Anthropologie is upping its beauty assortment and creating in-store beauty installations as it sees more demand for the category.Anthropologie sells dozens of beauty products across skin care, fragrances, makeup and more, with a mix of national brands (like Phlur and L’Occitane), as well as private-label ones (like Maeve). After adding more SKUs, the company is finding that its typical apparel customers are increasingly shopping beauty. Over the past 12 months, one in six Anthropologie customers bought a beauty product, with hair care emerging as one of the fastest-growing categories.
Part of that is due to Anthropologie’s new beauty shop-in-shops, which allow customers to try on anything from lip gloss to roll-on scents. Anthropologie set up 27 such locations in stores last year, and it will end this year with 50. The company is also curating an “incubator” of beauty products near the registers to drive last-minute sales and gauge demand. What’s more, Anthropologie’s beauty advent calendar — which it launched in 2018 — is proving so popular that the company is moving up the release of its newer 12-day version.
“Beauty has been really strong for us,” said Holly Thrasher, chief merchandising officer of women’s at Anthropologie. “We have not been in the beauty business to the degree that we are now, and it’s really amplified our customer shopping experience. … Beauty has been very consistent for us in both channels [in-store and online] all year, and outperforming. There’s a lot more growth that we know we can have.”
