McKenna Grace posed among the new displays at a Target Beauty Studio celebration event on September 26, weeks after the retailer opened its rebranded beauty "destination" in more than 600 stores. According to Target's own press release, the concept launched September 10 with 1,600 products from 90 brands, more than two-thirds of them new to Target's shelves.
Target and Ulta split about a month before the launch, and Retail Dive ran the post-mortem, so the cosmetics aisle needed a new personality. The new personality is "destination." The 1,600 products are a "curated" experience, and Target's beauty SVP Amanda Nusz says shoppers come to "discover." Discovery. That is the word a big-box store now uses about a shelf of lip gloss.
So what does a destination do for launch week? It books a movie star to walk the aisle. Grace, between Scream 7, Sunrise on the Reaping, and a Netflix Scooby-Doo series, showed up to the celebration, got photographed among the displays by Getty, and the press covered the whole thing like a premiere. Retail launches don't usually double as red carpets, but here is the carpet, folded up and put on a shelf.
The mechanism is simple. The carpet used to be at the theater, then at the venue, then at the checkout. Next stop is the self-checkout.
YOUR TURN: If a Target beauty aisle is not a red carpet, what exactly is the difference, besides the cart?
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