“Adapt or die” is how Jo Horgan, founder and co-chief executive officer of Mecca, describes navigating retail in 2026.
“Mecca believes that physical retail isn’t dead. Boring might be dead, transactional might be dead, but we believe that physical retail is alive and kicking, especially if you obsess about the customer and try and stay ahead and reinvent and understand where she’s going and what they want,” she said.
Mecca should know, having recently made its biggest and “probably maddest” bet on retail to date, opening the largest beauty store in the world — a 40,000 square foot flagship in Melbourne, Australia, manned by a 500-strong team.
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“So far it’s delivering everything we hoped for and so much more,” said Horgan.
Around 40,000 shoppers descended on the store its first weekend, 1 million in its first month and it is on track to have received 4 million in its first 10 months.
“What makes that really relevant, that’s in a city of 5 million people, in a country of 25 million people,” Horgan said. “We keep on asking ourselves, ‘Why are they coming?’ We think it’s to experience beauty in all the new ways that we dreamed up, including the newsroom, which is our continually changing front page of beauty news; the beauty carousel, where customers just congregate to play, test, trial and have fun in a communal environment. The beauty lab, which is our version of YouTube in real life, where the fantastic presenter takes you through step by step, and you follow with live products in front of you, and you finish with a fabulous look.”
Elsewhere, there is an Artistry Studio with 20 chairs and the Skin Studio, which has five beds (the price of services are fully redeemable against product in the store.) There’s also a four-seat brow bar, an apothecary, an on-site naturopathy studio, a florist, a gifting area, a perfumeria, Nails by Trophy Wife, a Josh Wood hair salon, the atelier for hair, nails, and makeup all at the same time, dermal skin care clinic Mecca Esthetica, Maria Tash piercing and a café and Champagne bar.
“You look at all that, and you go, ‘All the things. Job done, right?’ I wish. Because now what keeps all of us up at night is how do we get people to keep on coming back again and again and again?” said Horgan.
“So we think about that and we go, ‘Right, how can we keep it evolving?’ That might be access to exclusive brand moments when founders come to visit, an exclusive beauty loot box only available at Bourke Street, which had 30,000 people flood in and queue up until it was totally gone. Then we’ve just opened Mecciversity, and the way we bring people in with this is through edutainment. Our team are educated there Monday through Wednesday. Customers are edutained there Thursday through Sunday. And we’ve already recommended some phenomenal brand founders. We’ve also hosted conversations on everything from women’s health to how to drive gender equality with speakers like Justin Trudeau and Katie Telford.”
As for the numbers, Mecca Bourke Street’s on track to do $65 million in sales in its first year, with 20 percent coming from services.
“We already have 90 percent share of the makeup application market in Australia. We’re now doing 80 different services, 3,000 of them a week in Bourke Street. This has become our petri dish for the future,” said Horgan.
She added, however, that it has not all been rainbows and unicorns.
“There’s plenty that’s tough. Services aren’t profitable, and yes, they increase the lifetime value of the customer, but we’ve got to make it profitable.”
Still, the store is a model for future Mecca openings, with the company planning a 20,000 square foot flagship for the Chadstone Shopping Centre, the largest mall in the Southern Hemisphere.