Richest 250 - Mecca founder Jo Horgan on the joy of make-up in brick and mortar stores
For Mecca founder Jo Horgan, there’s nothing so ‘viscerally delightful’ as going into a store and playing with products.
The List is the biggest annual study of Australia’s 250 wealthiest individuals, with final figures calculated in late February 2022. See the full list here.
“Our role is to dream the future of beauty for our customers.” So Mecca founder Jo Horgan told The Australian in December, when she announced plans for a new “Meccaverse” flagship in Melbourne.
But it’s something Horgan has been doing since she opened her first store with just seven brands in the city’s South Yarra 25 years ago.
Today, she and her husband Peter Wetenhall, through their company Mecca Brands, are said to control more than 10 per cent of the Australian beauty market, which is worth about $4.5 billion annually. According to documents lodged with the corporate regulator, Mecca has annual revenue of $570 million and pre-tax and interest payment profits of more than $42 million.
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While Horgan never discusses figures for the privately owned company, in 2020 she conceded to The Australian that Mecca was “the number-one beauty retailer in Australia – clearly number one”. That status is borne out in more than 100 stores across Australia and New Zealand, which feature more than 200 of the world’s most covetable beauty brands, from cult indie brands to celebrity favourites, across make-up, skin care, hair, body – even dental.
That future focus had Horgan launch e-commerce in 2001 – years ahead of Australian department stores Myer and David Jones – and the pandemic saw that side of the business boom, as it did in for so many others, as bricks and mortar stores had to temporarily close during lockdowns. Having described 2020 as “truly the most meteorically disruptive year on steroids you could ever imagine”, Horgan has said that Mecca’s motto to be a “company of change” saw it “pirouette” rather than simply pivot around the pandemic obstacles thrown in its way.
But simply selling products has never been Horgan’s raison d’être: “Mecca started with one key focus, and that was let’s make the customer experience extraordinary every single time,” she said. That focus is built on a brand-agnostic approach to retail, with customer experience, entertainment and education – “edu-tainment”, if you will – at its heart. “As fabulous as online is in so many ways, there is nothing as viscerally delightful as coming in, playing with products, smelling beautiful fragrances.”
This belief saw the company take a giant leap of faith in opening the biggest beauty store in the southern hemisphere with its Sydney flagship store, coming in at 1800sq m in the iconic Gowings Building. With the lease signed in February 2020, Horgan was subsequently unable to set foot in the space until days before it opened in November of that year due to pandemic border closures.
For the first time, a Mecca store could offer beauty treatments and consultations, and featured visiting practitioners including a naturopath, aesthetician and even a fertility specialist, while customers could book in for a blow dry or an express facial.
Horgan had employed a mantra of “build it and they will come” for the Sydney store – and the gamble paid off.
“Our customers have voted with their feet again and they have made Mecca at George St such a resounding success and are asking for more and more,” she said in December.
That success was the impetus for the new Melbourne flagship, which will be almost twice the size at 3000sq m, in a heritage building on the Bourke St Mall. It’s still in the planning stages and building work will begin in April 2023, the store opening later that year.
“The thing that gives me confidence is I genuinely believe we are offering the customer a completely new experience they cannot get anywhere else,” said Horgan. “And we have tried to dare to imagine beyond what anyone would possibly think of imagining themselves.”
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