The days of the classic candy-and-chip vending machine have been gone for years now. These days, you can get cupcakes, slices of pizza, heads of lettuce, mashed potatoes and fresh-squeezed juice from the dang things. 

You can’t blame any brand from getting in on the trend. After all, a vending machine provides a full-blown ad right at the point of purchase and is the ultimate grab-and-go service for customers. Chanel has gotten into the act with a new vending machine at one of London’s Selfridges department stores that shells out three shades of a new mascara, Le Volume de Chanel Mascara, until May 8, according to British Vogue.

Of course, you can't stuff this attitudinal machine with any old coins. Naturellement, there is a special Chanel-logo coin that consumers need to get first in order to make the purchase, Refinery29.com reports.Continue reading...

Since its inception in 1970s Paris, Sephora has been a disruptive force within the beauty industry. Today, the retailer has 1,750 stores in 30 countries and is turning out revenues upwards of $4 billion.

From its very birth, “this new stand-alone beauty and fragrance store was a real shock for store operators throughout the world,” notes Forbes. “The department stores believed they had the only retail format capable of effectively selling premium beauty and fragrance products. They were wrong.”

Acquired by Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy in 1997, the first Sephora store opened in New York in 1998. Today there are close to 706 stores in the US, including 386 boutiques inside JCPenney stores, a key element that has kept the ailing department store from drowning. Breaking the barrier of entry, Sephora applied that iconoclastic spirit to wooing a new, younger consumer than those frequenting department stores, with modern brands and a cross-sell of products by in-store sales associates who primp and paint customer’s faces from their choice of products, arranged alphabetically.Continue reading...

Coffee and makeup don't generally mix, but when it comes to selling either globally, similar skills are apparently needed. Coffee giant Starbucks has plucked its new Global CMO from Sephora in Sharon Rothstein, who was SVP of marketing for the  will join the company in mid-April and won’t just be overseeing the marketing efforts of Starbucks, but also the company’s other brands, such as Seattle's Best Coffee, Evolution Fresh, La Boulange, Tazo and Teavana, Motley Fool reports.

Rothstein, who will be replaced at Sephora by former report Julie Bornstein (promoted from SVP of digital to chief marketing and digital officer), has worked with a plethora of big brands including Godiva, Starwood Hotels and Resorts and P&G, so she knows a thing or two about customer experience and brings those Sephora-honed digital chops.

“I have been a loyal Starbucks customer and fan for most of my adult life and I am humbled to become a partner (employee) at one of the few companies in the world that embraces the value and responsibility of balancing business performance and social impact,” she said in a press release. Rothstein will also oversee the company's Seattle's Best Coffee, Evolution Fresh, La Boulange, Tazo and Teavana brands.

The social conscience side of Starbucks also gets a boost from another big announcement this week: that it's buying its first coffee farm, a 600-acre spread in Costa Rica that will serve as the company's first global agronomy center and the center of its $70 million ethical sourcing program.Continue reading...

Pinterest is finally getting into the data game. The photo-heavy (and ridiculously popular) social site has launched Pinterest Web Analytics to help brands and advertisers better understand what users are doing with their content in a move towards monetizing its huge amount of traffic.

The 3-year-old company—which is the fastest website to reach 10 million unique visitors a month—has taken a cautious approach in defining its business model, in part to avoid the mistakes of other social networks that moved too fast.Continue reading...

JCPenney, seemingly a permanent fixture in the news these days, seeks to push past the negative financial and branding headlines and tap into customer experience with their new pop-up shops, which will hopefully garner appeal from designer collaborations. 

The store, which is currently embroiled in a high-stakes trial with Macy's and Martha Stewart over product licenses, has had a rough time since CEO Ron Johnson took over a year ago. The brand's "no markdown" strategy backfired, and word on the street is that employee morale has hit an all-time low at the company's Plano, Texas headquarters. 

However, the company had a moment during the Oscars broadcast. The new campaign, a series of commercials introducing JCP’s latest brand partnerships expanded on last year's rebranding campaign with Ellen DeGeneres. It also boosted activity on Facebook and Twitter, rewarding some followers with gift certificates.

Now, with the success of shop-in-shop brands like Sephora, MNG by Mango, Levi's Denim Bar and Liz Claiborne, the retailer is adding more designers to its in-store boutique lineup and plans to expand to home goods later this spring. Each brand will have their own design aesthetic within their individual shop.

With its in-store designer additions, J.C. Penney joins Target, Macy's (now battling JCP in court over Martha Stewart) and Bloomingdale's as the latest department store to experiment with boutique-style shops. In fact, JCP is stealing from Target's playbook with a new exclusive home goods collection by American architect Michael Graves—Target's first designer partnership, which launched in 1999 and produced a whopping 2,000 items—and Justin Timberlake's William Rast collection, which launched as a Target exclusive in 2010.

Other upcoming JCPenney designer collaborations include in-store boutiques for Happy Chic by Jonathan Adler, Designs by Conran, Watchgear by Tourneau, Carters and Giggles. Here's a look at the in-store boutiques now hitting its stores:Continue reading...

Many politicians, actors and sports stars have experienced an annus horribilis. But when it comes to corporate CEOs, few have ever had as bad a year as Ron Johnson of JCPenney.

It's been about a year since the former Apple retailing executive blew into Penney's headquarters in Dallas believing that he had a secret formula that would do even more than rescue the company from its threatened place in the nation's retailing industry. Eager to start a "retail revolution," Johnson sought to simplify the company's structure and re-program the American consumer's attitude toward store pricing, discounting and promotional tactics.

A year ago today, at a splashy two-day press event in New York, Johnson outlined his vision for transforming the 110-year-old department-store chain over four years through "Fair and Square" pricing as part of a rebranding and repositioning for the company. But it's not working.Continue reading...

Next year, Kermit the Frog may be singing, "It IS easy being green." He'll be delighted to know that Pantone has selected Emerald Green as the Color of the Year for 2013, and will feel right at home on its Pinterest board devoted to the exact shade of green: 17-5641.

For over a decade, Pantone, a company long associated with setting color standards in printing, has been selecting a "Color of the Year." According to the company, "Pantone quite literally combs the world looking for color influences. This can include the entertainment industry and films in production, traveling art collections, hot new artists, popular travel destinations and other socio-economic conditions. Influences may also stem from technology, availability of new textures and effects that impact color, and even upcoming sports events that capture worldwide attention."

So why is 2013 a Green kind of year? "Green is the most abundant hue in nature — the human eye sees more green than any other in the spectrum," said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. "Symbolically, Emerald brings a sense of clarity, renewal and rejuvenation, which is so important in today's complex world. This powerful and universally appealing tone translates easily to both fashion and home interiors."Continue reading...

It won't come as news to the millions of Americans who go to humanity-choked Apple stores and try to find a blue-shirted staff member who might be unoccupied, but Apple's outlets are the most productive retail real estate in the United States, according to new research.

Now if its former retail guru Ron Johnson could finally just figure out how to apply some of the Apple shine to JCPenney, where he is the increasingly beleaguered CEO after having left Apple as head of its retail stores a little over a year ago.

Apple's store productivity has soared in recent years as consumers have flocked to buy iPhones and iPads, reports the Financial Times. As a result, Apple recorded sales per square foot of retail space of $6,050 in the year ended in June, putting it ahead of all other contenders, including No. 2 Tiffany & Co. and No. 3 Lululemon Athletica, according to data from Retail Sales. But even Tiffany finished a distant runner-up, with sales of $3,017 per foot.Continue reading...