Sephora Boss Rejects Claim That Brick-And-Mortar Retail Is Dying

French beauty powerhouse Sephora is doubling down on expanding its distinctive store portfolio, with Sephora Chairman and CEO Guillaume Motte describing postpandemic predictions that retail would shift decisively online as “bullshit.”

Speaking at the U.S. National Retail Federation’s debut NRF Big Show Europe in Paris, he also said he neither knew nor cared whether sales came online, in stores or a combination of both, so long as customers kept buying.

Motte also said he and the company continue to believe in stores despite the rise of online retailing and cited Generation Z shoppers as a younger cohort that enjoys going to stores rather than buying everything online.

“If you have exciting retail, an experience, it’s alive and kicking,” he said.

He added that while Sephora estimates that around a third of its business is online-driven, the lines between physical and online shopping are blurring.

“Omnichannel, I don’t know, I don’t care,” he said of where the sale was executed, whether in-store, click-and-collect or home delivery.

“My real concern is that the end of the journey is really seamless.”

Of Sephora’s store network, he said the retailer has 3,400 “warehouses within areas where people live and work” and said that not only were they used for online order picking but that the company was working with rapid delivery companies to create a wider one-hour beauty service.

As part of LVMH, the retailer is generally guarded about sharing full performance figures, but Motte said Sephora had tripled sales in the past decade and had doubled its earnings postpandemic, while last year it had grown sales by 9% in the U.S. and 20% in Europe.

“The figure that we always track is market share, and we are growing faster than the market,” he said, adding that market potential estimates can often underestimate how much impact a new brand entrant can have in growing the overall market size rather than simply taking a slice out of rivals’ sales.

Sephora returned to the UK in 2024 after an unsuccessful opening stint in the country, with stores in London’s two Westfield shopping centres. It plans to grow to 20 UK stores by the end of 2027.