[A few things that have changed:
- the Australian dollar dropped dropped to below $US0.70 today, a 6 year low, which again makes prices in Australia seem better
- Sephora will be opening a second store in Maquarie shopping centre this month, so if you live on the north shore but didn't already hear about this, now you know (I hear they're planning on opening Melbourne ones soon but I don't know when)
- I checked on the Bite Beauty pencil again 3 months after my first visit and it was ~$30 so I may have actually remembered that incorrectly but that's still a high price (but bite beauty was never cheap so)
- it's now been almost a year and the other prices haven't changed
- although they now have a website, it's not an online store, the Australian website doesn't even have a catalogue, just the brand names available (wait quick check shows they now have some products listed)
- they do now have the ABH contour palettes and they have brought the Kat Von d shadelight eye palette in (slightly faster than the above) ]
Oh and as an aside to Sydney-siders who want Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics lip tars and pencils, they're available at Scotty's makeup and beauty store next to Broadway shopping centre for $2 cheaper.
So
the Sydney Sephora store opened on the 5th of December 2014 and it
was causing a buzz before and after that. And I figured I’d put my thoughts on
that on my blog, because what else are blogs for?
To
start off with when people caught wind of the news that Sephora was planning on
opening a store Down Under (and another couple more after that) consumers were
excited and it only got bigger when Sephora claimed to be bringing US pricing
to Australia.
(and
of course Sydney-siders let out a cheer when it turned out that the new Sephora
store would be in Sydney not Melbourne but anyway)
David Jones and Myer are
pretty much the only stores that people got to for non-priceline skincare and
makeup; Mecca Cosmetica/Maxima does a good job but it’s nowhere near the scale
of the aforementioned 2. (To non-Aussies: Priceline is a big chain pharmacy that has a large focus on makeup and skincare, kinda like Ulta) We can argue whether ‘drugstore’ skincare and makeup
are necessarily inferior to the more expensive brands, but either way David
Jones and Myer were in control of the distribution of these products and savvy
consumers were fully aware of the noticeable mark-up in price between the US
and European pricing compared to Australian prices, not just in brands like
Chanel and Giorgio Armani, but in Revlon, Maybelline etc.
Now I’m no finance student
but I’m given to understand at least part of the reason why is because
Australia economy is nowhere near as big as the US’ economy. The US has a much
larger population and can therefore afford to price things cheaper because
there will still be enough people buying them to cover the costs (I think the
prices in the EU are in between US and Aus for the same reason, the EU has more
people than Aus but not as much as the US). It’s the bane of living on a
massive ancient landmass that’s largely inhospitable and far away from
everything; not only does it cost a lot to ship something here (and then truck
it around the big ass country), but when you get it here, not a lot of people
will pay you for it because there aren’t a lot of people here in the first
place. In addition while the Australian dollar is generally relatively close to
the US dollar, it was particularly close in the last couple of years (and was
above parity for most of last year) because the US was struggling to recover
from the global financial crisis. Nowadays it’s back to around pre-2008 levels
and when u do the conversion prices seem more reasonable now (+they all lowered
their prices but more on that later), and this is what the businesses were
expecting/hoping for; they wouldn’t have passed on the cuts however
temporarily, because they would be losing money too. (not to mention Australian
consumer confidence wasn’t very high considering how well we survived the
global financial crisis – in the beginning it sounded like we were one of the
few first world countries left standing after 2008).
I’m oversimplifying here
(possibly a lot, I’m not familiar with this stuff), please feel free to further
explain if you have the know-how in the comments below. The point is, trying to
pass on US pricing in that retail climate wouldn’t have been easy, and really
why would the retailers do that anyway? So when Sephora said they’d match to US
pricing exactly, everyone in the business seemed to get a bit jittery because
of all the companies that could pull it off, Sephora probably could, what with
it’s mother company being a supergroup (LVMH) that owns half the western luxury
brands in the world and Sephora’s legions of online fans. Despite low retail
outlooks around the world Sephora didn’t stop growing throughout the financial
crisis so they were looking pretty capable.
According to news articles (links below) David Jones and
Myers get a large portion of their profits from the luxury departments and this
could have hit them badly, and Mecca Cosmetica was in even more danger because
it was a direct competitor and a small scale one at that. Sephora did say that
they wouldn’t bring US pricing on brands already available here, but that
wasn’t in their control to begin with, those brands all have exclusive
contracts with David Jones and Myers (usually to say that they are the exclusive
provider of X brand goods etc.), and what price consumers pay for their
products is obviously managed by them. Unsurprisingly all 3 started dropping
their prices, Mecca Cosmetica first, with a Maquarie Centre magazine interview
with the founder noting that she wanted to match US prices for the betterment
of her consumers and her company and if you check out their prices (not that
they were that much higher mind you), they are now almost on par, the extra
couple of dollars is probably tax. Priceline also joined in, bringing a lot of
brands over including the incredibly popular Bioderma and Nuxe (though these
brands came before Sephora’s announcement so Priceline may have been trying to
up their game for a while now), and opening another store in the CBD.
Then
Sephora actually arrived. (on Pitt street Mall if you’ve been living under a
rock for a year and didn’t actually know where the Sydney Sephora was.)
