LONDON — There are 25 Aesop stores in the city of London, and not a single reason to visit all of them; unless, of course, you are intrigued about the Australian personal care brand’s aggressive recent retail expansion, and have the time, interest and journalistic impetus to explore.
From its origin as a hair salon in Melbourne to its global blanket of stores, Aesop has become known for its highly conceptual store builds, which blend local flavour into branded retail. The Stratford City store, on the upper levels of a Westfield mall, is cast in terracotta plaster with a recessed ceiling meant to evoke a monastery built in the area some thousand-plus years ago. About 10 kilometres west, the Lamb’s Conduit is comparatively lower key, until you realise that a wall of copper shelves doubles as a water feature quiet enough to be imperceptible.
There are around 400 Aesop boutiques in the world, the vast majority of which are concentrated in megalopolises like New York (18 stores) or Tokyo (22 stores), reflecting the company’s desire to scale into a local apothecary with a global footprint.
The first wave of stores, opened between 2010 and 2015, focussed on shopping districts with high foot traffic, like Tokyo’s Aoyama or New York’s Nolita. Following its purchase by Natura & Co in 2016; the next wave settled in neighbourhoods with largely local clientele, like Le Marais in Paris; most recently they’ve opened in largely Westfield malls, where its now parent company, L’Oréal’s luxury brands, frequently pop up.
“I will use this French example, but we want to be like the boulangerie on the next corner, you know?” Marianne Lardilleux, Aesop’s head of global retail design told The Business of Beauty at the Marylebone boutique earlier this week.
At a time when beauty retail has a pervading sense of sameness and “omnichannel,” “BOPIS” and “click-and-collect” are buzzwords, Aesop is a case study in owned stores first. Few other brands follow this trajectory, from makeup juggernaut MAC Cosmetics to body care imprint Lush, but to varying levels of execution. Its person-to-person in-store experience is legendary, but largely ignores digital channels where beauty purchases are increasingly made. The brand is remaining committed to terra firma — an old-hearted strategy in a brave new world.
Think Global, Act Local
Aesop’s main aim with its retail network is to make its customers feel at home, if their home was designed by the best architects in the world and stocked with an endless supply of premium body, hair and skin care.
Of the UK’s 31 Aesop stores, more than half are clustered in and around the city of London, like neighbourhood apothecaries. The earliest locations spawned on shopping streets are in proximity to other purveyors of fine bathing goods — from Malin + Goetz to Lush — but also pharmacies and grocers. More recently they’ve popped up in Westfield malls like Stratford City, on the eastern rim of London.
All of the stores are famously different, part of the company’s fastidious and decades-long commitment to creating architectural snowflakes: Compare the stores at Regent Street and Borough Market, one a two-story flagship carved from stone and the other a creaky, cozy wooden shopfront. In terms of selection and merchandising, however, each store is identically stocked according to rigid design codes. Products are arranged in groups of three, five or seven under the belief that odd numbers are the most visually interesting. When its bottles are arranged on a shelf, the labels form an elegant continuous line.
The brand has built a muscular retail design division headquartered in Paris — 70 percent of stores are designed in-house, said Lardilleux, an architect who previously worked for LVMH on Louis Vuitton and Céline. She joined the brand 10 years ago, when the company operated just over 100 global stores. Besides its department store counters and placement at the upscale specialty retailer Bluemercury, the brand’s products are largely purchased in its own shops, Lardilleux said.
But shoppers did not initially appreciate the visuals, said Thomas Buisson, an investor at Ilyos Capital who was Aesop’s general manager in Europe between 2009 and 2020. “Customers didn’t recognise which [product] was which.”
Though Aesop’s unique fleet strategy is easy to appreciate in hindsight, early flagship experiments failed.
Aesop initially struggled in the UK. Despite success at Space NK, its department store counters at Selfridges and Liberty underperformed — the brand was close to being the worst selling label at both stores, according to “Aesop: The Book”, published by Rizzoli in 2019. Its first flagship store on Mayfair’s ultra-tony Mount Street was intended to boost brand visibility but cost “three times as much to build as was planned, and generated less than a third of what was budgeted”; it opened in 2008 and closed five years later.
A similar experiment on Paris’ Left Bank, in 2009, was just as lacklustre. In an effort to keep costs low, the brand sought out locations that didn’t require “key money” deposits, entering younger, trendier neighbourhoods like in the Marais and in Shoreditch, where Buisson relocated the store. “Redchurch street had practically no retail,” Buisson said. “People in that neighbourhood, which were primarily working in ad agencies and creative agencies, absolutely fell in love with the brand. That was a turning point.”
A few other key events happened between then and now: Aesop’s hand soap became an if-you-know-you-know bathroom accessory; the company was acquired by Brazilian conglomerate Natura in 2016, and seven years later, L’Oréal bought Aesop for an estimated $2.3 billion (annual revenues reached around $500 million), making it the second largest beauty M&A transaction of the decade after Estée Lauder’s purchase of Tom Ford.
The brand’s most recent expansion into malls and airports follows a similar Aesop tenet by showing up in “unexpected” locations. Maybe not unexpected for the lay customer, but unexpected for Aesop. A duty-free store in China’s Hainan Airport, and two at London Heathrow, opened within the last year.
With these locations, the brand known for appealing to a cool, creative class — the same shoppers that made its hand soap a cult object — seems to hit a critical mass. Even more than its botanical recipes, Aesop’s shops are some of its most valuable creations. And an airport duty-free store, even a tasteful and unique one, is still an airport duty-free store.
The brand’s continued success depends on its ability to transplant the soul of a Shoreditch storefront into an airport terminal. Between new store openings, like a recent one in Hoboken or a forthcoming one in Chongqing, relocations and renovations, Ladrilleux said the global fleet is continuing to expand. “It’s a continuous line,” she said, drawing an upward arc in the air.
The Ritual of Commerce
Another invaluable asset to the brand’s retail network is its in-store associates, referred to as “Aesopians.”
Each store lures shoppers to its door by installing testers of its hand lotions just outside the door; once they’re inside, they’re engaged in a gentle but muscular retail choreography. Associates are trained to wait until customers “settle” before approaching them. “They’ll say, ‘Can I take your coat?’ ‘Can I get you a tea?’ as if welcoming them to their home, but there’s no product conversation yet,” pointed out Paula Floyd, the founder of Headkount, a beauty retail consultancy.
Besides generating sales, every store associate’s goal is to bring customers to the basins, the nuclei of Aesop’s cellular network. Rather than talk about the benefits of balm, the associate will probably talk about the basin itself; each one is distinct, always made to exacting specifications — Ladrilleux said the distance from the edge of the sink to the tap is carefully calibrated for customer comfort — and sometimes made from found objects.
“These are from the Regency era,” an Aesopian at the Islington boutique said, tracing a finger along a corroded finger pull.
Though body care is still Aesop’s hero category, particularly its cult hand soaps, the line has augmented its skincare line for different skin types, and tripled its fragrance portfolio, which has inspired changes in its stores: many are outfitted with a “fragrance armoire” designed to accompany a perfume testing experience, and 13 stores in the world now have spaces for facial services, including the Regent Street flagship, where guests descend by elevator into a soundproof treatment room.
The brand’s apparent aversion to the digital world could be seen as a mark against it, especially when dealing with replenishment customers who may want to visit the boulangerie without getting their hands wet. But the delicate retail choreography is one of the brand’s biggest assets.
“We’re not planning to change it,” Ladrilleux said. “In terms of experience — to welcome somebody in, to offer them a drink — there’s nothing more human than this, right?”
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