclusivities that make the channel look almost like a niche boutique – with the newness and the things they do not yet find anywhere else and, of course, with the price incentive.”

Think about these words: “The things they do not yet find anywhere else.”

Tuning into the Discovery Channel. Coty pre-launched BOSS Bottled Beyond Eau de Parfum in select airports across Europe, Middle East, Americas and Asia Pacific in July followed by airport doors across the Americas from 1 August. The pre-launch gave international travellers access to the latest men’s fragrance from BOSS ahead of its global launch on 1 September.

They echo the words of Dag Rasmussen, then Lagardère Travel Retail Chairman & CEO, from one of the standout interviews of my career, conducted in July 2024.

With Dag Rasmussen in July 2024

When I pressed him about the multiple challenges facing travel retail, Dag replied sagely: “The point is to see how we can continue to grow in a business where you have some categories which are at risk, like tobacco and liquor, where you have some trends in certain countries which are not that positive.

“And the short answer is sense of place. It’s having an offer which you don’t see everywhere else. It’s giving passengers some new experience.

“We summarised it in the Aelia concept ‘Here and nowhere else’, and that’s critical. The objective I set for the teams in duty free is to have 30% of local products. Sometimes we are way below but then we should work on it. It could be craft, it could be gastronomy, it could be wine, it could be lots of things.”

Here and nowhere else. Or to deploy the acronym taught me by Dubai Airports Chief Commercial Officer Eugene Barry, WACD. What Amazon (or Alibaba) can’t do.

It’s precisely such logic that persuaded us to launch the pioneering cross-category travel retail-exclusive awards programme, TREX earlier this year. As I said at the time, “Differentiation is vital to travel retail’s future prosperity in the face of intense online and downtown competition. By definition, travel retail-exclusive products offer something that such competitors cannot, bringing a critical element of surprise and discovery to the travel shopping experience.”

A little more verbosely put than the redoubtable Ms Nabi perhaps but whether the product in question is a permanent TREX or a preview of a wider launch, the principle of travel retail as the Discovery Channel is surely an irresistible one. ✈