Department stores are in the battle for their lives. Classed in the category of general merchandise stores in Census Department’s Monthly Retail Trade Survey, department stores, excluding discounters, shrunk 2.1% year-over-year through October 2018, as compared to the entire general merchandise category, which posted healthy 3.5% growth.
In the last ten years, department stores have experienced a massive 30% drop in sales.
Nowhere is a department store’s battle for survival more critical than in the beauty department , often the most productive selling spaces in a department store in terms of dollars per square foot.
With Sephora, Ulta and e-commerce players chipping away at what was department store dominance in premium beauty, department store beauty departments are the front line of battle, with Target, Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue and Barney’s giving makeovers to their beauty departments recently.
Now Bloomingdale’s 59th Street flagship joins the fray with a totally reimagined beauty department that spreads across four floors. It unveils today and may be the biggest, boldest idea of what a department store like Bloomingdale’s can bring to its customers, and the beauty brands that make their home there.
Bloomingdale’s new face of beauty
In his classic book, Like No Other Store, the late-great Marvin Traub, commented on Charles Revson’s famous trope, “In the factory we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope.” Traub wrote, “If cosmetics companies sold fantasy, we set out to be the dream factory.”
Bloomingdale’s executive team and its beauty-brand partners have been dreaming about what its next-generation dream factory needs to be.
I met with Francine Klein, vice chairman and GMM for shoes, handbags, fashion accessories, fashion and fine jewelry, cosmetics and outlets, and Stacie Borteck, vice president and DMM for cosmetics, to discuss the new face of beauty at the 59th Street flagship store.
Klein and Borteck are hoping their dream will become a nightmare for competitors. And with success behind them, the concept will be rolled out to other Bloomingdale’s stores across the chain.
“We are creating a playground for the beauty and fragrance world,” Klein shares, as she explains that the new beauty vision is part of the company’s total flagship renovation that started last year with the home and ready-to-wear worlds.
“Our mission is to create energy and excitement that radiates throughout the store,” Klein continues. “ It’s retail as theatre. It’s entertainment that customers can’t get at home shopping. ”
