Chemist Warehouse had 14 stores in New Zealand in the 2020 financial year. By 2025 it had 70. New Zealand sales grew 22.4% in the six months to December 2025.
If you sell beauty or personal care here, that is a story about who your shopper is now and what convinces them, dressed up as a retail statistic.
What changes when a channel moves that fast
Five things, and they compound.
Price becomes visible. The format is built around visible discount. A shopper who used to compare your product with the one next to it on a department store counter is now comparing it with everything in the category at once.
Advice moves out of the aisle. Counter service and pharmacist recommendation were how a lot of skincare was sold. In a volume format, the recommendation has to happen before the shopper arrives.
The basket changes. Beauty gets bought alongside vitamins, nappies and painkillers rather than as a considered purchase on its own.
Range breadth exposes you. More shelf means more competitors, including brands your shopper has never heard of and is willing to try because the price makes trying cheap.
Trial gets easier and loyalty gets harder. Both directions at once. That is the part most brands only notice on the way down.
The problem this creates
If the recommendation now happens before the store visit, and your marketing is built around what happens at the shelf, you are spending money at the wrong end of the decision.
Meanwhile the thing that has always driven this category, one person telling another what actually worked for them, is happening somewhere you have no presence at all.
Nielsen's Trust in Advertising study, covering more than 40,000 consumers across 56 countries in 2021, found 88% most trust recommendations from people they know, the highest ranked channel in the study. That has not changed because the retail format did.
What to do about it
Three things, in order of how quickly they can be started.
1. Get real people using it, on record
Not a creator sent a box. A customer who bought it, in the channel that matters, and used it for the trial period set out in the brief. Beauty and personal care campaigns can be filtered to shoppers of a specific retailer, which means the evidence you end up with is about the shopper the buyer cares about.
2. Build a content pool the price format cannot flatten
In a discount environment, the brands that hold value are the ones a shopper already has a reason to reach for. Real faces, real routines and real results give a shopper that reason before they walk in. In a South Africa campaign, Beiersdorf ran Nivea Sun and Elastoplast together through real parents packing school bags, and it produced more than 16.3 million total impressions, reach 37 times the organic benchmark, and 170 verified product purchases.
3. Keep the claims on the right side of the line
This is where beauty brands get caught as they move into a pharmacy-led channel. A cosmetic claim describes how a product looks, feels or smells. A therapeutic claim says it treated, prevented or cured something, and under the therapeutic and health advertising code in force from 1 July 2026, a person in an advertisement cannot make one.
A customer saying a cream cleared their eczema is a therapeutic testimonial, however sincerely they mean it. That content is rejected before it is licensed, which is why the brief has to be written for the line rather than corrected at it.
The channel question worth asking internally
Not whether to be in Chemist Warehouse. That decision has usually already been made by the shopper.
The question is whether your marketing still assumes the old decision path, where a shopper stood in front of a counter and asked somebody. If it does, the spend is aimed at a moment that now happens on a phone, days earlier, in a conversation you are not part of.
The mechanics are on the product sampling page, and nano-influencer campaigns covers why small audiences do the heavy lifting in this category.