The Ordinary’s latest Markup Marché pop-up activation exposes the real drivers behind luxury skincare prices — from buzzword-laden packaging to celebrity endorsement fees that can raise retail prices by 100 percent or more.
Standing in a beauty aisle holding a serum that costs more than a plane ticket, most people have had the same thought: what, exactly, am I paying for? The Ordinary has made a very literal attempt to answer that question.
The brand — known for its clinical formulas and aggressively low price points — launched The Markup Marché, a surreal, grocery store-style pop-up that opened simultaneously across six global cities, including London, Paris, Toronto, São Paulo, and Melbourne. It marks the brand’s first simultaneous physical activation at this scale. Inside, everyday produce sits on shelves dressed in luxury packaging and marketing language borrowed directly from the beauty industry’s playbook. A banana is an “All-Natural Magical Energy-Boosting Bar” priced at $175.90. An avocado is a “100% Natural Glow-Enhancing Vitality Orb” at $305.90. A coconut is an “Exotic Thirst Defying Hydration Vessel” at $195.50. The product is identical to what you’d find in any grocery store; the price tag is not.
The Ordinary’s research found that some luxury beauty products carry markups as high as 12 times their production value. Each aisle at The Markup Marché is designed to make that abstraction concrete, surfacing the buzzwords and packaging tactics that justify — or attempt to justify — those numbers. “We would find it absurd if we had an avocado priced at $300 simply because there’s flowery language and unique packaging to it,” Amy Bi, Vice President of Brand at Deciem (The Ordinary’s parent company), told WWD.
The launch comes as a McKinsey report found that 64 percent of consumers don’t believe premium beauty products outperform mass-market alternatives — and yet prestige beauty has, until recently, continued to grow. That gap between what people believe and what they buy is precisely the territory The Ordinary is staking out.
The celebrity math
Last year, The Ordinary brought a related — and equally pointed — piece of its transparency campaign to New York City. The Secret Ingredient, a three-day pop-up in SoHo, focused on a single, costly line item: celebrity endorsement fees. Its window display was filled floor-to-ceiling with branded dollar bills alongside the statement: “This is the amount of money we would have to add to the price of our products if we paid for a celebrity endorsement.” Inside, interactive exhibits and one-on-one discussions with brand scientists walked visitors through the actual economics of fame in beauty.
The Ordinary has cited research showing that celebrity endorsements can raise a product’s retail price by between 30 and 100 percent or more, with some talent commanding as much as $10 million per social media post. That cost doesn’t stay with the brand. It moves directly into the retail price, absorbed quietly by whoever picks the product off the shelf.
The Ordinary has been building out that argument beyond the shop floor, too. Last year, it launched a free digital archive of white papers and myth-busting explainers developed by its own scientists — positioning the brand as a resource as much as a retailer.
Related on Ethos:
