When Peter Ruis took over John Lewis department stores at the beginning of the year, he had a surprising judgment on the success of the middle-class option.
“Beauty drives all the traffic into stores,” he said. “It’s a way into everything we do.”
For many customers, John Lewis is best associated with home furnishings – from pots and pans to bedding and cushions. But Ruis was convinced that the key to reviving the flagship department stores was perfume, lipstick and blusher.
John Lewis has started to spend on the face of its stores, and its beauty halls are at the top of the list to get a makeover. Already, there are signs of this on the shop floor.
At John Lewis’ flagship department store on Oxford Street, the beauty hall – which houses make-up giant Charlotte Tilbury to luxury fragrance maker Loewe – has been made 20,000 square feet bigger.
The new John Lewis beauty hall in the Oxford Street store – www.markmackenzie.co.uk
There are now more than 40 polished and marbled beauty counters spread around the room, a quarter of the previous total. The likes of cosmetics maker Mac and skincare company The Ordinary now sit alongside old favorites like Kiehls.
John Lewis has also started offering more in-store services. While it has long offered make-up appointments, it now offers new skin care therapies, including hydrofacials – a popular hyaluronic acid treatment delivered in a treatment room private Dermalogica.
The department store has seen an opportunity in the market – but they’re not the only ones. Marks & Spencer, John Lewis’s arch competitor, also sees huge potential for growth.
M&S is planning to expand into the market to help drive continued growth. “They’ve already gone after most categories of opportunity,” says one former executive.
The similarity of their customer bases means that John Lewis and M&S will compete with each other.
It sets the stage for a battle to win sales of premium mascara and perfume, a fresh clash between the two retailers after years of battling it out in the grocery and clothing markets.
Both are expanding in response to booming growth.
Beauty is now the best performing sector in the retail industry. Even after strong demand in 2023, sales are expected to be up another 5.6pc this year. By 2028, the beauty and personal care market is expected to be worth £12.7bn, compared to £11.3bn last year.
Part of this is due to the cash-strapped public switching from buying designer clothes and bags to more affordable designer lipsticks.
However, a bigger driver is younger shoppers who have grown up watching videos on social media about long skincare regimens and are more experimental with their makeup. When trends like “skin cycling” – where people rotate their skin care regime to avoid irritation – go viral on TikTok, it sparks a new wave of growth in the sector.
“Beauty has changed a lot in this business over the last 20 years and we’ve grown our market share,” says Ruis.
“The customers wanted us to do the new and exciting thing, and now we’re doing the new and exciting thing, they’re following.”
John Lewis was bold enough to stake its claim on the deal. Over the next 10 years, the department store plans to roll out changes similar to those seen at its Oxford Street branch across all stores.
“You’ll see a big statement about beauty,” says Ruis.
So far at least, M&S has been quieter. Just a day before Russ stood the trumpet in the John Lewis beauty hall on Oxford Street, M&S reopened its Fosse Park store in Leicester. He then added a new “beauty scheme”, in the heart of the shops where customers walk between food and women’s fashion.
The space is zoned from clothes and food with mint green tiles. There, counters with specialized lighting display their own beauty brands and well-known third-party products.
Sacha Berendji, operations director at M&S, says customers are “responding fantastically”. The Fosse Park store, which opened last month, is now the third largest seller of beauty products. The previous store was languishing somewhere in the 20s.
The scheme is set to be copied across all major stores even before M&S completes its wider refurbishment plans, which will see the retailer shrink its estate and focus on 180 “bigger and better” stores “.
Berendji says: “For our big stores, we didn’t want to wait until 2028 to roll this out, so we’re doing it soon.”
The battle between John Lewis and M&S comes in the context of the fiercest competition between the two retailers in recent years.
After years of languishing, M&S’s sales and share price have risen under chief executive Stuart Machin.
Meanwhile, John Lewis has only recently started to turn a corner after a brutal pandemic, leaving it vulnerable to attack from its owner. Earlier this year, the John Lewis Partnership, which also owns Waitrose, returned to profit for the first time since Covid-19.
Clive Black, from stockbroker Shore Capital, says M&S is “gaining authority and confidence” in the beauty market.
John Lewis, meanwhile, “needs to maintain his performance and hopefully he will take it.”
M&S currently has just 0.3pc of the beauty and health market, according to GlobalData, compared to John Lewis’s 0.6pc. Boots is the giant of the sector, controlling 19pc of sales.
GlobalData forecasts suggest M&S will control 0.4pc of the beauty market by next year, while John Lewis will grow to a 0.7pc share.
In the short term at least, beauty is likely to remain a relatively small part of both companies’ businesses. But it could be an important way to attract new customers to stores, where executives hope they will spend money on other things.
Although M&S is the rebel, John Lewis has an advantage.
“John Lewis is a more traditional department store,” says one former executive. Women are already used to buying beauty products from department stores, and the loss of BHS and Debenhams leaves John Lewis as the natural home for customers in need of their fix.
“What John Lewis has is the most famous brands coming in with their own fixtures, their own people,” says the executive. “There is an endless appetite for this type of product.”
This year alone, John Lewis has launched 21 more beauty brands, including cult skincare brand Trinny London, founded by celebrity Trinny Woodall.
M&S wants to do something different. Instead of hosting counters with third-party brands like in a department store, it sees itself as a “trusted editor” for its customers.
The beauty counters will be staffed by M&S employees themselves. And like food and drink, M&S is making its own-brand beauty products.
Indoor Formula and Fresh Elements are sold alongside Estee Lauder fragrances and Bumble and Bumble hair care.
M&S believes that shoppers want to be guided in the right direction by a retailer they know and trust, amid the growing number of new beauty brands and products.
Earlier this year, it started selling new ranges of “discovery” beauty boxes containing both its own brand items and products from outside names. The aim, he said, was to help customers “renew their routines”.
When M&S publishes its interim results next Wednesday, there could be early signs of a beauty boom, adding to what analysts say is likely to be a “resilient” performance from its clothing and home division .
John Lewis and M&S are approaching the crucial Christmas trading period, when most retailers make most of their money. While food and gifts will be the main area of battle, the pair will also struggle with beauty.
M&S has launched a £315 beauty advent calendar with a mix of branded and own-brand skincare, haircare and make-up. It is up against the £195 John Lewis version.
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