The retail see-saw is here. Which side is your brand built for?

Roy Morgan's latest Future of Retail data confirms what most of us have felt walking through a shopping centre lately. Australian retail has split into two ends, and the middle is the place nobody wants to be standing.

At one end sits the value play. Temu pulled 5 million Australian shoppers in 2025 and Shein another 2.9 million, even as Temu landed the title of the country's most distrusted brand. People go in knowing the product might not match the picture, and they buy anyway, because the price makes the gamble feel worth it.

At the other end sits experience. Think MECCA's Bourke Street flagship, with its hair salon, flower bar, and education spaces built into the floorplan. The transaction is almost beside the point. The reason to walk in is the room itself, the service, the feeling of being somewhere considered.

Myer is following the same footsteps. Its multimillion-dollar Sydney Beauty Hall redevelopment will hand the entire ground floor to beauty, tripling the current space, with 11 private treatment rooms, two semi-private skin studios, a beauty play bar, and an on-floor masterclass area offering more than 200 services.

Clinical skin treatments, facials, and skin diagnostics sit at the centre of it. Executive chair Olivia Wirth put it plainly: customers want more than a transaction, they want to discover, be inspired, and indulge in something that feels special. That is a department store betting its ground floor on experience, not price.

The squeeze is on everyone caught between the two. Too dear to beat the discounters, not distinctive enough to command a premium. Roy Morgan's read is blunt: pick an end, or watch your margin erode trying to hold the centre.

Here is the part that should make professional beauty founders sit up. If you sell into salons, clinics, destination day spas, or wellness centres, you already hold the experience end. Your product lives inside a flagship clinical room, a treatment suite, a space someone chose to visit and spend an afternoon in. That is the Tiffany end of the spectrum, and you didn't have to build the retail lounge yourself. Your stockists did it for you.

Kérastase understands this. Their current Society events programme turns a haircare range into an invitation, a room, a moment your client remembers. That is the activation playbook, and for B2B brands stocked in the right rooms, it should be an easy one to run. The experience asset already exists. The work is in making more of it, putting your brand name on the moment, and giving your stockists a reason to keep curating around you.

The Temu end? Fine for the bits and pieces nobody emotionally invests in. Not the route for a professional skincare or haircare brand built on expertise, results, and the credibility of where it sits on the shelf. Chasing price in this channel only teaches buyers to value you on price, and that is a race with no winner at the professional end of the market.

So the question for 2026-27 is the same one the shopping centres are wrestling with. Which end are you building for? If the answer is experience, the good news is you are likely already there. The job now is to own it.