In the age of online-only brands becoming multimillion-dollar enterprises, next-day delivery convenience, and social media-driven purchases, some brands doubt the strength of the in-store experience. According to NielsenIQ, in 2024, e-commerce accounted for 41% of beauty and personal care sales in the US market, presenting strong competition to in-store shopping. However, a Klavyio 2024 State of Ecommerce report also found that 61% of consumers prefer to buy directly from a brand’s retail store.

For brands entering physical retail, the shelves of national and international retailers seem like a logical haven. A standalone boutique is the ideal for many, but the costs and required resources make it a challenge.

A select few brands have bet on standalone boutiques to drive brand awareness and loyalty. Fragrance house Amouage has 19 standalone stores across North America, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Personal care brand Malin+Goetz has 22 locations across North America, Europe, and Asia. Color cosmetics brand Asteri, founded in 2023, already has seven boutiques in the Middle East. French luxury brand Officine Universelle Buly 1803 has over 37 outlets across Europe and Asia (including department counters). 

BeautyMatter spoke to Renaud Salmon, Chief Creative Officer, at Amouage; Matthew Malin and Andrew Goetz, co-founders of Malin+Goetz; Sara Al-Rashed, founder of Asteri Beauty; and Victoire de Taillac-Touhami and Nathalie Elbaz, co-founder and CEO, respectively, of Officine Universelle Buly 1803 to discuss the challenges and rewards of building a standalone physical retail presence.

Location, Location, Location

Foot traffic, audience resonance, and a desirable neighborhood are obvious starting points, but choosing the right store location comes with other factors. Malin+Goetz opened its first store in Chelsea in 2004. “We cluster stores around our prime retailer, which was Barney's at the time—it was almost an Army, Air Force, Marines, and Navy mentality; you needed all those forces to win the war,” Goetz said. 

The company boosted the impact of its standalone store with an owned e-commerce presence and local amenity programs, “an entire ecosystem that supported the store and the brand.” The brand prioritizes neighborhood-feeling locations, like Williamsburg and Silver Lake, and is conscious of the surrounding architecture. “You don’t want to be in the ugliest building in the nicest neighborhood,” Malin remarked. 

For young entrepreneurial brands, carving out a destination off the beaten path initially is a way to build recognition over time. “Those initial customers who are seeking something interesting and cool will find your brand. As the budget and footprint expands, a place with a higher price can be justified because of the amount of foot traffic,” Malin added.

“Our retail presence needs to be very curated so that every boutique becomes a destination,” Salmon said. Aside from making each store a travel destination, it’s also about adopting the presence of the region’s understanding and perception of the brand. “Each boutique tells a story that hopefully is relevant to the audience where the boutique is located and takes into account the aesthetics, the availability of materials, and the place.”

There are also local customs to be conscious of, especially in the Middle East. Asteri offers customers a private makeup room to try out products, while Amouage reduces boutique noise levels out of respect to prayer times throughout the day.

Bringing the Concept to Life

Once the contracts are signed, how does the store come to life? All four brands emphasize individualized elements in each store, bringing the personality of the brand to life. One of the Amouage’s newest openings, a boutique in Shanghai’s Zhangyuan block, drew inspiration from being underwater, a nod to historical trades happening via sailboat between Oman and China. Salmon emphasized the importance of each boutique having its own identity, but also playing on contrasts, “a dystopian tension, because you get something very authentic, raw like the sandstone and the travertine [materials] and on the other hand, you get digital screens, something you would see in futuristic movies.”

The digital component also allows the brand to easily switch its merchandising between boutiques with new product launches, creating a more cost- and time-efficient method for updating an in-store appearance. Salmon sees this instantaneous myriad of possibilities, from live streams of rose harvests to instant color changes, as the future of physical retail.

He also crafted the concept of unselfish retail, where the purchase is only a small part of the overall experience, “doing things against the grain of hyper-calculated merchandising.” For Amouage, this meant putting a piece of art front and center of every boutique, which takes up approximately a quarter of each space, with products often hidden in the side of displays or in the back of the boutique. 

