Push open the heavy doors of a great department store and take a breath. That first wave that hits you, the perfume in the air, the gleam of a hundred little gold tubes, a woman in red lipstick ready to hand you a mirror. Cosmetics. Every single time, right at the front door.
The store could have put anything there. It could have led with the roped-off handbags, the untouchable coats, the jewelry under glass, the stuff that makes most of us walk a little faster and feel a little smaller. Instead, for more than a hundred years, the very first thing a department store chose to show you was the lipstick.
It is the most quietly democratic thing in all of retail.
Most women cannot walk out of a store with the $10,000 handbag. But almost any woman can walk out with the lipstick.
The psychology of the counter, the brand and the gorgeous little gold tube with the famous name on it, for the price of lunch, has been good business for the department store landscape.
The lipstick by the door is the store leaning down to whisper, you don’t have to be rich to have a piece of this. Come in. Take the dream home in whatever size you can carry it.
The stores that forgot this are the ones in trouble now. They chased only the woman who could afford the whole floor, and they watched their customers quietly walk across the street. You build a hundred-year store on the open door to many. You build it on the woman who came in for lipstick and left feeling like a queen.
The best stores never forgot her, because she was always the point. And she was always us.
PUT ON your lipstick today, the small, affordable, gorgeous thing that lets you hold the whole dream in your hand. Walk in knowing you belong there, because you always did.
