In a time when brands are tentative about physical retail, MyGlamm, India’s fastest-growing direct-to-consumer beauty brand, opened the country’s largest beauty destination. Located in Mumbai’s Juhu neighborhood, home to many of India’s notable Bollywood stars, the 3,000-sq-ft interactive flagship is six times larger than the average beauty store in India. It is built to celebrate larger-than-life experiential moments and pioneers the idea that makeup can be bold and glamorous for all people and all genders.
Partnering with noted New York beauty creative agency School House, the space is designed as a contrarian view and redefinition of physical retail in a post-COVID world, to craft a flagship experience where co-creation and digital community intersect to create a more hopeful, more colorful world. The design brings several first-of-its-kind elements that are socially distant, privately experiential, and digitally communal, redefining new world policies and physical retail.
Darpan Sanghvi, founder and CEO, My Glamm, said of the design, “It is an experience that sums up the idea of co-creation and artistic work between a brand and a consumer. The whole idea is to blur the stereotypical beauty concepts and redefine them with the latest technology that is socially distant yet digitally connected.”
The design focused on creating a flexible, sustainable, dynamic design system with a full complement of interactive, customizable opportunities to welcome visitors into the brand world to an immersive, shareable context. The space offers consumers the choice between private, autonomous physical experiences with publicly sharable community and co-creation digital experiences, to empower the next generation of makeup creators, makeup artists, and makeup tastemakers to celebrate personal expression and communal creativity. The overall design language is a glamorous approach to the millennial aesthetic, inspired by film sets’ modularity, and boldly highlighting the MyGlamm color palette of gold, pink, and white.
“The MyGlamm retail proposition is a connection of curation, creation, sharing experiences and communal spaces designed with beauty and you in mind,” says Christopher Skinner, founder and Principal of School House. “Inspired by the success of thematic co-working spaces and their inherent flexibility and social components, the experiential destination delivers an experience of beauty play, with perks.”
From a check-in station inspired by concierge services in hospitality spaces, to socially distanced makeup vanities, to modular visual merchandising design systems for product exploration and ease of in-out product offers from the brand and its sub-brands, the store is a dynamic system of space for consumer play and the brand’s fast-paced innovations.
MyGlammXO Beauty Creator Booths: The entire store is designed for content creation empowering MyGlammXO Beauty Creators and guests. Private booths are equipped with technology, including adjustable light settings, to create looks live, shareable with friends, and enabling the growth of their social audience.
MyGlammXO Secret Lab: A secret lab for MyGlammXO Insiders’ members (members of a joint loyalty program by POPxo, India’s largest community of women, and MyGlamm) is outfitted with a swatch content-capturing setup and a future innovation feedback wall where consumers can privately test digitally crowdsourced formulations physically, and then relay their feedback back into the digital space, for product co-creation.
The Glamm Zone: Artists and creators can experience one-on-one consultations with beauty experts and technicians. The Glamm Zone is a visual experience room where consumers test their looks in a variety of light settings within a highly shareable context.
The Glamm Stage: A masterclass stage is equipped with public broadcast capabilities. The stage is programmed with ongoing product education and artistry workshops physically at the store with thousands of Beauty Creators digitally tuned in across India, in partnership with Bollywood’s most prominent makeup artists. This co-creation and shared artistry elements between brand and consumer disrupt the conventional trial-first concepts for beauty with a flagship that redefines beauty retail’s role for digital-first and socially savvy consumers.
Dotted throughout the space are lounge areas, where self-guided beauty tutorial stands, integrated with the MyGlamm Virtual Try-On app, are available for creating curated seasonal looks and discovering recommended products virtually, for the safety of consumers. As the world continues to face a pandemic, an additional extensive safety protocol system has been put in place:
“In the age of COVID, people have been isolated, and there are limitations to creating digitally,” says Skinner, “MyGlamm’s flagship is a safe place where communities can connect, express themselves, and play. It boldly showcases a new culture of makeup in Mumbai, with tools that empower the local community to express themselves at high fidelity and full volume.”
MyGlamm competes with Indian beauty market leaders Nykaa, Purplle, and NewU. In July 2019 MyGlamm was valued at $72.35 million when the brand closed a $14.47 million round of funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners and the Mankekar family office with participation from existing investor L’Occitane. In July MyGlamm acquired women-centric digital platform POPxo to expand into the online content space. MyGlamm expects 50% of new products to be developed co-creation in the next 12 months.
“MyGlamm is spearheading a paradigm shift in the way beauty products are formulated and marketed to women. We have moved control from the boardroom to the real decision-makers – our users,” said Sanghvi.
