Beauty products retailer L’Occitane has opened a New York flagship on Fifth Avenue which it describes as “a unique immersive destination”.
The 1870sqft store at 555 Fifth Avenue was designed by L’Occitane’s Daniel Contorni, international artistic director, and Paul Blackburn, VP concept design, construction & merchandising with the Hong Kong-listed, French-styled retailer.
“To adapt to differing consumer preferences across the world, L’Occitane has adopted a ‘glocal’ approach, developing creative experiences especially adapted for local clientele,” the company said in a statement.
Recent examples of this strategy include new flagships in Brazil, China, London and Toronto, each with exclusive styles and services mix; a concept store in Paris (86Champs) in partnership with French pastry chef Pierre Herme; a pop-up cafe in Singapore with Asian pastry chef Janice Wong (a protege of Herme); and L’OcciTruck, the brand’s first travelling shop experience encapsulated on wheels, currently touring North America.
The L’Occitane Fifth Avenue store features a range of interactive customer touchpoints. Whilst the existing L’Occitane experiential boutique in the city’s Flatiron district continues to offer a more traditional L’Occitane retail experience, the Fifth Avenue store will be more disruptive, geared to attracting new customers, encourage engagement and produce user-generated content for social media, the company said.
The store includes a “rain-shower” sink, an interactive skincare consultation area, a curved communal bench beneath a Mediterranean olive tree, and an enhanced fulfilment services “comptoir”.
L’Occitane says it is pursuing “a robust customer-first retail strategy, seeking to surprise consumers and surpass their expectations by providing an unforgettable in-store experience”.
“In today’s digital world, customers rarely enter a L’Occitane store purely out of need; they expect to be pampered and entertained and want to indulge in the experience.”
The L’Occitane Fifth Avenue store features several environment-first initiatives, including a recycling program in partnership with TerraCycle that incentivises customers to drop off all brands of empty personal care and cosmetics packaging at participating L’Occitane retail locations.
