QQ Nails opened its first salon in New York City twenty years ago. By 2020, QQ had grown to roughly 20 locations.
It’s nearly doubled in size since the pandemic. Thirty-eight QQ salons now dot the city’s streets, with plans for dozens more. In one six block radius in Manhattan, there are four.
“People are more willing to spend on self-care, self-expressiveness and these types of larger services,” CEO Tian Jiang said.
Brick-and-mortar stores were once designed to sell you stuff: shoes, furniture and TVs. Today, they’re all about making your face, abs, hair and nails look and feel fit for the world— both the in-person and social media versions of your life.
City streets and suburban shopping malls have been reconfigured in response to our collective obsession with appearance, health and performance. The transformation of retail storefronts is the physical manifestation of marketing buzzwords like “ looksmaxxing ,” “self-care” and “longevity.”
Nail salons on every block. Med spas expanding rapidly. Pilates chains opening hundreds of clubs. High-intensity weightlifting studios, bathhouses, saunas, stretching studios, cryotherapy and IV therapy.
Nationwide, more than 1 out of every 4 retail leases signed in the United States this year has been from a cosmetics, beauty service or fitness company, according to CoStar. It’s on pace to be the highest annual share on record.
The presence of screens everywhere helps explain the changes in the physical commercial landscape.
People want to look good when they see others in real life. They also want to look good on Instagram, Hinge and TikTok. Vanity businesses serve both our in-person and digital lives simultaneously.
“There is definitely ‘aesthetic creep’ that has intensified in recent years” Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a historian of American politics and culture at The New School, said in an email. Women and gay men have long felt pressure to present themselves, but “straight men are now encompassed by the beauty-industrial complex in new ways” than the pre-looksmaxxing, social media era.
Physical retail has also changed because many younger consumers prioritize smaller acts of self-improvement in an economy where traditional life milestones such as homeownership, marriage and kids, feel out of reach. Increasingly living alone and staying single, these consumers are less willing to cut back on gym memberships and manicures that help them feel healthier, stronger and more attractive.
Gym and fitness studio memberships for people under 35 are growing faster than older groups, and they spend more on their monthly gym dues than older generations, according to the Health & Fitness Association. Gen Z spending at cosmetics stores was also nearly twice as strong as the overall average this year.
When QQ Nails opened in 2006, manicures were seen as a “pampering moment,” Jiang said. “All you did was a polish and a clean up.”
But manicures and personal care services are now associated with physical and mental well-being. Salons’ offerings and techniques have evolved, too. More expensive gel manicures and pedicures replaced regular air-dried nail polish. Customers come for extensions and custom designs they see on TikTok. More men get manicures.
“It’s become more ingrained in everybody’s routines,” she said.
Vanity businesses have also come to dominate the streets because e-commerce has altered the utility of a storefront.
As online shopping made it easier than ever to buy products from home, physical retail moved into services that couldn’t easily be duplicated online. Amazon can ship a television or pair of sneakers to your doorstep. But it can’t give you a manicure, Botox or six-pack abs.
Retail leasing by service-oriented tenants outpaced goods-based tenants for the first time ever this year.
It’s a shift for real estate developers and city planners who were long wary of gyms and personal-care businesses in prime retail corridors.
Cities have loosened their zoning laws to make it easier for gyms, studios and spas to expand into more commercial areas in recent years. Many traditional retailers in shopping centers ended strict provisions in their leases preventing fitness tenants from locating nearby.
As these lease restrictions eased, shopping centers added more boutique fitness tenants, said David Gerstenhaber, the head of leasing at Brixmor Property Group. The company owns more than 340 shopping centers around the country.
Forty percent of Brixmor’s shopping centers now have a boutique fitness tenant, up from 29% in 2021. Beauty, boutique fitness, and wellness tenants like Face Foundrie and Hydration Room have grown 11% over the last five years at its properties.
Lake Pointe Village, a shopping center in Sugar Land, Texas, anchored by Whole Foods, is the poster child for the shift. There are 13 vanity businesses in the center — everything from Solidcore to VIO Med Spa to European Wax Center.
“It all comes down to look good, feel good,” he said.
