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Advanced Night Repair, the serum Estée Lauder launched in 1982, can now be bought at a staffed counter in Wolstanton, Staffordshire. So can Double Wear foundation. Marks & Spencer fitted out 17 stores with Estée Lauder counters in August 2025, Handforth in Cheshire and Camberley among them, and a further nine stores were due to follow before the year closed. The counters came with a range of more than 400 products, from serums to foundations, and took M&S’s tally of outside beauty labels to 53 as part of a wider push to stock more brands from other companies. Luke Evans, a vice president and general manager at Estée Lauder, spoke of M&S as a beauty destination gaining ground and promised attentive, personal service at the counters.
Many of Britain’s ground-floor beauty halls disappeared when Debenhams and Beales closed, and House of Fraser shrank by about half. On 29 September 2026, M&S and Sephora announced that from spring 2027, Sephora counters staffed by Sephora’s own advisers will open in selected M&S stores, with Sephora products also sold through M&S.com. The two companies have 100 high street and retail park sites in mind. No brand list has been published yet, and the size of each space remains unclear. M&S says the names will follow nearer the opening, including labels new to the retailer and Sephora exclusives. The Estée Lauder counters and the Sephora plan share an assumption that shoppers still want to try a product and hear advice from a person.
Ulta bought Space NK, which began in Covent Garden in 1993, in July 2025 and gained 83 stores with it. Boots, drawing on records from more than 17 million active Advantage Card holders, brought in 20 beauty and wellness brands in February 2026, including the Korean pharmacy label Dr Reju-All among them, and says 65% of its customers bought from an international brand in the previous six months. Sephora opened six British stores between 2000 and 2005, then shut them all. It returned online in October 2022, opened its first new shop in March 2023 and now runs 18 UK stores. Catherine Spindler, who leads Sephora’s Europe and Middle East business, says the UK relaunch went well enough that the company wants to go “further and faster”, and she calls the M&S arrangement a more varied and more scalable way to grow.
Worldpanel by Numerator figures, which M&S cites, value UK beauty at £5.2bn after growth of 1.2% in the 52 weeks to 19 July 2026. M&S took 1.3% of sales over the latest twelve weeks, a small share for a retailer known mainly for food and clothing. At Landsec, health and beauty sales across its shopping centres rose 13% in the 2025 Golden Quarter, against 4.9% growth in its total sales and a 0.2% fall in the national retail benchmark. The 13% and the 0.2% cover different ground, since one is a single category in prime centres and the other is all retail nationwide, so they cannot be compared directly. Landsec says sales across its destinations have grown 20% cumulatively since the 2022 financial year, 17% ahead of the national average. Footfall in its centres rose 0.7% while the wider market slipped 0.3%, and four of Sephora’s six UK openings in the previous year were in its centres.
M&S first took on Estée Lauder’s fragrance range in 2023. At the August 2025 expansion, its head of beauty, James Mugford, described the goal as making M&S the retailer customers turn to when they want a range chosen for them. Outside labels made up 42% of M&S beauty sales when the fragrance deal was announced and a little over 40% at the time of the 2025 expansion, which suggests the reliance on outside brands has stayed broadly stable. John Lyttle, who runs M&S Fashion, Home and Beauty, puts Sephora at the core of what the company sells in beauty from here, while its own-label lines, where M&S says it is already well established, will keep receiving investment. He also describes the wider overhaul of the fashion, home and beauty business as an effort to improve its efficiency and profits.
The clearest precedent is Sephora’s partnership with Kohl’s in the US, announced in December 2020 with 200 shops due the following autumn. Each was a 2,500-square-foot space carrying more than 100 prestige brands, and the first opened in August 2021. By August 2022, about 600 Kohl’s stores had one, according to Global Cosmetic Industry. Kohl’s reported high single-digit sales lifts at the first 200 locations, and mid-single-digit lifts at nearly 400 more and said roughly half of the customers buying Sephora products were adding something from another category to their baskets. The original plan called for at least 850 stores by 2023, so on the announced targets the 100 sites M&S has in mind come to about an eighth of that, although the two rollouts are not directly comparable. Kohl’s did reach 850 stores in 2023 and later planned to bring Sephora to all of its more than 1,100 stores.
M&S has not said how much floor space each shop-in-shop will take or how many brands it will hold. Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, told Retail Dive that M&S starts from a stronger position, because food already brings people into its stores while Kohl’s added Sephora to a struggling business and the pairing “jarred a little” with the rest of the store. He calls the M&S move tactical, a targeted way to reach younger shoppers, and says M&S’s own beauty range is real but narrow. Retail Dive also reports that Kohl’s promoted its shop-in-shops for years as drivers of traffic and sales, yet they have dragged on its results so far this year.
The Sephora announcement does not use the word luxury and names no heritage house. Online, M&S.com will carry a wider range than the stores, with home delivery and Click & Collect from M&S stores nationwide, so the offer reaches beyond the 100 shop-in-shops. Sephora’s large-format stores and the curated boutique concepts that opened in London this summer continue alongside. Sarah Boyd, managing director of Sephora UK, says the aim is to bring Sephora’s advisers to customers in the towns where they already live and shop. Neither company has said how many advisers each store will have or how they will be trained.
https://beautymatter.com/articles/sephora-brings-boutique-beauty-experience-to-london
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