How Mecca’s female leaders changed beauty retail forever
It’s been heralded as the biggest store opening of the century, and for good reason. Mecca’s Mecca’s transformation of the historic Cole’s Book Arcade on Melbourne’s Bourke Street Mall into a 4000sqm beauty wonderland has redefined the art, size and ambition of experiential shopping in Australia.
But while it may seem that every corner of the beauty retailer’s new flagship has been written about and photographed in recent months, one detail has largely been overlooked: the team of women who brought it to life.
Women have long been the primary consumers of beauty products, but today they are emerging as the industry’s most influential visionaries, reshaping its future with creativity, leadership and innovation. And there is no better testament to the growing female gaze in beauty than the senior leaders at Mecca.
Inside Retail went behind the scenes with eight of the female leaders who worked side-by-side with Mecca founder Jo Horgan to understand what it takes to reimagine the customer experience and set a new standard for beauty retail. This is an exclusive look at the internal decisions, course corrections and cross-team collaborations that culminated in Mecca Bourke Street.
Outer beauty attracts
The four-year journey to the record-breaking store opening in August began with finding the perfect location. Mecca’s property team is responsible for identifying new store locations, negotiating the commercial terms and the legal contracts, building and setting them up with stock before opening them. Megan Wilkins, general manager of property, was the person who found the Bourke Street site, which has since been dubbed “Mecca 3000” for its Melbourne CBD location.
“We looked at a few sites, but this was our favourite because we could see how beautiful it could be when stripped back to its gorgeous heritage original building,” Wilkins told Inside Retail.
Since its founding, Mecca has opened more than 100 stores, but Wilkins said the 4000sqm Bourke Street flagship demanded an entirely new skill set and team, with women leading most key roles. “When you combine a very large, very old building with intricate and exquisite design, it takes a very specific way of working and thinking,” she added.
“Along with our incredible project manager at Mecca, we needed a dedicated construction project
manager and a commercial builder, as well as our shopfitters, architects and full-time internal design leads – the list goes on.”
Wilkins credits much of the success of the new flagship store to the deep collaboration between team members in different departments. One of the leaders she spoke to at least 10 times a day was Mecca’s head of studio and flagships Kathleen McMahon, who served as program manager on the Bourke Street project.
“It may be a cliché, but if you want something done, give it to a busy woman. That was every female leader on this project,” Wilkins stated.
McMahon was tasked with ensuring every department planned, organised and executed the required
work leading up to the grand opening of Mecca Bourke Street.
“Think project governance but a lot more fun,” McMahon told Inside Retail.
“It often involved working out the path forward for problems that are the first of their kind, working out the opening date and making sure everyone had everything they needed to get the job done – this was a ‘one team, one dream’ type of project.”
To stay on track, the team took the approach of using “today’s best answer,” McMahon said.
“Our female leaders across every department took every opportunity, problem and last-minute idea and turned it into the very best experience for our customers in a way that women of all ages will enjoy for many years.”
Another one of the team’s mantras was “fix it now, not later”. If something wasn’t working, they adjusted in the moment, rather than waiting for a review at the end.
One example of this was the decision to change the program structure midway through to ensure the retailer had the right people in the right departments contributing to the project. “If we had waited until the end, we wouldn’t have delivered the store we did,” McMahon shared.
Marita Burke is Mecca’s chief Mecca-Maginations officer, who is responsible for imagining what Mecca can do next, creatively, commercially – always with the customer front of mind – also adopted the “today’s best answer” approach.
“We attached the Bourke Street project to the future vision for what Mecca could become, and we gave permission to everyone to play a part in this,” Burke told Inside Retail.
Mecca’s head of retail innovation delivery, Katelyn Jenner, told Inside Retail that when it came to the construction of Mecca Bourke Street, the first thing the team asked themselves when making key decisions was “what would the customer want”.
“This could be decisions around joinery placement, navigation, getting the lighting right in each space, shopability of fixtures, down to something as small as, ‘Is that stool going to be comfortable?’” she elaborated.
“It is a constant balance of design, but just as importantly, function.”
Like many of the senior leaders behind the Bourke Street store, Jenner worked on the project for four years, partnering with multiple architects on the base build design, which involved drastically changing the building fabric.
“We created a new mezzanine level to improve traffic through the space, new vertical transport between levels, new windows and entrances off Union Lane,” Jenner explained.
Jenner appointed Buildcorp to carry out the construction and worked extensively on the internal fitout and procurement of all fixtures and fittings, every day through to launch.
The finished design, with its restored original terrazzo tiles, arched windows and gallery of commissioned work by modern female artists, is a fitting fusion of history and modernity.
However, finding the right location and designing an incredible fitout was just half the story. Delivering a mind-blowing customer experience unlike anything the industry had ever seen was the team’s greatest achievement.
