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Beauty chain Mecca is taking a major gamble on bricks and mortar retail in Melbourne’s CBD as it unveils its flagship store in the Bourke Street Mall after three years of construction.
The “Mecca of Meccas”, a 4000-square-metre, three-storey department store dedicated to all things beauty, opens on Friday.
Jo Horgan, founder of Mecca, with staff as she prepares to open the new flagship store in the Bourke Street Mall. Credit: Simon Schluter
With soaring arched windows overlooking Bourke Street Mall and more than 80 services on offer inside the megastore, the opening is a major undertaking for Mecca.
Founder Jo Horgan is coy on how much her most ambitious venture yet has cost, but says the project in the former David Jones menswear store became at times “the nightmare of our dreams”, a reference to challenges including installing a 300-square-metre atrium and relocating escalators while juggling heritage building requirements.
“This is an enormous risk,” she says, gesturing around her as she stands at the main entrance to the store. “We say to ourselves we don’t want to die wondering.”
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Construction workers are still applying last-minute touches during a tour of the building with Horgan on Tuesday ahead of its opening, but otherwise the store is stocked with products and ready for business.
Entering from Bourke Street Mall through the painstakingly restored pink-tiled facade, there is a concierge station where staff can help customers navigate the store and a mirrored carousel for customers to test products on themselves.
The left side of the ground floor is dedicated to skincare and the right side to make-up. Further into the store is a brow bar, a 20-seat make-up studio and recliner chairs for express beauty services such as facials.
At the rear is the Mecca Apothecary focused on wellness and selling everything from crystals to bath salts, with services including naturopathy and acupuncture and a Flowers Vasette florist.
Heritage features such as the tiled floors and industrial metal windows have been carefully restored, and Horgan says she was inspired by the Coles Book Arcade which once occupied the space.
“There are 80 services in total in this store, because at a time when the world is moving to just transactional interactions brought upon by the proliferation of e-commerce, this is our love letter to in-real-life experiences,” she says.
“We want this to be a beacon for people to actually physically come to and experience the ‘laying on of hands’.”
Most of Mecca’s sales are still made in-store rather than online, and Horgan is bullish on bricks and mortar retail.
Horgan is bullish on bricks and mortar retail. Credit: Simon Schluter
“You can’t get your hair done through the internet,” she says. “You can’t get your hair, your make-up and your nails done in 90 minutes through the computer.”
Horgan is referring to the Mecca Atelier on the first floor, where that 90-minute service is available. Next to the atelier is Cafe Mecca serving Seven Seeds coffee, Lune croissants and “Meccatinis”, and a hair salon by stylist Josh Wood.
At the rear of the store are private treatment rooms where Mecca is making a push into clinical services with laser treatments, microdermabrasion and Botox.
The top floor has a nail bar for manicures by Trophy Wife and a perfume bar with “scent sommeliers” on hand to provide fragrance education.
Horgan runs Mecca with her husband, co-chief executive Pete Wetenhall. What started as a single store in Toorak Road in 1997 has grown into Australia’s biggest cosmetics retailer, one with 110 stores around Australia and New Zealand and more than 7000 employees.
“The first store in Toorak Road was four metres wide and 76 square metres,” Horgan says. “This is literally 60 times bigger. It’s a very different scale, it’s a very different proposition, but at the heart of it, it’s exactly the same. What do we need to do to surprise and delight our customer? What do we do to push the boundaries of beauty?”
Inside the Mecca store, which features dozens of artworks by female artists including Patricia Piccinini.Credit: Simon Schluter
As Mecca is a privately owned company it has limited reporting requirements, but its most recent annual report, filed in June, reported revenue of $1.2 billion in the 12 months to the end of June 2023.
This was a 25 per cent increase built on the back of Sol de Janeiro sprays and Glow Recipe moisturiser, but Mecca’s profit only inched up to $27 million, due to soaring expenses.
Horgan is counting on Mecca’s devoted 4.6 million-strong customer base, 4 million of whom are members of Mecca’s cult loyalty program, Beauty Loop, to embrace the store.
“I do say one of the joys of being a private business is that you can take an outsized risk like this, where you really do push the boundaries of what beauty can be, what retail can be,” she says. “This would never have been signed off by a publicly listed company, because the risk is just too great.”
Horgan stocking a Mecca store in 1999. She says she still aims to surprise and delight customers.
The Bourke Street property itself is owned by funds management group Newmark Capital – run by former Hawthorn player Chris Langford – which bought it for $121 million in July 2020 and battled soaring construction costs and a delayed opening.
Mecca’s rent is a major determinant of the property’s value. In one analysis, Newmark told investors the store could achieve annual sales of $100 million.
When asked if she ever wonders whether Mecca has bitten off more than it can chew, Horgan laughs and says every day.
“It is not easy to take a building like this and transform it into something so future facing,” she says. “This is our love letter to Melbourne.”
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