I’m not crazy, I didn’t go
to the opening day it would’ve been so crowded (pictures on Sephora australia’s
facebook if you’re interested). But even though I went the week after, u still
had to queue up, partially because there was still hype and partially because
the shop really isn’t very big (it’s the CBD just a shop that big would cost a
fortune in rent). And when I went inside to check out the brands I was
interested in (um hello MAKE UP FOR EVER ANYONE!?!?) it was . . .
disappointing.
For starters they had a
couple of counters (and by a couple I mean almost half the first floor) devoted to brands already available here e.g. Benefit, which
considering their limited space, I didn’t see the point. You’re already selling
yourself half on the new brands you’re bringing over, why on earth would you
waste space on Clinique and Dior?? The skincare section was marginally more
interesting because it mainly consisted of brands unheard of in Australia e.g.
fresh, skin inc., and ranges from companies that were already here but in a
limited capacity, e.g. Shiseido.
Secondly, everything was
hella expensive and even though I knew some of those brands were expensive in
the US I still baulked at the prices in Sephora (really bite beauty $50+ for a
retractable lip pencil are you out of your mind?!). The only reasonably priced
brand was Red Earth, which was originally an Australian brand anyway and had
it’s own online shop. That and Sephora’s own brand of makeup could be deemed
affordable while their nailpolish range Formula X was at the same price as OPI.
I hadn’t bothered to
compare US prices on most of the products, but the price disappointment soon
hit the newspaper companies and they showed that Sephora’s markups were about
as high as David Jones and Myers ones used to be (the highest mark ups being on
their own brand products, Formula X and the Sephora brand makeup). Sephora
Australia said they would be working on this but the fact that they essentially
sidestepped admitting they lied rather annoys me, they could have at least
tried for a ‘oh initial pricing will be adjusted’ or a something, but to act as
if this was a new problem that hadn’t occurred to them, with a ‘we pay
attention to our customers and will do our utmost to tackle this problem’ kind
of attitude, when they specifically SAID that they would bring US pricing over
was just kind of insulting.
It’s
been 4 months and I went in recently, the prices haven’t budged a cent.
Another
problem I had with Sephora’s launch is that I can’t believe they still haven’t
set up an Australian website. (hello not everyone in Australia lives in Sydney?
Granted a lot do but anyway . . . .) Nevermind becoming a member and gaining
points, there is no Australian website despite the fact that you have a brick
and mortar store on the friking ground?? Sigma Beauty has at least one licenced
Australian online distributor and they don’t even have a store here, and the
majority of consumers haven’t heard about them unless they are proper makeup
(youtuber) junkies! The whole reason Sephora could come to Australia with so
little real world marketing fanfare is because it already had Australian fans
who bought from their US website, it stands to reason that an Australian
website or at least cheaper shipping to Australia, or a pick up option NOW THAT
YOU HAVE A BLOODY STORE, would have been a good idea. Especially for
Australians who can’t just fly to NSW on a friking whim, so why on earth has
there been not so much as a peep about a website? There was also some
controversy where apparently after the Sydney Sephora store opened, Australian
users got banned from the US site, but I’m not too clear on that and it seems
to have been a glitch? But still HORRIBLY bad timing for a glitch.
As a
small extra aside, I’d been hoping for some more niche fragrances (oh Mecca Cosmetica
with your Diptyque and your Byredo), but they only had brand name eau de
toilettes shoved up against one side.
Another rather obvious (to
me at least) thing they failed to do was bring in new and hot products. When I
went in I expected to see MUFE’s artist eyeshadows and I was rewarded, but the
Anastacia Beverly Hills contour kit that everyone online has been raving about
like mad, and (if I remember correctly) launched months before the artist
eyeshadows wasn’t there. Last time I checked it still wasn’t there though there
was a coming soon sign I think. They also didn’t have their liquid lipsticks
when I last went in even though by that time they had been launched in US
stores. They didn’t have the new Kat von D shadelight palette nor Interstellar
palette, though again, may have seen a tester for the interstellar?
ANOTHER
thing I noted over the last couple of months is that there hasn’t been a single
sale, or at least I’ve missed hearing about a sale if there was one, it’s
certainly not on their facebook page. So not only are the products expensive,
you’ll probably have to wait till the end of financial year to see if you’ll
get a sale. Now I don’t know whether Sephora has frequent sales in the US, but
with the prices they’ve got, sales are kind of necessary.
If
you’re not going to provide a better price or a wider range (achieveable online
or at least a wider range of skin tones for foundations), and you’re not even
going to be up to date, what the hell is the point of going to Sephora?
The
thing is the name Sephora brought certain expectations, and then they hyped it
up quite a bit more, but then they let their consumers down in so many ways
it’s either pathetic or sneaky. And sure some people are willing to pay the
higher prices and more will now that the Australian dollars gone down but Sephora
did a crap job and thus lost a lot of trust and gave the other companies time
to keep their ground. Mecca’s just launched Urban Decay (which apparently
they’ve had the contract for for a while now), and everyone’s lowered their
prices (except Priceline since the sales are so frequent there’s no need).
Reference
news articles (and beautyheaven articles)
9/4/14
16/6/14
20/8/14
20/11/14
4/12/14
(I’m not sure this is the exact article, but meh)
18/12/14
19/12/14
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