Sephora will open shops in about 100 M&S stores from spring 2027

Sephora has announced a strategic partnership with Marks & Spencer to launch Sephora at M&S, a beauty destination inside selected M&S stores across the UK and on the retailer's website, from spring 2027. The aim is to build around 100 physical sites over time.

The LVMH-owned beauty retailer said the partnership is the next step in its UK growth strategy. It extends a prestige beauty offer into more communities through what it called the UK's most trusted brand, making that offer, in its words, even more accessible.

The shops will stock beauty favourites, emerging brands and exclusive products in skin care, make-up, fragrance, hair care and body care, with specialist beauty teams serving customers on the shop floor. The full product line-up will be confirmed closer to launch.

Online, the M&S website will carry a broader range, with home delivery and click and collect from M&S stores nationwide. Details of new-to-M&S names and selected Sephora exclusives will also follow closer to launch, so neither the brand list nor the exclusives are yet public.

Why M&S wants Sephora

M&S is starting from a small base. Its share of the UK beauty market in the 12 months to mid-July was a little over 1%. The market itself is approaching roughly $7 billion and grew 1.2% in the 12 months to 19 July, according to WorldPanel by Numerator data cited in the joint release.

John Lyttle, managing director of fashion, home and beauty at M&S, said the company is transforming those divisions to build a more efficient, more profitable business. He described Sephora as the next step in that work and said the partnership will be at the heart of M&S's future beauty offer.

"Beauty is an important category for M&S," Lyttle said, with the potential to attract new customers and let existing ones shop more often. M&S will keep investing in its own-label beauty categories, where he said it has established strength and customer trust.

GlobalData managing director Neil Saunders called the move tactical. M&S is in a strong position, he said, with plenty of store traffic drivers, especially food, and a fairly narrow beauty assortment of its own. He said it sees Sephora as a targeted way to bring in younger shoppers.

What Sephora says it gains

Catherine Spindler, Sephora's president of Europe and Middle East, said the UK launch had been such a huge success that the company wanted to go further and faster. She called the M&S deal a retail model that complements its existing formats.

Those formats include a digital and app proposition, large-format Temples of Beauty and curated boutique concepts that debuted in London this summer. Spindler described the mix as a deliberately complementary ecosystem, adapted to the needs and opportunities of each region.

Combining Sephora's global prestige beauty expertise with M&S's established retail infrastructure, she said, creates a more diversified and scalable model for growth. Sephora is part of LVMH, the group formed in 1987 from the merger of Louis Vuitton and Moët Hennessy.

Sephora has not said what the shops will cost to fit out, how the economics will be split with M&S, or which of the roughly 100 stores come first. The sources give no financial terms for the arrangement at all.

The Kohl's precedent

The tie-up resembles Sephora's 2020 alliance with Kohl's in the US. The department store promoted its Sephora shop-in-shops as a traffic and sales driver for years, but this year they have weighed on Kohl's results.

Saunders argued the similarities do not go deep. Kohl's added Sephora to a core proposition that was struggling, he said, and the offer jarred a little with the rest of the store. M&S, by contrast, begins with advantages of its own.

Sephora's other recent moves point the same way, from a US TikTok Shop with a monthly pilot product drop, which we reported, to the push by niche fragrance house Byredo into its shelves, which we covered as a shift in niche fragrance strategy.

Shop-in-shops are spreading elsewhere too: we reported that DSW will pilot The Edit, an affordable-luxury shop-in-shop, at four stores this fall. Sephora at M&S opens from spring 2027, with the product line-up due closer to launch.

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Image: Courtesy of Sephora