Evolving the Beauty Flagship
- Retail Trend Report
With 90% of global beauty consumers shopping in physical stores, bricks-and-mortar flagships remain key. We spotlight leading strategic opportunities, including advanced diagnostics, mall and department stores’ mainstreaming of ‘tweakments’, ‘sensorialised’ experiences, the suburban beauty boom, eco-centric environments, and fame-fuelling hubs for aspiring influencers.
01. Tailor-to-Me
The global personalised beauty market is set to grow by 15% annually until 2030 (InsightAce Analytic, 2022). Brands like South Korea’s Etude and India’s Boddess are putting diagnostics front and centre of store design, while British label The Inkey List’s educative pop-up encourages visitors to turn forensic in their own facial analysis.
Etude House’s Foundation Matching Station: Seoul-based Etude’s Sinchon-dong, Seoul store features a colour-matching foundation station resembling a vintage food cart. It measures skin tone via a touch- screen-embedded camera panel, while a neighbouring window displays foundation being robotically mixed and packaged. Consistently booked up, it’s generated a 20% uplift in overall store sales since launching late last year.
The station is set within a cartoonishly feminine all-pink store, where grey concrete and tubular metal shelving transition the brand’s signature ultra-girly princess aesthetic for a more Powerpuff Girls-style, kick-ass stance.
Etude House, Seoul
Etude House, Seoul
02. ‘Tweakments’
Tapping into the mainstreaming of the ‘tweakment’ (non-surgical cosmetic procedures) industry – projected to nearly triple in value by 2028 (Research and Markets, 2021) – some retailers are centring on the desire for injectables like Botox and fillers. Approaches range from John Lewis’s restrained over-25s policy and traditional styling, to fellow British brand Flannels’ social-media-centric clinic, which livestreams treatments to the shop floor.
Flannels’ Social-Media-Ready Clinic: Flannels’ new Liverpool store will soon offer tweakments by UK cosmeceutical brand Esho, founded by Instagram-famous British aesthetic doctor Tijion Esho. The in-store clinic will house several medical suites for procedures like HydraFacial and laser therapies, alongside a separate ‘champagne recovery suite’.
Set behind Crittall-style doors away from the high-octane retail floor, the aesthetic will be ‘premium surgical’, with marbled surfaces and grey concrete walls. A 4K screen (with a selfie-style ring light) will transmit treatments to the shop floor, with consumers encouraged to livestream their sessions on TikTok.
Esho at Flannels, Liverpool
Esho at Flannels, Liverpool
03. Experiences
Brands are looking beyond visual allure and tapping into the heightened post-pandemic consumer desire for sensorial connection and wellness-infused beauty. While Australian company Aesop’s clothing infusion chamber and YSL Beauty’s neural fragrance profiler spotlight scent, Dutch label Rituals’ Mind Spa uses multisensory tech to enhance mental wellbeing.
Ritual’s Beauty-Exulting Brainwave Spa: Rituals’ Mind Spa in its Amsterdam House of Rituals flagship features tech-enabled sensorial experiences (including a Brain Massage) on the uppermost floor. Headphone-wearing visitors sit in a zero-gravity chair within a private booth, immersed in music, lighting effects and haptic Users select Deep Rest – purportedly equal to three hours’ sleep – or Deep Focus to stimulate gamma brainwaves (associated with higher IQ and concentration levels).
Rituals, Brain Bar & Mind Spa
Rituals, Brain Bar & Mind Spa
04. Suburban
Astute retailers, like luxury British department store Harrods, are targeting suburban and ‘micropolitan’ consumers – a growing group, spurred by the pandemic’s mega-city exodus – with regional locations reminiscent of metropolitan bricks-and-mortar flagships. Store design is either pared back (letting the brands shine) or seductive (with ultra-luxe styling).
Harrods Brings Luxe Beauty to Suburbia: Harrods’ H Beauty store openings in Gateshead and Bristol (both UK) this year update the brand’s 2019 London beauty hall revamp. Some elements are repeated – ultra-luxe Art Deco styling is recalled in the curved golden dressing-table-style try-on ‘play bars’ and champagne lounges. But there are also more youthful, casual counterpoints, like a mask bar encased in powder-pink tubular shelving with neon signage.
H Beauty, Bristol
H Beauty, Bristol
H Beauty, Bristol
05. Eco-Activist
Sustainable brands including Aesop are harnessing the connection between personal and planetary wellbeing with eco-conscious store designs. These communicate clean beauty credentials and/or overtly educative spaces, spotlighting regenerative research and activism – see French marine skincare brand Biotherm.
L’Occitane’s Recycled Store: French beauty brand L'Occitane’s July-launched store in southern China’s duty-free island Hainan is made up of 84% eco-certified materials. These include reclaimed wood flooring (from an old boat), and resin tabletops crafted from upcycled glass.
L'Occitane, Hainan
L'Occitane, Hainan
L'Occitane, Hainan
06. Content Creation
In the US, 54% of millennials and Gen Zers want to become influencers (Morning Consult, 2019). Shrewd (predominantly luxury) brands like Chanel and Flannels are targeting this growing cohort of fame-seeking content creators with store-hosted TikTok beauty challenges and social-media-connected changing rooms.
Chanel’s Shareable Virtual Makeovers: Chanel's Beauty House pop-up in Tokyo this spring boasted a Beauty Recordings area. Shoppers were encouraged to save personalised videos of make-up sessions, try products on virtually, and post the results on social media.
Chanel, Tokyo
Chanel, Tokyo
Key Take-Outs
01. Tailor-to-Me
Create a halo around your brand expertise with diagnostic skincare tools that lean on hard-won clinical expertise and take company know-how from headquarters to in-store. With beauty consumers especially receptive to personalised recommendations, check-in tech enabling them to ‘carry’ their individual profiles around stores will win – The Inkey List’s pop-up shows how.
02. Tweakments
As non-surgical treatments boom in popularity – 17% of affluent 20- to 40-year-olds globally expect to have them within the next five years (McKinsey, 2021) – extend your offering into medi-beauty. John Lewis and Hillcrest Mall spotlight how this burgeoning trend might become an anchor tenant, while Flannel’s social-media-hyped take appeals to younger consumers, for whom such services are normalising fast.
03. Experiences
Play into the post-pandemic desire for heightened sensory engagement with experiences that work best in-store. While especially relevant for fragrance brands – which should look to Aesop’s garment infusion chamber (which enables the retail experience to transcend the store, albeit temporarily) and YSL Beauty’s neural profiling – all can seek inspiration from Rituals’ wellbeing-centric take.
04. Suburbia
Connect to the fast-emerging regional prestige consumer (a cohort growing thanks to the pandemic’s hyper-city exodus) by creating spaces that provide luxe beauty-hall-style engagement (like virtual mirrors and champagne bars) for aficionados beyond metropolises. Harrods’ regional play – which updates the design codes of its famed London beauty hall for more casual outposts – highlights how.
05. Eco-Activist
Demonstrate that sustainability is at the heart of your business with an eco-centric approach to store architecture, capable of nurturing and/or attracting green- and clean-beauty-oriented fans. Biotherm’s educative hub on its marine research and activism highlights how spatial design can epitomise ethical brand purpose in a highly contemporary way.
06. Content Creation
Speak to the hard-wired link between beauty and fame – supercharged by social media (and the high proportion of Gen Zers and younger millennials with a would-be influencer mindset) – with concepts encouraging premium user-generated content. Flannels’ connected beauty changing rooms replete with content-creation-ready props provide a template.