Sephora's Brief History

Sephora has grown to be one of the best establishments for selling cosmetics products. It was founded in the year of 1969 by Dominique Mandonnaud in France. At first called “Shop 8”, Mandonnaud had his store arranged in supermarket form with cosmetic products lined up on shelves which made his store unique from the other cosmetic shops around at the time. With this mindset of marketing and advertising, Mandonnaud had four open stores by the year 1984. However, distribution group “Promodes” had all of his stores under control. Around the year 1987, their business relationship started to go bad which resulted in the separation of Promodes and Shop 8. However, Mandonnaud did not let this stop him and by 1988 he had required eight stores all under the first Shop 8 format. In 1991, Mandonnaud completed a buyout plan from Promodes by partnering up with Apax Partners and Astorg, two private equity groups. After that task, the three now partners set out to expand their stores 3-5 per year building up their chain of cosmetic stores. Upon their expansion, the partners came across Boots who had 38 Sephora stores that were unprofitable but were in great locations. Therefore, Boots was offered 61 million for their stores and Boots sold. This raised their network to 50 stores in total. This in result is when Mandonnaud renamed his stores Sephora.  Mandonnaud retired in 1997 but not before selling his part of the company to LVMH. Since then the company has been expanding and growing at a fast rate. As of 2011, Sephora has over one thousand stores in 24 countries in Europe, 60 stores in China, 300 Stores in the United States and Canada combined and their first store in Mexico.