I remember a colleague in the beauty industry telling me that British women don’t want to shop for luxury beauty products like groceries. Allegedly, we wanted luxury beauty dispensed only from counters, by uniformed sales consultants with time to devote to a single customer and brand. This was the blinkered argument put forward by beauty industry analysts to explain the UK closure of Sephora in 2005.
British culture had, they said, rejected the global retailer’s self-selection, multibrand retail model. Having been there, shopped there and written about it first time around, I suggested that we had merely rejected its bafflingly situated and (then) slightly grubby and gloomy UK stores. I continued to make Sephora my first stop whenever I visited the US, and hoped the company might soon come to its senses.
