Why Gondola-Style Open Shelving Is the Trusted Format for Multi-Brand Beauty Stores

A beauty multi-brand store faces a structural challenge a single-brand store never encounters: dozens of brands, hundreds of SKUs, constantly rotating assortments — all needing to share the same floor without one brand's fixture dictating the terms for every other. The format that has become the trusted answer to this problem is the open-shelf, gondola-style display.

As Display Craft's beauty retail fixture guidance notes, open merchandising configurations allow customers to see, reach, and engage with a product assortment directly, with shelving heights, depths, and spacing developed to fit the specific footprint of what's on them. Gondola-style fixtures have become a trusted format in beauty retail for a specific reason: they maximise floor space, support clear planogram layouts, and adapt to category changes without requiring a full rebuild.

That last point is the one that matters most for a multi-brand environment specifically. A single-brand cabinet is built around one product range that changes on a predictable cycle. A multi-brand gondola has to accommodate a completely different brand's footprint every time a buyer resets that section — different bottle heights, different box dimensions, different visual identity. Adjustable shelving that can be reconfigured without structural rework is not a convenience in this context. It is the baseline requirement that makes the format viable at all.

The format's floor-space efficiency compounds this advantage. Because a gondola presents product from both sides simultaneously, a multi-brand retailer can house significantly more assortment per square metre of floor than a series of single-face wall units would allow — a meaningful economic factor in a category where the number of brands a store can carry is directly tied to how much of the store's total revenue potential it can capture.