The NACDS Total Store Expo closed in Boston on Monday, August 17, after three days at the Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center. We followed it from the desk, and our preview promised to come back with what the floor and the buyer program say about mass beauty in 2027.
Most of what a meetings show decides stays in the meetings. Ten-minute appointments do not publish minutes. But TSE does release one document that works as a public trace of buyer opinion: the Product Showcase results, announced by NACDS on the last day of the show.
How the ballot works
Exhibitors enter new products into showcase cases on the floor, grouped by category. This year there were more than a hundred entries across ten categories, as reported by NACDS. Retail buyers from around the country then vote for the products they expect to have the greatest impact in stores over the coming year.
That makes it a small but honest instrument. It is not a jury of editors or a marketing award. It is the same people who sit on the other side of the Meet the Market tables, saying what they think will sell.
New this year, a second ballot ran alongside it. The inaugural class of the NACDS Emerging Leaders Academy, 49 dean-nominated pharmacy students and 16 deans from colleges of pharmacy, picked a favorite in selected categories.
Beauty: one product, both ballots
In Beauty/Cosmetics the buyers chose No7 Future Renew Serum, from No7 Beauty Company. The students chose the same product.
That agreement is worth a moment. No7 is the skincare brand that came out of Boots in the UK, and a serum is the category's highest-value, most claims-driven format. Buyers voting for it at a show dominated by pharmacy tells you where the front end expects its beauty dollars to come from: not color, not gifting, but efficacy skincare that can sit plausibly next to the pharmacy counter.
It fits the pattern we saw from the claims arms race at Cosmoprof North America in July. The products that travel into mass are the ones that can explain themselves in clinical language on a shelf with no beauty advisor nearby.
The hair signal sits in the OTC category
The result that belongs in a beauty column but was filed elsewhere came from Health Care/Over-the-Counter. There, the students' pick was a tie that included Force Factor Hair Growth Supplements. The buyers' own OTC winners were a tie between BoomBoom's Nasal Stick and TruLabs' Hydrate + Creatine.
We are careful not to read too much into one student ballot. But in our preview we flagged the question of whether hair would stay a pharmacy conversation or move to the beauty aisle, as scalp and hair-loss products gain ground. A hair-growth supplement entered in the OTC category, not in beauty, is a small data point on where the chains still shelve it.
Personal Care/HBC, the category closest to everyday beauty, went to Minee Wipes' compact flushable travel wipes, with Cleanlogic's Body Care Routine as the students' pick.
What the rest of the list says
Read as a whole, the winners describe a front end that wants convenience and function: a caffeine supplement (Vespyr Brands' Vivarin Smooth Energy XR), a toilet spray (Poo~Pourri), a deodorizing bidet attachment (LUXE Bidet), a flu, Covid-19 and RSV rapid test (the students' home health pick, from iHealth Labs). Pharmacy Operations went to Inmar Intelligence's drug disposal system powered by Deterra.
Nothing on that list is aspirational. It is a list of products that answer a problem the shopper walked in with, which is exactly the job the front of a chain drug store has been given since the channel consolidated.
What we will watch next
The Showcase ballot is a forecast, not a sales result. The test is whether No7's serum and the hair-growth supplements show up with wider distribution in the spring 2027 resets. We will check the shelves against this ballot when those planograms land.
Sources: NACDS, "NACDS Names 2026 Total Store Expo Product Showcase Winners", August 17, 2026; NACDS Total Store Expo.
