Store Concept of the Year: Sephora
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And finally, to complete this retail experience, Sephora also offers Beauty Classes with makeup lessons and workshops led by beauty professionals at the Beauty Hub. Last March, Sephora unveiled its “Beauty Hub” in two shops in France offering a fun retail experience to its clients. Each Beauty Hub is a virtual lookbook with thousands of options provided via iPad stations or interactive mirrors, where products can be virtually tried using augmented reality. Beauty recommendations like skincare diagnostics and tutorials are also available, with or without the advice of an in-store makeup expert. Items tested on these new digital tools can be purchased either in-store or online.
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Other Sephora offerings are the Instagram Checkout feature, Instacart same-day delivery and a credit card program featuring a buy now, pay later model, allowing shoppers to pay for merchandise over time with no interest. For its part, Macy’s Inc., parent company to Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and Bluemercury, doesn’t break out beauty sales but includes cosmetics and fragrances with women’ shoes and accessories. Meanwhile, Ulta Beauty surpassed $10 billion in sales in 2022 for the first time in its history, but that includes sales of mass, masstige and professional products, as well as prestige beauty and services. Acknowledging that entering a new phase of life can make people feel insecure about their looks, we asked research participants, What does “beauty power” mean to you?
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Graphics, promotions, and featured products are aligned on all customer interfaces, allowing for seamless browsing and purchasing regardless of format. Those displays started as prototypes in a Sephora concept store that filled an entire floor of IDEO’s Shanghai office. In our bright, modern space, consumers of all demographics explored a self-led experience designed to delight. A “Play Table” allowed visitors to freely explore products, using digital platforms to access product details and reviews. At another pitstop, the “Sephora Beauty School”, offered a spectrum of classes and community activities, providing hands-on guidance and enabling participants to test out beauty bloggers’ techniques. The “Care Table” addressed more personal skincare needs, providing a semi-private setting for individuals to remove makeup, try out products, and consult with experts.
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The feedback garnered from that prototype helped the team iterate quickly and gave Sephora the confidence to launch its first “Asia Store of the Future” in Singapore in 2022, followed by a second store in Shanghai in 2023. The Singapore store, situated in Raffles City, offered consumers a free-flowing, interactive beauty playground with a blend of digital and personal services, much like our early prototype. While not every retail market is the right place for this kind of intimate environment, Sephora is watching closely for places to expand, namely in locations where "the real estate speaks to that kind of footprint," according to the company. But wherever Sephora's prototypes go next, it's safe to say they'll be focused on an experiential, engaging form of retail. The first phase of Royalmount will consist of an 824,000 square feet, two-level retail and lifestyle complex.
Sephora reinvents the in-store experience for digital-first shoppers.
“The city has enormous untapped potential, being ideally positioned and with a strong cultural identity. Events such as this coming weekend’s F1 Grand Prix have previously been the calendar moments where luxury brands have come to play in Montreal to great success. Royalmount will now be bringing that opportunity to both locals and visitors all year round,” he said.
Retailers have to rethink the purpose of the store and propose unique and helpful experiences to their customers. Sephora is aiming to settle in classic neighborhood shopping streets with a dynamic retail mix in order to attract new customers who might not go to mall, and propose personalized experiences that will be meaningful to win customer loyalty. And Sephora, the LVMH-owned beauty retailer is one of the winners of the industry thanks to its customer-centric and digitally-focused retail strategy using omnichannel and engaging clients in new ways. Here are 3 retail strategies that show how Sephora gets closer to what its clients want and need.
This flagship also sells the wide range of prestige fragrance — for women and for men — and color cosmetics found at other Sephoras. There is an area showcasing which brands are hot on social media, plus The Next Big Thing gondola and the Gift Hub. Francis Kurkdjian will be sold in the section devoted to high-premium fragrance brands. An example of a label found in no other Sephoras is Maison Francis Kurkdjian, a fragrance brand that shares the retailer’s parent company, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. The flagship’s design nods vigorously to the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, on which it stands, at numbers 70 to 72, with a 2.6-foot-wide path of hand-set snow white marble paving running straight through the store. Sephora’s signature black-and-white stripes appear on some columns flanking that.
