Credo has found its clean-beauty happy place in Los Angeles.
The natural beauty emporium has touched down in the city where green juice kicked Starbucks off its throne as the most-coveted accessory in a cup, Pilates got pumped up, raw food was popularized and self-realization became the closest thing to an established religion. Its 1,300-square-foot location on West Third Street joins Credo’s retail roster after stores on Prince Street in New York and Fillmore Street in San Francisco, where the brainchild of former Sephora executives made its debut in 2015.
“We looked at the L.A. market simultaneously with San Francisco because it’s such a great community of people who are health savvy and, at the same time, very uncompromising when it comes to beauty and that’s what we are interested in when we open in a market,” said Annie Jackson, vice president of merchandising and planning at Credo, and previously director of merchandising at Sephora. “Our belief system and the idea that one can have beauty products with style and efficacy, but also real substance in terms of healthful ingredients is a great match for Los Angeles.”
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Skin care and makeup constitutes the bulk of the assortment of some 105 brands and 2,500 stockkeeping units at the L.A. store. Among Credo’s best-selling brands are Tata Harper, RMS Beauty, Josh Rosebrook, Vapour, Marie Veronique, Ilia and Pai, and brands breaking into the retailer with the opening include Alima Pure, Goldfaden MD and Susanne Kaufmann. Other brands at Credo are Plume Hair & Lash Science, Suntegrity, African Botanics and Osea.
The staff is made up of makeup artists and licensed aestheticians, and there are three people generally manning the store. The store contains a Tata Harper treatment room featuring services such as purifying detox facials and pregnancy facials running from $95 to $175. Makeup and lash application, brow and lip waxing, mini facials and lessons in swapping out mainstream beauty products for their natural alternatives are also provided at the Credo Beauty Bar. Those offerings range in price from $15 to $65.
“We are trying to really tap into the expertise of the staff in terms of how we offer services in the Credo B
eauty Bar,” Jackson said. “Especially with Los Angeles being a celebrity-populated community, the makeup artists in the store have pretty successful freelance careers, and we love that vibe with all the creativity that you would get in a Sephora or an Ulta with makeup techniques and tapping into trends, while really continuing to dispel the misconception that natural beauty brands don’t have high color payoff, and can’t be fun and trendy.”
Although it’s an important stop, L.A. is definitely not the only stop on Credo’s expansion march. Next up is Brooklyn. A roughly 1,100 square feet is set to open in Williamsburg in the spring. “We hope to open stores at a pretty measured pace in line with the way the market is going,” Jackson said. “We want to be at the front of a movement that’s out there educating people and increasing understanding. We are out there looking for stores, but we have to be in a community and market that is ready and wants a concept like this.”
Credo declined to discuss sales per square foot at its locations, but founder and chief executive officer Shashi Batra, a member of the team that introduced Sephora in the U.S., told WWD upon the opening of Credo’s first store that it didn’t have to reach Sephora levels of $1,200 or more in yearly sales per square foot to be a successful enterprise. Turning to the present, Jackson was ebullient over Credo’s fourth-quarter performance, which she took as an indication the retailer is headed in the right direction. She said, “It beat our wildest expectations of what we could have done. We are super encouraged about this upcoming year.”