What Holiday Samplers & Advent Calendar Merchandising Teaches Us About Beauty Retailing in 2025

One box can tell you a whole lot

Amazon has struggled to build good relationships with beauty brands and, as an industry, cosmetics hasn’t really trusted Amazon as a retailer. It began as a brand concern, how products are displayed matters a great deal, but issues in the third party marketplace, especially commingling of inventory and counterfeiting, really exacerbated the trust issue.

But the need to expand reach comes for everyone, and as independent and luxury brands battle it out for the top 10% of consumers who buy 50% of consumer goods in America, beauty brands have had to do the deal with their devil. And so, Amazon has built beauty storefront tooling for the more willing, just as it did in fashion and wellness, and is slowly winning brands over.

While skeptical luxury brands have held out, others have jumped in, seeing the opportunity to gain ground by choosing retailers who scale like Amazon and Costco. No one more so than K-Beauty brands, who are featured prominently in both my Costco holiday mailer and Amazon’s Beauty Advent Calendar.

K-Beauty at Costco

As the loss of deminimus tax exemptions wreck market place resellers, the box stores are using this opportunity to expand market share, and I think Amazon in particular is using this holiday shopping season as part of a push to concentrate beauty under its own roof. It’s upping the overall experience for these imported brands to send a sign to reluctant ones, especially American ones, that Amazon can be trusted, so get online with them and get with the program.

To see how this is being telegraphed, look no further than the merchandising experience for their Beauty Advent Calendar. The beat up banana for scale is deliberate. Amazon is going big.

Amazon’s Advent Calendar and a banana for scale

It’s not just the size and scope of the wow factor in the giant gift box that was impressive, though it does tower over the Sephora and Saks Fifth Avenue versions (representing “better” and “best” retailer price points for advent calendars here).

No, it’s actually the shipping box from Amazon for the Advent Beauty Calendar that was striking for more subtle reasons than scale. My husband pointed out that this was the first time either of us had seen Amazon use packaging where they specifically designed the shipping setup to protect the product box.

Normally Amazon has a bunch of pre-set size boxes, into which they chuck all the product you ordered, with some airbags or crumpled paper to “protect” it, and off it goes. Even with their own electronics or products, they just put the product box in the shipping box and go.

But with the beauty advent calendar, they realized that if you’re giving a beauty gift for the holidays, the product box showing up with a bunch of broken edges and dents is a bad customer experience. It ruins the essence of the gifting. Incidentally, as much as I love their products, I’ve had this problem with Beauty Pie, so watch out if you buy their products as gifts.

To see Amazon ship an Advent Calendar so mass market that it contained a literal Burt’s Bees chapstick, in such a lavish manner, seemed a real corner being turned. For whatever reason, Amazon wants to protect this gifting experience.

Amazon’s Advent Calendar, packaged with bolsters to protect it

To really get into the autistic packaging details, they set up the product box with custom bolsters to keep it from bouncing around inside the shipping box, but somehow that actual shipping box was still oversized vertically.

Perhaps some product manager was like “hey we need to protect this box from being dented” and the fulfillment team was like “sure we can stick bolsters on but you can’t have a custom box size so you need to design it to fit around one of the existing ones alright?” So someone designed the foam bolsters to hold it firmly against the sides of the most appropriate shipping box, even though that box was way too tall

They also designed it to fit really tightly against the edges of the box so that friction kept it from moving up and down in transit without the bolsters having to be taller and therefore take up any more space than absolutely necessary during storage.

Truly a masterwork of tertiary packaging presentation. That delivered a perfectly unmarred box.

You know who didn’t exert this kind of effort? Saks Fifth Avenue. I purchased their advent calendar for $325, partially as an excuse to get a deal on luxury products I would not otherwise sample. This is the raison d’etre of the beauty advent calendar incidentally, to get you to pay to sample expensive stuff that you will then (hopefully) fall in love with and repurchase at $400, while they enjoy an 80% margin on COGS. You really should care a lot about your packaging in the context of this business logic.

The Saks 5th Avenue Advent Calendar

Inexplicably, Saks glued down the Baccarat sampler bottle, and I am still not quite sure how firmly to pull up on it, lest I break 2020’s most popular aspirational girl fragrance of Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540.

You glued it down Saks?

