Sephora's Hong Kong debut was a Mong Kok store — it closed in two years

Sephora, the French beauty retailer owned by LVMH, is one of the world's largest cosmetics chains with about 3,000 stores in 35 countries. In 2008 it opened its first Hong Kong store in Mong Kok, one of the city's busiest shopping districts — but also one of its most densely packed, mass-market, and rent-inflated.

The store closed at the end of March 2010, barely two years after opening. Sephora declined to give a detailed explanation; a spokesperson said only that the location 'did not meet the expectations of the brand.' Media reports at the time and later attributed the failure to the wrong location for Sephora's premium positioning, high rent, and the fact that the brand was still unfamiliar to Hong Kong shoppers. The closure was a complete exit from the Hong Kong market.

Sephora had entered China in 2005 with a Shanghai store, and its Hong Kong failure came just as the mainland business was growing. The company did not attempt to find a better Hong Kong location — it left the market entirely. The exit was Sephora's first in Asia, predating later withdrawals from Japan (2001, predating China entry), Vietnam (2022), Taiwan (2023), and Korea (2024).

Nine years later, in September 2019, Sephora returned to Hong Kong with a flagship store in the IFC Mall — a 4,200 sq ft space in a premium shopping centre, a very different location from the Mong Kok experiment. The company announced plans to open eight stores in the city within three years. The return was a tacit admission that the 2008 failure was a location problem, not a market problem.