M&S in landmark link-up with Sephora to expand beauty offer for UK

M&S had huge news on Tuesday as it announced a link-up with Sephora “to bring a new beauty destination to high streets across the UK”.

The partnership will bring “curated brands, product discovery and specialist advice to 100 M&S stores and M&S.com”. The retailer also said it marks the next step in M&S’s Fashion, Home and Beauty transformation”.

It’s clearly a big deal for both companies as they exploit the £5.2 billion Uk beauty market. It really rams home the point about M&S now being a multi-brand retailer across multiple categories and one that can offer a specialist beauty experience. And for Sephora, it gives instant wider exposure through one of the UK’s most visited retailers.

It launches next spring with M&S bringing Sephora to 100 high streets and retail parks across the UK.

M&S said on Tuesday: “The new, transformed beauty offer will help attract new customers and give existing customers more reasons to shop with M&S more frequently.  

“For Sephora, the partnership marks the next step in its UK growth story, extending its prestige beauty experience into more communities through the UK’s most trusted brand. Building on Sephora’s destination store, boutique and digital formats, the shop-in-shop retail model will give more customers access to curated brands, expert advice and the beauty discovery experience for which Sephora is known.”

There will be specialist beauty teams to support customers in stores while M&S.com will offer a broader online range with home delivery and Click & Collect from M&S stores nationwide. The final brand line-up will be confirmed closer to launch, alongside details of new-to-M&S names and selected Sephora exclusives.

M&S’s fashion and beauty MD John Lyttle said: “We’re transforming Fashion, Home and Beauty at M&S, creating a better experience for our customers and building a more efficient, more profitable business. Beauty is an important category for M&S. Our partnership with Sephora will sit at the heart of our future beauty offer, combining [its] specialist expertise with the strength of the M&S brand, our store estate and our growing digital platform. Alongside this, we will continue investing in our own-label Beauty categories where we have established strength and customer trust.” 

And Sephora’s Europe/Middle East president Catherine Spindler added: “Sephora’s ambition has always been to continually evolve how we bring our expertise in beauty to market, adapting our global model to reflect the needs and opportunities of each region. In the UK, this has seen us build a deliberately complementary ecosystem across our digital and app proposition, large-format ‘Temples of Beauty’ and, most recently, our curated boutique concepts that debuted in London this summer.

“Our UK launch has been such a huge success, that we wanted to go further and faster. Our partnership with M&S is the next evolution of this strategy, introducing a retail model that complements our existing formats and allows us to build on the strength of the Sephora brand in the UK.”

Meanwhile, Sephora UK MD Sarah Boyd explained that M&S is “a brand so trusted, loved and deeply ingrained in British life is not just a great honour and privilege, but also an extremely exciting next step in our expansion journey. Together, we can re-define what high street beauty means for customers across the UK”.