Sephora's Here!

Cosmetics Goliath Sephora opened not one, but TWO brand new locations today.

The company's newly opened stores in Vancouver's Pacific Center and Coquitlam Center locations opened to much anticipation and fanfare this morning, with long lines of women anxious to get inside and spend their hard earned dollars, crawling for blocks in the case of the downtown Vancouver location.

I arrived at Sephora's Pacific Center location at 1 pm, ready and rarin' to go.

I spoke with Sephora Canada's Vice President, Marie-Christine Marchives yesterday as part of my pre-grand opening tour of the new Pacific Centre location. Because Sephora is scheduled to open three new stores within a mere few months of each other (as I said before, two opening on the same day), I had to ask, why Vancouver (or BC), why 3 stores, and why now?

"It was actually just a matter of very good timing. When we are looking to open a new store, we are looking for 2 things; good location, and enough space to accomodate us, a minimum of 5000 sq. feet on one floor. These three BC spaces simply happened to fit that criteria, and all were brought to our attention almost at the same time. We're very lucky."

The Pacific Center store is a whopping 7,452 square feet of pure beauty bliss. With 13,000 products from more than 200 brands including the Sephora Collection, we found typically hard to find brands normally reserved for the online domain like Urban Decay, Bliss, Cargo, Philosophy, Josie Maran, Hard Candy, and Kat Von D's ultra cool line of cosmetics, sold exclusively at Sephora.

Product is showcased in gorgeous open displays, and guests are encouraged to 'try, test and play' before they buy. I asked Marie-Christine what she thought were the three best reasons to shop at Sephora; "The enormous variety allows so much freedom of choice, brand exclusivity, and the newness and trend factor of a wide variety of the products that we carry are definitely the top 3 reasons to shop at Sephora." (Sephora is the exclusive distributor of 60 Nail Candy OPI colors.)

Sephora operates approximately 1000 stores in 12 countries worldwide, with a rapidly expanding base of over 220 stores across North America.