Inside Beauty: How Sephora Turns Loyalty Into an AI Advantage
What happens to loyalty when shoppers don’t start their journey on your website? That question is becoming more urgent as AI assistants move from answering questions to recommending products and completing purchases. And, marketers can learn a thing or two from Sephora.
In the latest The Speed of Culture podcast, Emmy Brown Berlind, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Loyalty at Sephora, tells Matt Britton that the company wants to be wherever people are shopping for beauty. That now includes an app inside ChatGPT, and a Google Agentic Checkout partnership. But Sephora enters that future with a long-standing advantage: a customer relationship nearly two decades in the making.
Loyalty Has to Feel Personal
Sephora’s Beauty Insider loyalty program is approaching its 20th anniversary with more than 46 million members. Its lasting power, according to Emmy, is that Sephora keeps trying to make it feel personal rather than transactional.
Even something as familiar as a birthday reward has evolved toward more choice. Beauty Insider Challenges go further - tasks can reflect what Sephora already knows about a client, encouraging someone to explore a category they have never purchased while earning points for trying something new.
For marketers, the insight is that personalization is about making the program, as a whole, feel responsive.
Data Only Works When the Value Is Obvious
More than 90% of Sephora’s sales come from Beauty Insider members, which, of course, creates an enormous data advantage. At the same time, it also creates responsibility. Emmy’s standard for AI is memorable: it should help out rather than make clients feel uncomfortable.
Sephora’s Beauty Skin Scan illustrates this difference. A client chooses to have their skin analyzed, receives shade or skincare recommendations, and that information can then improve future experiences. The AI Beauty Chat follows the same principle. Customers can use it if they want to, and Sephora plans to incorporate loyalty information so recommendations can reflect available rewards and points. The technology only earns trust if it returns value.
The Store Makes the Data More Human
Emmy’s quick to remind everyone that Sephora’s advantage is not purely digital. Beauty advisors remain central to the in-store experience because they bring product knowledge and a personal service that is difficult to replicate elsewhere. And, these interactions also enrich the wider relationship. Purchases, advisor conversations, skin scan results, and digital behavior can all contribute to more useful recommendations later. This creates something a generic AI assistant starts without: context built through an existing relationship.
Agentic Shopping Shouldn’t Change the Relationship
This is where loyalty becomes especially important because if shoppers increasingly discover and buy through ChatGPT, Google, or future AI agents, retailers may lose some control over where the transaction happens. Sephora’s response is not to fight that behavior but rather show up within it.
The company wants its beauty expertise and recommendations accessible wherever customers choose to shop. And, while this changes the role of the owned channel, there’s a hidden advantage: having enough knowledge, trust and relevance that the brand remains useful even when the interface belongs to someone else.
Client Friendly Still Comes First
For all the technology in the conversation, Emmy’s most durable principle is surprisingly simple: Is this client friendly? She says the best loyalty decisions are not always the easiest internally; they can require coordination across many departments. And, that may become even more important in the agentic era.
AI will make many retail interactions easier to automate but what it cannot guarantee is that the customer feels understood. Sephora’s bet is that loyalty can. If the shopping journey keeps fragmenting across stores, apps, chatbots and agents, the brands with the strongest existing customer relationships may be the ones best equipped to travel with the shopper wherever they go.
