Walmart Partners With Space NK To Launch Prestige Beauty Products

Walmart Inc. is getting into the prestige beauty act with BeautySpace NK,^{a collaboration that leverages the retailer’s size and scale with the iconic British personal care and beauty company’s assortment of high-quality beauty brands and products. Walmart becomes the latest example of mass market and department store hookups with beauty specialists. Target has a collaboration with Ulta for in-store shops and Kohl’s has been opening Sephora-branded experiences for consumers. Customers will now have a convenient way to shop for both beauty staples and prestige specialty items during their weekly Walmart shopping trip.}

Walmart and British retailer Space NK will bring prestige beauty products to Walmart.com on March 15 and nearly 250 Walmart stores nationwide this summer through BeautySpace NK. Space NK shops can be found at select Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom units.

Andy Lightfoot, Space NK’s CEO, said, “We initiated the conversation and a couple of things drove it. First and foremost we observed a change in customer behavior in the beauty market, particularly in the U.S. and globally, the catalyst being COVID-19 and the demand from customers for us as retailers to make it easier for them to find the brands they want.

“We, at SpaceNK, thought we had something very unique to offer the Walmart customer through our curated multi-brand wholesale-plus platform at Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom and our ability to move with speed combined with Walmart’s scale and real universal customer appeal, made this our number one choice to launch prestige beauty,” Lightfoot added.

Laurie Tessier, merchandising director of prestige beauty at Walmart said the retailer has been fine-tuning its offering for the past two years. “We’ve really just been looking to expand our assortment and continue to drive newness for our customers,” she said. “We were trying to continue that in the prestige sector. For us, it made sense, knowing that customer for the most part will mix their beauty bag and their shopping bags with both mass and prestige product.

“It didn’t make sense that our customer needed to go to two places, so what we’ve really done, Space NK is providing us with these brands and a curated assortment, but we’re still doing it in a very Walmart way that we’re setting it up and the curation is integrated into the total beauty experience. That was our number one focus and number one goal,” Tessier added.

Space NK has carefully curated a collection of prestige products specifically for the Walmart customer, spanning a variety of price points across skincare, makeup, haircare and bath and body. Available on Walmart.com March 15, BeautySpace NK features over 600 products from 15 brands, including both new and established labels, some of which are only available at Walmart.

Among the offerings will be luxe brands such as Slip, By Terry, Philip B and Lancer; indie brands including PSA, from the makers of Allies of Skin; award-winning beauty heroes such as Mario Badescu, Foreo and Ameliorate; trending items from brands including Babe Original, Eyeko, Patchology and Grow Gorgeous, and plant-powered products from Goldfaden MD, Mio and Mama Mio. New and exclusive brands will include Summer Camp, a mineral-based SPF range from the founders of Soleil Toujours, which will bow only at Walmart this summer, while new and exclusive products will include a bespoke zip lock pouch of single scrunchies from Slip and a custom-made Philip B introductory set.

“We have a host of different brands across all different creative thinking and ideology and price points,” said Lightfoot. “Slip, Grow Gorgeous, Philip B and Mario Badescu will be taking the end caps at launch. We’ve got some of the doctor brands and makeup brands such as By Terry. It’s a real mix of different types of brands, heritage brands and doctor brands and lots of different price points.

“Finding the sweet spot for price point is something we really want to test,” Lightfoot added. “The impression and depth of the customer demographic Walmart has, which is mostly everybody, suggests that there’s demand for lots of different price points and products at different levels. That’s why we selected lots of different curated brands at different price points and with different ideology to really test that and see what works. That’s very much what this first step is about, testing and learning what works to understand how we move forward and what we double down on.”

There will be more product launches throughout the year, Tessier said, adding that there is a possibility of opening BeautySpace NK aisles at additional stores. “We’re super excited to launch in our nearly 250 stores. From there we’re going to learn a lot, see what’s working and we’re going to continue to monitor that. We’re really excited to see how our customers are going to respond.”

Lightfoot said that the fact that Walmart has raised the product bar in other categories such as fashion and home, drove Space NK’s decision to collaborate with the retail giant.

“Walmart has become synonymous with innovation and customer-centricity,” he said. “My perception of Walmart is [a retailer] that’s really looking to make it easy for customers to get all the products they want to buy in a single shop in a single location. Having had the opportunity to spend time as an individual and as a customer on my many visits to the U.S., and with the Walmart team, I see that coming across in a whole host of categories. The collaboration with Space NK takes it even further than that in terms of the execution and in terms of the visual merchandising and what we’re trying to do together as a partnership, which is offer a really unique and distinct curation of prestige beauty products to a Walmart customer.”

The design of the BeautySpace NK area combines a bit of both retailers’ aesthetic. “The design definitely echoes the sleek, easy to shop design that you see in the U.S. and the U.K. at Space NK, but it’s done in a very unique Walmart sort of way,” Lightfoot said. “They’ve been incredible partners and we really bent the rules to create a very differentiated look and feel that allows us to express our brand focus and express the creative stories of what the brands and products and really represent and what they’re about. We’ve done that all within the Walmart environment. We’ve introduced unique lighting and light boxes and imagery and different creative. It takes the best of Space NK and the best of Walmart.”

Tessier said BeautySpace NK will launch with a 360 degree marketing campaign intended to drive awareness. “We strategically launched [online] so much in advance of the store launch to continue to drive awareness and visibility for the customers so they would be really excited once it goes live in stores,” she said. “We’ll continue once we launch online, and will continue our marketing efforts to drive awareness as we go into stores in early summer.”

Tessier and Lightfoot declined to discuss sales volume, but the former said, “We’ve got high hopes that it will do very, very well.

“We’re thinking about this strategy a little differently,” she added. “We’re keeping this within the Walmart infrastructure, but what’s different about our strategy is how we really played with curation. We’ve done a lot of that hard work for the consumer who only has a limited time in our aisle and in our box. That’s what’s really exciting about this, we’re bringing the best of the best of these brands and doing it in a really elevated and still Walmart way. We’re making it easy for the consumer to get what they want when and how they want it.”

Definitely opportunity to expand to mor