Inner beauty captivates
Since opening its first store in South Yarra in 1997, Mecca has emerged as the leading beauty retailer in Australia, consistently outfoxing global competitors through its relentless retail innovation, the culmination of which can be seen in the Bourke Street flagship.
As Mecca’s chief new concepts officer, Maria Tsaousis was ultimately responsible for delivering the retailer’s vision of a next-gen beauty experience, and she knew her team had one shot to get the offering right.
“Over the last four years, Mecca Bourke Street has been the unifier of our innovation agenda, giving us an extraordinary platform to deliver our vision for the next frontier of beauty retailing,” Tsaousis told Inside Retail.
“Everything in the store is the product of 27 years of listening, learning and imagining what our customers will want before they even know it themselves.”
The store offers over 200 global beauty brands, including Crown Affair, Byredo and Kosas, over 80 services – including brow and lash services, a private beauty atelier and a high-tech skin clinic – and eight never-before-seen concepts, including Trophy Wife manicures, Maria Tash piercings and Flowers Vasette bouquets, introducing customers to a whole new world of beauty.
To ensure the Bourke Street store offering lived up to the hype, Tsaousis was ruthless about testing new concepts before committing to them.
“Our internal guiding light for the entire project was that everything we launched at Mecca Bourke
had to be tested and ‘snag-free’. Mecca Bourke Street is the centrestage for a performance that’s
been rehearsed a number of times in advance,” Tsaousis shared.
The Mecca Atelier experience – where customers can get their makeup, hair and nails done in 90 minutes – had been trialled upstairs at the retailer’s newly renovated Albert Park store during last year’s Melbourne Cup season.
Meanwhile, its Mecca Aesthetica concept was incubated at a pop-up next to Mecca’s Highpoint location for over two years to ensure the product, technology and service model were right before launching at Mecca Bourke Street.
Shantini Morey, Mecca’s head of flagship concept and concessions, was also heavily involved in shaping, testing and delivering the new flagship experiences at Mecca Bourke Street.
Similar to other team leaders, Morey told Inside Retail: “A non-negotiable was that no new concept would
launch at Bourke Street without being tested first.
“This meant extensive trialling, including constant pop-ups in our support centre. Our head-office teams experienced every new service themselves before we felt confident enough to take them to customers.”
From Morey’s point of view, a project of this scale works only when you have leaders who are completely committed to the vision and resilient through the inevitable challenges.
“The female leadership team brought that unwavering commitment, along with a huge amount of energy and fun,” she stated.
“Despite the hurdles, the team’s determination and collaborative spirit made the journey as rewarding as the outcome.”
Morey described her role as helping build the plane, and then handing it over to Sarah Henshaw, Mecca’s head of flagship, to fly it. Henshaw strategically leveraged Mecca’s decades of retail insights to guide decisions that enhanced the in-store experience for customers.
“I also meticulously mapped the customer journey and refined service delivery, ensuring we delivered a truly wow-worthy experience from the moment customers stepped through the doors,” she told Inside Retail.
Clearly, it’s no accident that Mecca Bourke Street has made the splash that it has. But it’s not just due to the level of planning that went into the store years before the first customer walked through its doors. It’s also because of the particular point of view of leaders like Henshaw, Morey, Tsaousis, Jenner, McMahon and Wilkins.
“Having a predominantly female leadership team meant that we approached this project through the lens of how we think women – and even more so, all customers of the future – want to experience beauty,” Tsaousis said.
A woman’s lens
Mecca’s senior female leadership team made history by conceiving, building and shaping the world’s largest dedicated beauty store.
Every facet of the store – from its grand heritage-listed architecture to the intricate, customer-centric experiences within – bears the hallmark of a team of women who understood that beauty is not just products on a shelf, but a deeply personal, holistic journey for people of all ages and stages of life.
This extends to the store team, which is 95 per cent women, with new roles created to nurture career growth in areas from scent sommeliers to dermal clinicians.
Flagship manager Justine Spencer relocated from Sydney to Melbourne 15 months before the store opening to support the in-store recruitment, processes and execution of services. Now, she oversees the Bourke Street store’s more than 60,000 weekly customers, 350 team members and 90 unique services.
“Every day is extremely busy, so I always like to ensure I’m making my decisions and planning my day around firstly our customers and secondly, our team,” Spencer told Inside Retail.
“Using this decision-making matrix really allows me to spend time on what is important and impactful and to add value across the entire store,” she added.
From Spencer’s perspective, there is nothing better than that feeling of helping a customer connect with a service, a product, or just have a wonderful time exploring the store.
Mecca Bourke Street is as much a celebration of women’s leadership as it is a destination for beauty lovers – a bold statement that only such a brand and team could bring to life.
“Mecca has always championed women in everything that we do, and being surrounded by women who work with grit, spit and determination was both inspiring and motivating,” Spencer concluded.
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