Sephora Unveils Its New Store Look

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Sephora is set to open a new store in San Francisco that will be the new model for all future locations, WWD reports. Sephora's intends for the new model to encourage customers to Teach, Inspire, and Play — these principles also serve as the acronym for the new store name, Sephora Beauty TIP Workshop.

The heart of the store are these beauty workshops where Sephora can host communal beauty tutorials at 12 different stations. Each station is equipped with USB ports, an iPad, and WiFi, which allows employees to walk customers through beauty workshops and existing technologies, like Sephora's Color IQ, Fragrance IQ and Skincare IQ, will play more prominently in the store design.

"When a client comes in and experiences Teach, Inspire, Play, she's going to experience it on her own, she's going to experience it through cast members, and she's going to experience it through technology," Sephora Americas CEO Calvin McDonald tells WWD. "And that's where we really see our differentiator being and how we're going to continue to innovate."

Sephora also says that it is expanding more into hair with the same type of stations and technology it has committed to cosmetics. "Hair is emerging for us as a nice fourth world, and we have a lot of initiatives planned for 2016," McDonald said. "At Powell [in San Francisco], we want to merchandise it as a world and bring the play element into it with testing tools like hair-dryers and curling irons." McDonald also wouldn't rule out creating a hair studio down the line. "In the future, would we see a hair studio? Potentially one day," he said.

McDonald explains that this new store concept will serve as the basis for store renovations and new stores moving forward, even if it isn't replicated exactly. "Some of the locations, depending upon the size, will get all parts of this new design; others may just get components of it, but this was designed not as a single store," he says. "It was designed as a vision for the majority of our current doors and the new ones we're bringing."

The first Sephora Beauty TIP Workshop store will be unveiled at San Francisco's Powell location on November 20th. Boston's Prudential Garden store will get the redesign next, in February.