First Look: Amazon’s first store in Italy is focused on beauty and personal care
Amazon's newest brick and mortar venture — and first ever in Italy — is a store selling beauty and personal care products in Milan.
Located in Milan’s busy city center, new Amazon Parafarmacia & Beauty provides a curated selection of beauty and personal care products. Amazon opened the store as part of broader effort to expand its online beauty and personal care product offerings across Europe.
Amazon Parafarmacia's assortment, which includes brands such as Eucerin, La Roche-Posay, Vichy, Avene, Bionikem Rilastil and CeraVe, will be progressively available throughout the year to online Amazon stores in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the U.K.
The new store features two distinct areas. The central hub of the space, or the "main gallery," showcases a selection of beauty, personal care and dermatologically-recommended brand-name products. “Place & Learn” stations feature interactive digital displays that enable customers to learn more about products by playing educational videos about select items when they are placed on a designated tray.
The videos provide product-related details such as ingredients and usage. Organized shelving displays and electronic shelf labels are designed to help customers shop different brands, products, and categories.
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Source: Amazon
Derma-bar
An experiential area, called "derma-bar," provides customers complimentary digital skin analysis using technology and product recommendations from beauty experts.
Using digital tools, customers can obtain a comprehensive report on their skin type and condition by having their skin analyzed at one of three digital skin analysis stations. Beauty experts then provide product recommendations based on the results. The derma-bar also features try-on stations to sample products.
Other store features include counters and an over-the-counter area staffed by on-site pharmacists, where customers can purchase non-prescription, over-the-counter medications and the pharmacists can provide expert information and guidance on available products.
"We're thrilled to announce the opening of Amazon Parafarmacia & Beauty in Milan, a physical store that further enhances and innovates our customers’ shopping experience featuring a curated selection of beauty and personal care products," said Giorgio Busnelli, VP of Amazon consumer goods in Europe, in a corporate blog post. "We've designed this store to bring us one step closer to our customers and to deliver an innovative experience, merging cutting-edge technology with expert advice."
This opening marks a change in Amazon’s recent physical store activity, which has primarily been focused on brick-and-mortar grocery and convenience locations in the U.S. during the past few years.
The retailer closed its two U.S.-based Amazon Style stores, a format designed to combine the personalization of e-commerce with the immediacy of physical retail, in November 2023.
[READ MORE: Amazon shuttering Amazon Style brick-and-mortar apparel format]
In March 2022, Amazon closed 68 physical stores across the U.S. and U.K. markets. These closures marked the end of the Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star and Amazon Pop Up brick-and-mortar banners.
Amazon Parafarmacia & Beauty is located at Piazzale Cadorna in Milan, close to major city attractions and transit options. The store's hours are 8:00am to 7:00pm from Monday to Friday, and 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.
