Beauty retailing is a tough business but who is good at it? Retail Week appraises approaches to the category in London’s department stores.

When it comes to beauty, it is often believed that the big cosmetic brands have things sewn up.

Most of the West End’s department stores feature big beauty areas at the front of the store, and devote large amounts of space to them.

From Lancôme to L’Oréal, Clarins to Clinique, the observant shopper can more or less tick off the big brands in each store, but this does not mean the visual merchandising is always same.

It is also worth noting that many brands will have had a very large part to play in the way in which they appear in-store and it can be a case of stores chasing the brands, rather than the other way around.

So how is the hapless shopper to differentiate between very similar offers and is it the in-store environments that determine whether one store will triumph over another when it comes to shifting product?

House of Fraser, Oxford Street

In terms of department store beauty on Oxford Street, this is pretty much Ground Zero. All of the big brands that you’d expect are present and all of them have been afforded the opportunity to use their corporate colours and branding to get the message across.

But as an exercise in creating a sense of difference about the space as a whole, which stretches from the front door to halfway towards the rear of the ground floor, this one is as basic as it gets.

House of Fraser uses a strict grid format

Overall, the impression of US town planning is hard to avoid because the brand offerings are arranged on a rigid grid. To an extent, the message communicated is that the space has been rented out and brands have been left to get on with it. The unfortunate result is that if the usual test were carried out where the name above the door was removed and shoppers were asked where they were, it would be almost impossible to guess.

Liberty, Great Marlborough Street

Liberty is almost the polar opposite of House of Fraser inasmuch as there can be little doubt about the location if a visitor happens to be familiar with the store.

The beauty department is divided into two rooms, one street-facing while the other is more obviously part of the building’s core Tudor revival interior. The street-facing space consists of a series of low mid-shop units and a perimeter wall and the whole department has been divided up by brand.

Liberty has left its imprint however, with brands from Kiehl’s to Aesop all using similar equipment, including a mid-shop fixture that succeeds in looking like a stiletto shoe. Each branded area does in fact manage to have its own identity but the feeling is very much that this is Liberty and this has been the starting point for the brands.

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This may be the reason that the offering is relatively idiosyncratic and that the biggest names do not have the same presence as would be encountered in other London department stores. Beauty brands usually do not like the shots being called, but it does have the advantage that shoppers are presented with a sense of difference.

Debenhams, Oxford Street

In 2013, when work was completed on refurbishing Oxford Street’s bastion of mid-market department store retailing, beauty was given the lion’s share of the ground floor. And what it offers, in effect, is a good old-fashioned white box, which always runs the risk of shoppers suppressing a yawn.

Yet stand at the entrance to this storewide department and it is hard not to be impressed. All of the usual suspects are here, from Chanel to Clarins, but the black lighting recesses in the white ceiling, which fan out diagonally from the front, create identity.

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There is real drama and the standard brands that are found almost everywhere are given additional impetus by both the layout, which is a grid but a non-standard one, and the materials palette that has been employed.

This favourable impression was enhanced on the day of visiting a Clinique promotion that had shoppers flocking – amazing what a cosmetic freebie will do to galvanise sales.

John Lewis, Oxford Street

Middle England’s department store of choice has a beauty department that has been fitted into what is essentially a very complex piece of in-store geography, but it works.

The retailer revamped the beauty department in 2012 and rings the changes as far as equipment types and shop-in-shop spaces are concerned. Bobbi Brown has a huge area at the front of the department, while Jo Malone has a very standalone space of its own.

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As far as shopping the department is concerned, this is a meander and while almost all of the global beauty players have taken space, none of them really dominate and there is a strong feeling that this is a branded house.

Gone now are the days when this retailer’s approach was to enforce a rigid code on brands, from graphics to fit-out, but although things have been relaxed this still looks and feels like a John Lewis.

Selfridges, Oxford Street

The grande dame of beauty departments in the West End is formed of three quite distinct rooms. At the front of the shop and just inside the main entrance there is a relatively small men’s fragrance and beauty products area. But most shoppers will move through this rapidly into the main beauty hall.

This is home to the women’s offer and every branded space seems to offer beauty consultations – the hall is a very glitzy hands-on selling operation.

There is a temptation to suppose that things are set in stone in this huge space, but this is a very fluid layout that is frequently remodelled. Brands are invited into the main room depending on whether or not they are earning their corn.

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It is a measure of how integrated all of the seemingly individual brands are on this floor that in the YSL shop there is a digital screen that has spliced parts of Selfridges’ Work It campaign into a generic brand video. The campaign explores the way people work is changing and the video helps tie the brands to their location.

The third room is for smaller brands and in-store beauty treatments and is located opposite the confectionary department.

This is by quite a wide margin the most glamorous of London’s beauty departments at the moment and its sheer size means that this is likely to be maintained.

Fortnum & Mason, Piccadilly

The beauty department at Fortnum & Mason is a real curiosity for one simple reason; it is not on the ground floor.

Instead, the retailer has just completed a total makeover of its fragrance and beauty department on the second floor and it is different from almost all of its rivals because it doesn’t ‘shout’ about its brands – the product, as much as the fit-out, does the talking.

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Fortnum presents its shoppers with a very polite version of a beauty department complete with piped chamber music. All the staff are from Fortnum & Mason too, rather than being brand employees.

This is another feature that marks this one out as being firmly under the guiding hand of what is certainly one of London’s most upscale emporia. The scent chandelier is an eye-catching feature.