New Beauty Concepts Percolate in Paris

PARIS — New beauty retail concepts keep blooming in Paris, despite an unstable socioeconomic environment magnified by massive demonstrations and strikes, which have plagued the city over recent months. The latest crop of shops to appear includes Lancôme’s flagship on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées; Sources, a “clean” beauty purveyor launched by hypermarket Carrefour, and Floraïku, a boutique selling the niche luxury fragrance collection by the same name. Paris, which has long claimed to be the world’s capital of beauty, is a key window onto brands, especially as the city remains among world’s hottest tourist destinations. In the first half of 2019 alone, Paris registered 17.3 million visitors, according to the Comité Régional du Tourisme Paris Île-de-France. Further, the French capital generates 31 percent of the sales rung up by prestige beauty products France-wide, the NPD Group data shows. Brick-and-mortar retail remains important in the country, where just 7 to 8 percent of beauty sales are made online, according to NPD. “It’s far from the U.K., the U.S. or even Germany,” said Mathilde Lion, a Paris-based analyst at the market research group. “It’s still underdeveloped.” “I think the current Brexit situation is a plus for Paris,” continued Marc-Christian Riebe, founder and chief executive officer of Zurich-based

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