Would You Buy Old Navy Skin Care?
Everybody wants a piece of the big ol’ beauty pie. Following Louis Vuitton’s splashy debut of $160 lipsticks, Gap, Inc., is offering a slightly more accessible fashion-beauty hybrid by way of Gap and Old Navy. The company announced a massive expansion of its beauty and accessories businesses that will now include Old Navy–branded skin care, makeup, hair care, and more, which is launching this fall. Meanwhile, a Gap beauty collection is also set to go into stores next year, starting with fragrance.
Neither of these brands are completely new to beauty — Old Navy has a fragrance line and has been carrying brands like E.l.f. Cosmetics for over a decade. As for Gap, the last time it ventured into the industry, Sephora didn’t even exist in the States yet. (Remember Gap Dream, the beloved, since-discontinued fragrance it launched in 1995?) But it seems like the chains are both really committing this time around. As part of the expansion, Old Navy will be adding brands like Mario Badescu and TonyMoly to its lineup in addition to its own branded products. Some stores will even have beauty-specific employees to recommend products to shoppers.
Apparently, there’s a real demand for all of this. According to The Wall Street Journal, a recent Old Navy survey revealed that 70 percent of its customers would be willing to do some of their beauty shopping at the retailer. I appreciate that most of the prices will be sub-$25 and accessible to everyday consumers (and the ever-lucrative teen demographic), but will the products actually be any good? Will they be able to draw shoppers away from established cosmetics retailers like Ulta and Sephora? And the most important question: Will they be enough to make me finally step back into a physical Old Navy store, which I haven’t done since the early 2000s? For Gap’s sake, I hope so.
Related