Helping a multinational company connect staff members across locations and identify new areas for growth. "One of the beautiful things about being in such a personal retail category is that there are human interactions happening all the time — and not just at a cash wrap," Yeh told Retail Dive. "They're happening in the aisles, in the beauty studios... and so each of those touch points becomes an opportunity for inspiration for us from our consumer." The Beauty TIP workshops, started in 2015, which feature an experiential, playful approach to the beauty retail sector. A host of new brands have committed to Royalmount, a multibillion-dollar mixed-use development in central Montreal that opens in August, and promises to be the city's first major fashion and lifestyle destination. "We always want to make sure that we are always giving the client everything they're looking for, and then some," he said.
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Industry sources estimate that Sephora North America has the potential to drive $10 billion in sales. A handful of brands — a.k.a. the big three — ruled the roost, and as for newcomers hoping to break through? Good luck trying to afford the astronomical costs affiliated with doing business in a full-service environment. E-commerce has created tremendous challenges to companies whose core business revolves around retail stores. Using the smaller Sephora Studio format also meant relying more on localizing the assortment, which sometimes meant stores would "miss the mark," Gaul noted. The retailer’s signature collection has its own department, and there’s an area for hair care.
Executives believe that ColorIQ is another step in the right direction, and will help remove a key pain point for shoppers of color — the difficulty of finding the right shade of foundation or concealer. “If you come into a store and the beauty adviser doesn’t look like you, you may not be totally confident that she can find the right match,” said Jacobs. Back then, Sephora had about 54 doors in France and had just opened its largest, a 14,000 square-foot flagship on Paris’s Champs-Élysées, with one of the widest ranges of fragrance and beauty products anywhere in the world.
Sephora Expands UK Footprint With Second Store In Westfield Stratford - Retail News And Events - 365 Retail
Sephora Expands UK Footprint With Second Store In Westfield Stratford - Retail News And Events.
Posted: Tue, 24 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
In-store visits and sales grew by 10%, and social media saw massive engagement – over two million interactions within the first three months of launch. A long-time beauty pioneer, Sephora needed to redesign their in-store experiences around their core values of discovery, fun, and fearless experimentation. ColorIQ has also plays a key role in Sephora’s diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives, another key component of “Pot of Gold.” “It is part of everything we do today,” said Rougeot, acknowledging that much work remains to be done. “We made a clear internal and external statement that we would be the retailer that would be inclusive to all. I’m not saying we do it all the time,” he said, noting that Sephora was the first major retailer in America to take the 15 Percent Pledge, where retailers pledge to allocate at least 15 percent of their shelf space to Black-owned businesses. As hoped, Sephora’s revitalized storefront blends digital and physical experiences in a way that gives every person who enters the store the feeling that they are stepping into their own “beauty power”.
Customers are encouraged to join Sephora’s free loyalty program, Beauty Insider, to easily track and sign up for classes and services at their local Sephora store, where a Beauty Advisor can assist them. Centered around Sephora’s DNA and branding principles, the new store formats go beyond trying and purchasing products. Another key to growth will be to continue to broaden Sephora’s consumer base, primarily through external partnerships.
A glass bridge on the second floor, lit from below, increases the sense of glamour in the store. “Our growth in beauty today is a little bit extreme — when you see the difference between prestige beauty and electronics or apparel, the gap is quite dramatic,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s sustainable, but beauty growing faster than other categories is sustainable. “Sephora isn’t just about distribution, it’s about brand-building and visibility. That is what makes them so unique,” agreed Nancy Twine, the founder of Briogeo who is credited with introducing textured hair care into the prestige channel. That skill of identifying and building emerging brands and trends has fundamentally changed beauty — and created a sales juggernaut.
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