French luxury house Chanel has closed its beauty concept store, Atelier Beauté Chanel, located on Wooster Street in New York’s SoHo district. Opened in 2019, the boutique operated for nearly six years before officially closing its doors on January 18, 2025.
Atelier Beauté was introduced as a new retail model centered on immersive experiences rather than direct sales. The space offered customers the opportunity to test skincare, makeup, and fragrance products freely, and quickly garnered attention among beauty insiders and fans alike.
In an official statement, Chanel noted, “Since opening its doors in 2019, the Atelier Beauté Chanel has provided an innovative, digitally enhanced environment aimed at elevating our clients’ experiences.” The brand added, “We have recently decided to integrate the innovation practice into our existing fragrance and beauty operational model,” signaling its continued commitment to delivering experiential value in other formats.
The closure comes amid a broader slowdown in the global luxury market. Chanel has implemented a reduction of approximately 70 employees in the U.S. as part of its restructuring efforts. The company commented, “The U.S. remains a key region for our business, but like any market, it experiences ebbs and flows in demand.”
Despite the closure of Atelier Beauté, Chanel continues to operate a fragrance and beauty boutique in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as well as the Maison de Beauté in Paris, which opened in 2023 in the Passy district. The Paris location spans three floors and showcases the full range of Chanel’s fragrance, skincare, and makeup lines—marking the brand’s first dedicated beauty house in France.
The Saturation of “Experiential Retail” and the Fatigue of Strategy
While the number of brands offering experiential retail environments has grown significantly in recent years, there is also a growing sense of fatigue and strategic stagnation in the space. In New York, particularly, the shift away from permanent retail stores toward short-term pop-up formats has accelerated, making “experiential” retail more of a standard practice than a novelty.
Within this context, 2023 also saw the closure of Showfields, an experiential retail showroom based in NoHo. Showfields gained attention with its mission to bring unique, direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands into physical spaces. However, high rental costs—locked in before the COVID-19 pandemic—became an unsustainable burden and one of the key factors behind the company’s eventual demise.
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