Harmony Pharmacy & Health Center

A unique airport-based retail chain with high-end beauty products plans to expand online, and eyes more brick-and-mortar sites.

by Liz Barrett

Photography by Andre Hermann

Have you ever arrived at the airport and realized that you forgot your shampoo, your favorite body wash—or worse yet—your medication?

These were just a few of the dilemmas that the people behind Harmony Pharmacy & Health Center (harmonypharmacy.com) were aiming to resolve when they opened their first boutique, health center and pharmacy three years ago inside Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. With additional locations at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and San Francisco International Airport, Harmony Pharmacy & Health Center has quickly established itself as the only airport-based retail pharmacy in the United States offering high-end boutique beauty products. Inquiries continue to flood in from airports across the country desiring future locations.

Recently, the head of corporate operations for Harmony, Martha Frommert Kausch, spoke with Beauty Store Business about the heretofore untapped world of high-end beauty retail inside airports.

Click to read the entire Harmony Pharmacy & Health Center article in pdf format.

Glow.com

Online cosmetics-sales players just gained an interesting competitor. Will this new kid on the block change the game?

by Julie Sturgeon

All images courtesy of Glow.com

Consumer spending studies in 2009 show a predictable pattern: The Nielsen Co. has seen a 46% increase in the amount of time Americans are spending on videos, a 20% jump in the time we spend reading blogs and a 17% hike in traffic to ecommerce sites. It’s all about entertaining ourselves at home.

Which means that recent research from The NPD Group showing that online purchases increased in the beauty-product category despite declines in other retail channels is right on the money. According to The NPD Group, the Internet has a higher ratio of women saying they spent more on beauty this year than women who cut back on their spending. What’s more, they’ve started spending more on expensive brands this year.

DermStore (www.DermStore.com) in El Segundo, California, owned by Intelligent Beauty (www.ibinc.com), has geared its engines to step right into this niche. Its online-only cosmetics store, www.Glow.com, officially launched in August. (DermStore, which launched in 1999, is also a health and beauty ecommerce site created by a board-certified dermatologist that Beauty Store Business has profiled. Intelligent Beauty, founded in January 2006, is a beauty-industry company in online marketing and new ecommerce technology.)

Click to read the entire Glow.com article in pdf format.