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Sephora's West Coast flagship store was designed by FeeMunsonEbert, San Francisco, in the style of the Paris flagship. Freestanding space features all-glass exposures on Stockton and Ellis Streets, with an animated display on the second floor of the Ellis Street exposure. A 19-ft.-high drywall barrel vault ceiling, visible from the entryway, spans the entire second floor, acting as a conduit to lead customers through the store.
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Services like express makeup bars and interactive menus address customer desires around personalisation and expert advice. A new category, the parapharmacy, completes Sephora’s skincare and wellness offerings. Implemented in over a hundred locations in Europe, the concept can scale to different formats, like a new shop-in-shop layout. The Beauty Hubs are a new innovative tool that gives the opportunity to buy products in-store or online, providing several purchasing options to clients, but also a fun and engaging experience. The Beauty Hubs show that Sephora has acted on the fact that consumers want to do more than just buy products in stores in an expert way.
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Why Do So Many Beauty Stores Look and Feel the Same?.
Posted: Wed, 16 Nov 2016 08:00:00 GMT [source]
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While Sephora’s flagship location is in Plaza de Catalunya, Barcelona’s commercial and cultural center, it saw modest levels of foot traffic and in-store sales. We needed to shape a new experience around Sephora’s core values of discovery, fun, and fearless experimentation to reignite the spark for beauty lovers and engage curious newcomers. With this new platform, Sephora has positioned itself as a pioneer in the beauty sector.
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Sephora's newest concept, the Sephora Studio, takes these concepts even further by focusing on the fostering of long-term customer relationships and consultation services, from skincare all the way through makeup. Although the store has only been open since July, Sephora said they have already received positive responses from their customers and they plan to expand the concept to more locations in the future. Retailers have been opening new store concepts at a furious pace as they strive to make brick-and-mortar fun again. From Nordstrom's merchandise-free experiment to Target's small-format stores aimed at winning over the college market with convenience and localized offerings, retailers are jumping at the chance to offer differentiated in-store experiences. Unlike its competitors, the digital and traditional marketing efforts at Sephora are organized under the same department, fueling collaborative decision making(3). Sephora’s competitive advantage in the prestige beauty space stems from integrated business and operating models that support the company’s broader objective to enhance the customer experience at every touchpoint.
In order to fight the decrease of foot traffic in malls and be closer to customers, Sephora recently opened a new concept store in Boston known as Sephora Studio. The studios will be about 2,000 sq ft, less than half the size of a typical Sephora store (5,500 sq ft), and feature digital components and a more curated retail experience for shoppers. Digital welcome screens with menus greet visitors, and all employees are equipped with an iPhone 7 for mobile point-of-sale purchases instead of cash registers. The store is equipped with digital screens, which gives a before-and-after preview using the AR “virtual artist”. Order-in-store and same-day pickup options for online purchases are also available.
As part of the expansion, the retailer announced a new store format — a 4,000-square-foot design that's meant to better fit the outside-the-mall locations it's moving into. That format will effectively replace the role Sephora Studio had played in the retailer's portfolio, according to Gaul, though the existing Sephora Studio stores will remain open. A bit further in, guests will find a list of the store’s services, like makeup, skin care, hair, fragrance discovery, brows, face glow and personalized engraving.
Expand beauty menu
Here, digital tools helped consumers understand their skin type, facilitating personalized consultations akin to professional medical care. These innovative features aimed to create a unique, exploratory experience, blending digital convenience with concierge in-store service. Sephora stores are constructed to facilitate the brand showcasing, product trial, and cross-brand purchasing that contribute to Sephora’s reputation and negotiating power within the industry. Stores are designed for a consumer-led retail experiences with large aisles for group shopping and self-explanatory shelves organized by brand, product, and color. Endcaps feature either testable products or digital interfaces where consumers can obtain personalized information on recommended products. In traditional retail outlets, customers travel from counter to counter to learn about products, but the Sephora store design encourages simultaneous product experimentation.
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From incubating some of today’s most powerful brands to pioneering an open-sell environment in prestige, Sephora changed forever how beauty is sold — and transformed the U.S. retail landscape in the process. As a point of comparison, while many of the top luxury automobile brands have their best Canadian stores here in Montreal, we find ourselves with only one freestanding luxury store in a market that should support close to 30. Sephora’s expansion will bring its U.S. store count to over 712 and will reinforce its omnipresence through standalone stores, Sephora at Kohl’s, and online offerings including electronic, mobile and social commerce.
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It all adds up to a dynamic landscape that is helping to fuel Sephora and beauty overall, one of the few categories in the U.S. that is growing thanks to unit sales increases rather than price increases. There’s lash applications, Hydrafacials for the face, lips and hands, and brow waxing. Sephora North America was a first-mover in digital, for example, launching its e-commerce site in 1999. That meant executives had to forge a completely new strategy, one built around small emerging brands that few had ever heard of. If necessity is the mother of invention, Sephora U.S. is the godparent of the modern-day beauty industry.
People will go directly to the platform to find inspiration and recommendations. Thanks to this new community initiative, Sephora will build trust and have an even more solid customer base. Sephora can monitor which items and topics are trending and create strategies accordingly. In a statement released in May with Kohl’s first-quarter numbers, CEO Tom Kingsbury said that comp-store growth was in the mid-teens for the first tranche of stores, and that the 2022 openings were exceeding expectations. The partners also introduced a smaller-format store, measuring about 750 square feet, with 50 planned for the end of this year and a chain-wide rollout to be completed by 2025.
Together we created a storefront and flagship store experience that was scaled to retail locations throughout Europe. The Sephora at Kohl’s store-in-store concept will be prominently located in about 2,500 square feet ... Sephora invested in technological solutions to address customer demands for targeted product recommendations to drive sales. Partnering with Pantone, Sephora developed Color IQ, an in-store interface that scans skin pigmentation to identify precise color matches across makeup brands(6).
Its highly curated menu will be available in an adjacent location connected to Sephora stores in San Diego and Los Angeles. Sephora leverages its strong reputation to attract new brand partners, control its competitive environment and gain product exclusivity rights to offer best-in-class product curation for consumers. Given demand for shelf space, Sephora is discerning regarding brand expansion and ruthless in discontinuing underperforming products. Protective of its image, Sephora dictates to whom its brand partners can sell to avoid association with lower-end stores. The company negotiates for exclusive “made for Sephora” products and exclusive “early rollout rights” for new brand product launches. Few do it better than Sephora — a company at the forefront of experiential retail for some time now.
