Mecca founder Jo Horgan embarks on her most ambitious project yet
Beauty empire Mecca again captures the zeitgeist with the opening of a vast beauty emporium in Melbourne that puts wellness front and centre
What does it take to feel good? Because a lot of us sure do want to. According to the Global Wellness Institute, wellness is now worth some US$6.3 trillion globally, up 25 per cent since 2019. It’s expected to hit US$8.5 trillion by 2027.
The largest of the 11 wellness sectors included in the report is personal care and beauty, clocking in at US$1.21 trillion alone, and amounting to a whole lot of tinctures and potions, sleep aids and gut boosters (and indeed the rest).
Wanting to feel good is a big reason why beauty powerhouse Mecca is launching its first Mecca Apothecary concept as part of its new flagship on Melbourne’s Bourke Street.
The space will incorporate services such as consultations with naturopaths from health collective Melbourne Apothecary, ear seeds, and new products ranging from teas to tongue scrapers. It will also introduce 15 new brands, all of which fit into one of six categories – sleep, calm, sensitised skin, rituals, cycles of life and gut. Brands launching into Mecca Apothecary include Britain’s AnatomÄ“, with its modern take on botanicals; The Gut Cø, which takes the view that all health – good and ill – starts with the gut; and functional fragrance and skincare brand The Nue Co.
When you speak of big business, Mecca’s said flagship – all three storeys and 4000 square metres of it, housed in the former David Jones menswear building – definitely fits the bill. It will become the largest beauty retail space in the southern hemisphere when it opens shortly.
Jo Horgan, founder and co-chief executive of Mecca, says the new flagship concept is the most ambitious project in the retailer’s 28-year history.
“Our vision for Mecca Bourke Street is for it to be the Mecca of all Meccas, a must-visit destination for any Melbournite or visitor. A place that people travel from around the world to visit. Where customers can spend the entire day there and still not have experienced all that there is to do,” she says.
“No two visits will ever be the same.”
This quest to continually surprise customers fits well into Mecca’s apothecary concept, aligning with the universal quest to feel good.
Marita Burke, head of marketing and brands at Mecca, says the pandemic pressed fast-forward on shifts already happening in wellness.
“I think that in the past five years, and covid was probably an accelerator of this, that yearning for feeling good has meant that our customers, and customers more broadly, have introduced a number of new practices and initiatives into their lives. And I think that feeling good is becoming as important as looking good,” she says.
Part of finding that feeling, Burke says, will come via a new event space that will host everything from breathwork sessions to sound baths.
The space’s potential for creating meaningful exchanges and fostering communities is something that particularly excites Burke. And importantly, she says, there’s room for everyone.
“[Our customer] is a really curious customer. It’s a customer that in some ways has a lot of very disciplined practices, where they are practising yoga on a daily basis, meditating daily, doing all of the right things … Some customers are just doing the 10,000 steps a day, they’ve just started and some customers are not doing anything, but they’ve heard about it.
“And so I think our role here is to introduce this concept to our customers, to bring it to life for them through the services and the experiences … I do think it’s putting a stake in the ground that Mecca really believes that wellbeing is a part of beauty; that those two areas are very complementary and that our customers really see the value in both.”
Oh, and you can dispel any notion of crunchiness. This is wellbeing for 2025: technologically advanced and scientifically backed sure, but also, sensorial and luxurious. The point being, it’s about finding rituals and practices (and products) that will, in some way, improve your life.
One such brand practising this philosophy, says Burke, is Flamingo Estate, founded by LA-based Australian Richard Christiansen, and which launched into Mecca in 2022.
Christiansen found his own feel-good by first swapping a stressful life running his own global advertising agency for a decaying and once gloriously hedonistic home in the LA hills. After restoring this beautiful oasis, he launched an array of products made in collaboration with farmers (and occasionally extremely famous people: LeBron James and Julianne Moore collaborating with Christiansen on small batches of honey spring immediately to mind).
“Flamingo Estate and Richard is very much about this luxury, but the luxury of time, the luxury of personal care, the luxury of looking after oneself with what you eat and how you rest and how you surround yourself in a beautiful natural garden and environment and interiors. And we believe in that. So the space will be a luxurious approach to wellbeing. It will have colour, it will have artists collaborating with us, it will have beautiful design elements,” says Burke.
“So, no, it won’t be that sort of crunchy granola sort of style, which were the early days of the wellness movement. I think we’re taking wellness really into a very self-caring space.”
The idea of self-care rituals is something Christiansen believes in deeply. So, too, the idea of introducing ceremony into your life. It needn’t be grand, mind you. It can be a long bath or lighting a candle. This discovery is something he wanted to share with others.
His book, The Guide To Becoming Alive (available at Mecca) is part of this. And he did, in fact, come up with the idea for it in a Mecca store. “I was in Melbourne at a Mecca store event and this woman came up to me who looked really, just heavy, her energy was heavy. She was sad. And she said something like, ‘Oh you seem to have worked everything out’. And I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m really happy’. And she said, ‘I wish you could write a book to tell me how to be happy’,” relays Christiansen.
“And I went back to my hotel and I wrote it down and I was like, ‘I need to figure out what the ingredients are for that’,” he says of that galvanising moment.
“There’s been so much press on the house and the brand, it’s so easy to fluff over that stuff … But at the end of it, it was a really personal journey about just, ‘How do I personally get happy and come back alive and really thrive?’. And so the book was really me trying to think about how, ‘Oh god, I hope I can keep this up’.”
A common thread among many of the people interviewed in Christiansen’s book – including Mecca’s Jo Horgan – is that people need to connect with themselves again.
“I think there’s one thing in the book that keeps coming up and it’s the importance of just, ‘Put your phone down and get back in touch with yourself’,” he says.
A first step in doing so may well be a visit to the Mecca Apothecary.
This story is from the February issue of WISH.