Meanwhile, Amazon is not messing around. A splashy gift box, packed to avoid dents and dings, for $100 of products that are good, but not great, outside of its K-Beauty choices (and a full size Sunday Riley Good Genes Lactic Acid). No one wants a Burt’s Bees chapstick for Christmas, so K-Beauty did the heavy lifting. I do however want a discount on Clé de Peau, Dr Barbara Sturm, La Mer and Augustinus Bader, which is how I ended up picking the Saks Advent Calendar. Neiman Marcus has minis for $99, and other luxury brands have $900 calendars, but the sweet spot of the luxury market was definitely the Saks Fifth Avenue Advent Calendar.

The Design of Routines from Clinique to K-Beauty

I always round out the newsletter with a routine.

The first beauty routine many millennials encountered was Clinique’s three part system. This innovation was to wash, apply toner, and end with moisturizer. And this vintage approach of a three step system, twice a day, is still a decent approach for oily skin.

Today, beauty is very complicated and we are double cleansing with oil & foaming washes, treating with actives, exfoliating with pads and scrubs, layering acids, sealing in moisture (let’s forget about slugging), and sleeping in multiple overnight masks on silk pillow cases.

Korean Beauty is what brought us 10-step routines. And now the layered approach is so popular that some K-Beauty isn’t even made in Korea, and American and British brands now use Korean manufacturers for western brands. I’ve done it myself, duping and formula matching is part of the manufacturing process, so knowing how to mix and match products is beauty culture these days.

So what K-Beauty line up might a sensitive skinned woman (or man) want to lather on for the winter dry season, or perhaps in appreciation for trialing a huge number of brands in sampler sets from Costco, Amazon and Sephora?

Before diving in, I would be remiss not to mention that Sephora’s 20% Insider Sale has begun and the good samplers, some of which I have reviewed already, will move quickly. Sephora has already sold out of its advent calendar online, but may have them in stores. This year’s Advent calendar did have a few K-Beauty winners in it, as Sephora was racing ahead on bringing in more new K-beauty brands this year, but the holiday samplers are also rich in K-Beauty, from single brand trial sets to sampler sets.

The holiday samplers include Innisfree, Dr Jart, and Glow Recipe. Plus Laneige’s classic layering line up was made a birthday gift sampler for Sephora Beauty Insiders for another year.

Getting to what I layer in my K-Beauty routine from the available options, and how I would do it.

First, let’s look at a few charts: these are from Innisfree and Beauty of Joseon (whose own website has a typo but who am I to judge) and follow a somewhat typical cleanser, toner, treatment, moisture cream, and sunscreen way of layering. The traditional wisdom in beauty has been thinnest to thickest in terms of products, with the end product always being sunscreen in the morning and retinol left somewhere in the middle of evening routines.

Yes, it is complicated. No, mine won’t be as involved.

So if you want a deeply moisturizing and protective routine that handles harsh climates and sunny bright winter days, wash gently, double moisturize, and protect with SPF 50 sunscreen. You can do it cost efficiently with samplers and advent calendars, or on its own.

I am drawing from Laneige and Beauty of Joseon, which are “western” K-Beauty winners. Sidney Sweeney is literally the face of Laneige and rumours are that Beauty of Joseon isn’t even popular in Korea, but I won’t lie, I use them and I like them and they are good bang-for-your-buck. You can even get in some wrinkle care in the evening.

The “Winter K-Beauty Layering Routine”

Morning

• Clean with Beauty of Joseon Green Plum Refreshing Cleanser for Gentle Daily Wash ($13)

• Moisturize with the Laneige Cream Skin Toner and Moisturizer ($36, or in the Amazon Advent Calendar or the Laneige Icons Samper) and the Laneige Water Bank Water Bank Blue Hyaluronic Cream Moisturizer (also in the Laneige Icons Samper)

• Protect with Beauty of Joseon Day Dew Sunscreen Lightweight SPF 50 ($18)

Evening

• Clean by repeating the morning wash

• Treat with Beauty of Joseon Revive Eye Serum ($17) - while it says eye serum, it is a retinal that you can slowly introduce to areas with wrinkles. Just for me, do it slowly with a pea sized amount once or twice a week, and layer on the ceramides and other moisturizers to soothe the skin barrier.

• Moisturize with the Skin toner and Hyaluronic Cream Moisturizers from the morning

Mask with the Laneige Water Bank Water Sleeping Mask and Laneige Lip Sleeping Mask (both in the Laneige Icons Sampler) - you are meant to sleep in these, so slather them on and wake up fresh (and apologize to your pillow case or partner for the annoyance).