While he notes retail experts might say the move wastes a lot of productivity per square meter, Salmon doubles down on the concept of emotional productivity and impact. “The perception of the value of products and status of things is really influenced by adjacencies. If you see an Amouage perfume on a display that feels very functional and sales-driven, people will probably not understand the artistry of the product,” he said.

“The experience of the store is one of the cruxes of success,” Goetz said. “What makes it different than just transactional and replenishment? Is there an education and experience? Obviously we're a brand that believes in how incredibly important design is to elevating that experience.” 

Malin+Goetz also works with a different architect or design approach for every boutique. “That unified cookie cutter, cloned experience isn't interesting to us personally and to the business,” Goetz explained. While that does come at an increased cost, it’s important to convey the brand’s ethos of accessible luxury.

De Taillac sees every store as a blank canvas like one store being split into a futuristic lab on one side and an apothecary on the other. “We create a place where we expect the customer to have an aesthetic shock or wow moment when they step in,” she told BeautyMatter.

Due to Asteri’s roots in sisterhood, each boutique also has a lounge space and serves coffee, encouraging a longer stay. The desert-proof formulas of its products also play into the design elements, like counters with sand dune-like textures. There are also location-specific elements, such as a blue centerpiece in its Jeddah store to represent the Red Sea.

Brand Building Through Brick Building

Aside from offering a place to purchase products, standalone boutiques are a powerful tool for creating brand presence and loyalty.

“A good retail distribution strategy can be a way to assert your seriousness and credibility. It has an impact on the perception of the clients about the status of your brand,” Salmon said. In Q4 2024, Amouage announced $260 million in annual retail sales with 30% organic growth year over year. 

Malin+Goetz’s owned physical retail and e-commerce is more than 30% of the business, with their four websites making up 60% of that figure and physical retail making up 40%. “But we tend not to measure it that way because the value of the store is the experience that the customer has,” Goetz added. “The store serves an incredibly important function, even if they're not always the one getting the sale.”

Asteri witnessed a growth in awareness and visibility as a result of their brick-and-mortar presence. “We have a lot of clients that have never heard of Asteri,” Al- Rashed said. “The moment they pass by the store and try our products, learn about our story, and fall in love with the brand, they return and tell their community about it. Makeup is all about application and feeling, and that is something that you cannot offer online.”

Sometimes, it’s also a case of less is more: showing restraint in the number of store openings. “If you're on every single corner, it eats away a little bit at the brand. Yes, we live in a globalized world, but you don't want to carpet bomb every city with your brand because it’s convenient. I think it diminishes the brand,” Goetz added.

Investment Timelines

While building these boutiques without outside funding is possible, sooner or later, outside capital is usually required to maintain and grow branded retail locations. In February 2025, L'Oréal announced a long-term minority investment in Amouage to support the expansion of its mono-brand boutiques. 

Malin+Goetz opened the first handful of stores without outside investment. “It’s possible to do brick-and-mortar without investors if you’re scrappy,” Malin said. The duo’s first store location in a co-op on 7th Avenue between 20 and 21st Streets also became the location of its offices, warehouse, and press events. “You can make a space work. You just have to be willing to think outside the box.”

Manzanita Capital acquired the company in 2015 for an undisclosed amount. When a Diptyque (which is also owned by Manzanita) space became available in IFC (International Finance Centre) Mall in Hong Kong, they were able to take over the lease. “It was a huge learning curve and success because all of a sudden, we had international eyes on our brand in a high-traffic location that we just had never experienced before. We probably could not have done that on our own,” Goetz adds.

Officine Universelle Buly 1803, relaunched in 2014, received investments through LVMH’s Luxury Ventures fund in October 2017 before being acquired by the company in October 2021.

The Customer Is King (or Queen)

Even the most beautifully built retail experience can falter at the hands of a subpar customer service interaction. “If you don't have good service, then you'll never return to a brand,” Malin said. “That old school retailer mentality, the customer is king, if retailers can manage and maintain that, they're going to win. The other thing I would add, which is a very old human component, is la joie des provisions: a joy of shopping, discovery, and learning. That passion of discovering something is irreplaceable.” In more driving-centric locations like Los Angeles, this spontaneous store discovery can be more challenging.

