Mecca Brands set to open in Sydney CBD’s Gowings Building

Mecca Brands prepares to open the doors on the southern hemisphere’s biggest beauty store this month.

Melbourne-based Jo Horgan, founder of Mecca Brands, will travel to Sydney next week to launch her flagship in the heritage-listed Gowings Building. Picture: David Geraghty

When Mecca Brands founder Jo Horgan steps foot in her “beauty wonderland” in Sydney next week, she will finally get to see her dream come to life — just days before it opens its doors to the public.

The mega store — set to be the largest dedicated beauty store in the southern hemisphere — will take over the entire Gowings Building in the Sydney CBD, and will open on schedule on ­November 27.

Due to COVID-19 travel restrictions between Victoria and NSW, Horgan has had to follow the development of the flagship from her base in Melbourne for the past nine months.

She last set foot in the building on February 19 — just after signing the lease.

Just in time, Horgan will finally be able to visit again when travel restrictions between the states are lifted on November 23.

“The entire team is so unbelievably excited to see (the finished store),” Horgan told The Australian. “As am I.”

Horgan signed the lease on the 91-year-old heritage-listed building when COVID was still a remote concept to most Australians.

At the time, she recognised it was “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”.

The resulting store will have a footprint of 1800sq m, and will feature more than 200 of the world’s top beauty brands, as well as a number of firsts for the retailer.

“We are doing a skincare floor for the first time, a luxury skincare area for the first time,” she said.

“We have three skin beds (for facials) on the skincare floor for the first time. We have a hair blow-dry bar for the first time.”

As well as retail space, the store will dedicate over a third of its space to treatments and services from partner practitioners and businesses.

“The third floor we have these incredible beauty service suites and have guest practitioners who are experts in their field,” Horgan told The Australian.

These include Dr Van Park for facial aesthetic consultations, and naturopath Anthia Koullouros.

The services suites, as one example, had to be planned without Horgan “ever clapping eyes on the space”.

While every week threw up new issues for the project, unsurprising in a building of this age, “all I did was marvel at the way the team absorbed every single bump in the road and managed to work around it”, said Horgan.

Sydney design studio Meacham Nockles,Mecca’s long-term collaborator, has designed the fit-out.

Horgan said the new store had more than 200 points of innovation. One of these will be virtual hosts “to help anyone who wants to shop with us in our new flagship, be they in Darwin, Alice Springs, Townsville or Melbourne, it doesn’t matter where”.

Virtual hosting — where staff in store do Facetime consultations with customers — became a key innovation for the brand during the lockdowns this year.

The new store will feature digital screen backdrops, neon yellow lifts as well as escalators, paillette ceilings, and mosaic walls, while also highlighting the heritage features of the building with restored ceilings and windows.

While Mecca Brands is a privately owned company, IBISWorld last year estimated that the company had cornered about 10 per cent of the total $4.2bn Australian beauty market.

Horgan will concede that the brand is now the country’s number one beauty retailer.

She launched the first Mecca store in a 79sq m store on Toorak Road in Melbourne’ South Yarra in 1997.

The Gowings flagship will take the total number of Mecca stores to 115 across Australia and New Zealand.