If ever there were a high-end mall on the East Coast to give Miami’s Bal Harbour a run for its money, it would be Americana Manhasset. Gucci, Hermes, Fendi, Prada, Oscar de la Renta, Cartier, Chanel, Tiffany & Co. – the only thing more shocking then the endless parade of luxury designer shops is the fact that somehow a GAP location was able to sneak into the mix. Now, affluent suburban woman have a new place to add to their must-shop stops – Beauty Bar.
The newly opened boutique has been in the works since June and it marks the first brick-and-mortar outlet of the online beauty shopping destination of the same name. More comparable to Space NK than Sephora, it offers men and women a curated selection of products with focus on natural brands, hard-to-find brands, and well-known favorites (their best sellers are Clarisonic and Dermalogica).
I spoke with some members of the team when I stopped by to check out the space and was told that given their target demographic (affluent suburban mothers), Americana Manhasset was the only place they considered for their first boutique. However, because space in the Long Island mall is so hard to come by, Beauty Bar had to jump on the opportunity when it unexpectedly arose back in June, despite the fact that the e-commerce site the store is based on launched just a few months before in February. Talk about a risky move.
In addition to the sales floor, there is a treatment room and a NuBest blow dry bar, which marks NuBest’s – considered the go-to high-end hair salon in the area – first salon-in-shop. Among the products used for the facials are Jurlique, Natura Bisse, and Dermalogica and the products sold reflect the site, which interestingly enough is owned by the same parent company that owns soap.com and diapers.com (hence the mother target demographic), meaning you can shop across sites.
Destinations to buy beauty products are a dime a dozen, so the key is finding one that suits your needs, whether it be Sephora because of its wide selection and exclusives or Space NK for its roster of international brands, Beauty Bar, or some other... I may not be an afflient suburban mother, but I will nonetheless be shopping on Beauty Bar’s site because the most interesting thing I picked up while there was that their warehouse is full of robots that pick and pack orders in less than 30 minutes, meaning that if you live in Manhattan and order a product by 10 AM, you’ll get it that day, they have free shipping on orders over $39 (which everything, pretty much, is), and there’s a no-questions asked return policy whithin a 365-day window.
Just don’t expect a sale to pop on any of Beauty Bar’s luxury products anytime soon…
