“Sold out within the hour”: Inside MCoBeauty’s 48-hour pop-up store

Australian luxe-for-less beauty brand MCoBeauty has launched its first major physical space in Australia, but there’s a catch: it’s only open for 48 hours. The MCoBeauty ‘House of Beauty’, found on Sydney’s Oxford Street, opened to media on Friday, 17 November, and will usher approximately 1,500 ticket-holding fans through its doors on Saturday, 18 November. After that, it’s closed. According to MCoBeauty founder Shelley Sullivan, the brand has toyed with physical spaces before, but the House of Beauty is its first “wow moment” in the bricks-and-mortar world. And it could be a sign of things to come. “Customers can come through every hour, on the hour. It’s really a learning for us, I have no idea how it’s going to go – we put 1,500 tickets up for sale and they were sold out within the hour,” Sullivan told Inside Retail. “This is really an opportunity for us to test and understand what consumers like, and we don’t know what the future holds. Everyone’s been asking us to launch an MCoBeauty store, so that might be coming.”The store features a number of dedicated beauty stations for customers to be made up by MCoBeauty make-up artists, as well as a discovery zone which will see make-up experts talking through the brand’s expanding range. Sullivan said that the MCoBeauty range has expanded throughout the year, and will triple again in the next six months, with a focus on adding cosmeceutical benefits to the brand’s beauty products. Beyond a range expansion, MCoBeauty has “supercharged” its New Zealand footprint, entering into Woolworths’ Countdown supermarket chain and Chemist Warehouse, as well as launching a dedicated satellite office. Sullivan also hinted that the brand would soon be “taking one of the biggest markets by storm”, signalling a larger push into the US is likely coming. Sullivan previously told Inside Retail that a US expansion was on the cards for 2024, and that the US is already MCoBeauty’s second largest market, following Australia, The Zara of the beauty industryMCoBeauty’s focus on delivering ‘luxe-for-less’ products has proven popular over the past few years, becoming one of the highest-selling beauty brands in the local market. And, with substantial pressures on customers’ finances, its proposition has gotten even stronger. “We’ve seen huge growth,” Sullivan said. “Women want to have that little bit of luxury, but can’t always afford it. So we’ve given them a quality product for less.”Beauty dupes, and luxe-for-less, have taken the beauty world by storm in recent years. According to research from market intelligence agency Mintel, a vast majority of customers can’t tell the difference between premium and affordable beauty brands’ efficacy, but almost half will still prefer to purchase premium brands. But, with inflation driving the cost of products up, consumers are becoming more cost-conscious.According to Mintel’s beauty and personal care analyst Joan Li, value is fast becoming the name of the game, and despite the ‘lipstick effect’, where cosmetics are often seen as affordable luxuries during times of financial uncertainty, category spending is expected to flatline. “Persistently low consumer confidence continues to drive cost-conscious shopping behaviours, including the popularity of dupes, with social media playing a big role,” Li said. “Our research forecasts that growth will slow due to headwinds from continued trade-down behaviours, the mainstay of work-from-home and hybrid lifestyles, and competing growth in beauty-adjacent categories like ingestibles and skincare.”According to Sullivan, though the brand focuses on delivering cheaper alternatives to popular brands, such as its ‘Flawless Glow’ foundation being likened to Charlotte Tilbury’s Flawless Filter, it is always careful to ensure it doesn’t infringe on any company’s IP, and everything it releases is trademarked. “Duping is a huge word right now, but you know what? Duping has been done for decades,” she said. “They’ve been doing it in the fashion world [for years]. Runway to retail. Gucci to Zara. We’re just doing it in beauty.”