Thank you, Sephora. We could all use a little peace and quiet. Particularly those of us Gen Xers who grew up clutching our Cabbage Patch Kids during Saturday-morning cartoons and enjoyed childhood without smartphone parental supervision.
For Gen X, the mall was our nucleus, our stomping grounds, where one could grab a slice of Sbarro’s pizza chased down with an Orange Julius and roam the artificially lit concourse with our friends.
But now, our generation only visits the mall out of necessity (and by necessity, I mean having lost a negotiation to a Gen Alpha). Visiting the mall, let alone a Sephora, can feel like a waking anxiety dream. As soon as you enter the black-and-white maze, you are navigating through a sea of young shoppers chatting and making Snaps with their friends, Moms yelling at their Gen Alpha children why, no, a Laneige lip mask is not essential for sleepaway camp, while you’re bombarded with blasting pop music and too-bright lighting. It can be daunting.
Sephora’s new Quiet Hours initiative was developed by listening to the neurodivergent community and working with Open Inclusion and Purposeful Futures, two consultancy firms that help businesses design and implement inclusive products, services, and environments. What started as a goal to accommodate its sensorially sensitive, neurodivergent clientele quickly led the beauty giant to realize that many of its shoppers could use a bit of distraction-free peace and quiet, particularly its Gen X clientele.
“It is not that Gen X craves quiet specifically. It is that they crave the ability to browse and discover without distraction,” Tuan Tu, marketing consultant and fractional CMO at Covet Branding, told BeautyMatter. Loud, crowded environments prevent those exploratory shoppers from browsing, Tu said. “As a Gen X myself who is in beauty retail stores weekly, the chaotic Sephora era was genuinely unpleasant. Quiet Hours gives that shopper a reason to come back.”
Gen X accounts for roughly 25% of total beauty spend globally, and the market is projected to grow by 1.3 times over the next five years, according to NielsenIQ. “And Circana puts it even more starkly: Gen X households accounted for 44% of total beauty dollars spent in the past year,” cited Tu. “They will be the top spending cohort through 2033, and most brands are still marketing past them.”
Beauty retail environments have historically been chaotic. Think makeup counters of yore, when you had to pinch your nose to avoid the assault of strong fragrance as soon as you entered the beauty floor, only to be accosted by spritzers who may or may not ask whether you want to be sprayed with their musky napalm. Weaving between unknowing patsies getting their “free” makeovers, and finally making it to your counter of choice, where once you actually got a sales associate’s attention, you would be upsold on the latest color story.
Before Sephora and Ulta Beauty entered the zeitgeist in the 1990s, consumers could only shop mass and select masstige brands in self-service environments, while prestige beauty remained largely confined behind the counter. By bringing prestige brands into an open-sell environment and later placing prestige and masstige side by side, Sephora and Ulta Beauty gave consumers a sense of freedom from the lipsticked gatekeepers and the upselling confines of the beauty counter.
But that freedom came at a price. Fighting through crowded rows full of shoppers to get within testing distance, only to find desecrated or missing testers. Or worse, unboxing your new product at home, only to find it had already been opened and used. Flash forward to today’s Gen Alpha invasion, and you would be lucky to leave the store without serious PTSD.
But there has to be a reason why loud music has always been the retail norm. Are customers more likely to buy in loud, chaotic environments?
It depends on the consumer. “Generally, the louder, faster music makes us consume more,” Dr. Charles Spence, Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and an expert in multisensory perception and cognitive neuroscience, told BeautyMatter. “However, for those [consumers] for whom all that stimulation equals sensory overload, it could be that quiet hours actually lead to increased purchasing.”
In Dr. Spence’s seminal 2014 study, “Store Atmospherics: A Multisensory Perspective,” he cited how lower lighting in IKEA’s glassware section led to increased sales. “Ostensibly, the stimulating property of the reflective glass was balanced by the lower level of illumination.”
In the same paper, Dr. Spence pointed to a study indicating that when high-tempo music was replaced with slower music, customers spent more time in the aisles, leading them to purchase more. The genre of music matters as well, according to Dr. Spence. “We did a study last year showing that Christmas shopping and relentless Christmas music raised heart rates as much as roller coaster rides.”
Will shoppers start speaking more softly during Quiet Hours? More than 100 years of research say yes (see: Inverse Lombard Effect). Humans involuntarily adjust their voices when background noise levels change, e.g., in library or spa environments. So Quiet Hours may, in fact, result in hushed conversations and a reduction in Gen Alphas filming themselves narrating their hunt for the perfect body spray. And perhaps parents will have the ideal excuse as to why a trip to the mall is not mandatory.
The real question is, will other retailers go quiet?
When BeautyMatter asked Tu whether he thinks other retailers may follow suit, he said, “Absolutely. But I think the more interesting question is which retailer moves next and how. Ulta has already signaled Gen X is a strategic priority. The logical next move is time-based store segmentation, with designated hours optimized for different shopper profiles, similar to how airlines segment the cabin experience. Quiet Hours is the opening move. The category is about to get much more intentional about who it designs the in-store experience for and when.”