“Our beauty advisors are our ambassadors and our most important asset,” echoed Al-Rashed. “It’s about creating a space where people enjoy the environment and feel comfortable spending time. We strive to create an impactful experience not just by being a beautiful space but also with our impeccable service.”

Officine Universelle Buly 1803 offers custom embossing, engraving, calligraphy, and wrapping in its stores, with opera music playing in the background. “We always knew it was about the details, about taking time in-store, putting the product inside the box in front of the customer. We thought all these kinds of gestures are a way to have a nice conversation with the customer to stop time,” de Taillac added.

“This is the tension that you need to get right in high-luxury beauty environments: how do you convey your status but at the same time, feel welcoming? That's really what I try to achieve,” Salmon said.

Goetz noted that with company growth also came an increasing complexity of maintaining said level of service. “Managing and maintaining that intimacy, which is what people want when they walk into these kinds of shops, having a strong training and education program, it takes a lot of effort. We understood how important an investment in both people and training is.”

The Pop-up Effect

Pop-ups have made an undeniable impact on the beauty retail landscape in the last five years. For brands, they can be financially challenging but also a useful testing ground. Amouage recently created an ephemeral boutique (the brand’s term for pop-up) at The Grove in Los Angeles to test the receptivity with a West Coast audience. It was so successful they subsequently opened up distribution in the region. 

“Pop-ups are a double-edged sword for me. It's a short-term investment where you test the waters,” Malin said. “The test and learn opportunity really is extraordinary.” Goetz added, “When you're a small organization, it's a lot of work. You put so much effort into opening the store, you don't want to have it close six months later.”

Malin+Goetz recently tested a pop-up opportunity in New York City’s Penn Station for the past two years that has been “hugely successful” with “an inordinate number of new and existing customers.” The brand had a similar pop-up in London’s King Cross Station, extending from 6 to 18 months following a successful reception. 

Offline Experience to Online Impact

Discovering a brand in-store can lead to online sales and vice versa. There is an interactional nature to the e-commerce and boutique experience. “Twenty years ago, when we launched our brand store first, but we also had a website, all the data showed that your direct consumer who will come into your store, out of convenience and replenishment, would eventually buy online. When you had the two together, that's where you saw the greatest growth,” Goetz added. 

This storytelling function remains essential due to the emotional and elevating experience of the in-store experience, which cannot be recreated on the same level online.

Malin also highlighted the importance of a standalone retail presence in broader brand growth. “When you saw that direct-to-consumer boom, everything started to shift. All of a sudden, those businesses are opening stores because they couldn't grow to a certain place without having that physical presence.”

Multifunctional Spaces of the Future

Salmon predicts boutiques will become livestreaming locations during downtime. “What if my boutique in the US is empty from 10 to 11? That boutique better go online to tell stories about the products, and then maybe it's going to resonate with an audience that is on the other side of the world. All of a sudden the audience of the boutique is actually much bigger.” He also hopes to expand Amouage to more residency-style locations and larger spaces across several floors, with some dedicated to selling but others as leisure spaces, masterclass venues, or art galleries.

For both Asteri and Amouage, boutiques also act as places of union and communal gathering. Al-Rashed stated, “Many people are shifting to online shopping, so physical retail will turn into a showroom format to sample and touch the products, to feel and understand the brand world. Fun is a big part of it too, so creating multilayered spaces that are not only for selling but more of a brand experience—through the music, lighting, scents—are part of the future of retail.” Elbaz sees the value of refined service standing the test of time, and the brand boutique even acts as a counterpoint to a high-tech world.

Malin concluded, “We've definitely seen the pendulum swing back from pure-play online to brick-and-mortar. There is some balance there, obviously where people want the experience, but the convenience of shopping online. The future is solid for brick-and-mortar; it is going to continue to be incredibly relevant and incredibly important.”