LVMH Brand Lip Lab Opening Third NYC Location at 825 Lexington Avenue
By Isabelle Durso August 28, 2024 1:57 pm
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Lip Lab, a subsidiary of luxury goods company LVMH, is opening its third New York City location.
The Toronto-based beauty brand signed a long-term lease for 1,600 square feet on the ground floor of 825 Lexington Avenue, Commercial Observer has learned. The landlord was 823 Lex LLC, which owns both the storefront and the residential condos above at 139 East 63rd Street, according to Judson CRE, which brokered the deal for the landlord.
Asking rent was $320,000 per year, according to Judson CRE, which translates to roughly $200 per square foot. Lip Lab will take over the space from MAC Cosmetics, a subsidiary of Estee Lauder Companies, which opened its first makeup studio in the Lexington Avenue storefront in 2015.
Lip Lab will open its third New York store following previous openings at 133 Wooster Street in SoHo and 160 North Fourth Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
“The space is ideal for Lip Lab due to its co-tenancy with nearby department stores such as Bloomingdale’s, Bergdorf Goodman, and cosmetics retailers such as Sephora,” a spokesperson for Judson CRE told CO. “Midtown Manhattan also has an abundance of foot traffic with access to all major public transportation lines.”
Nicholas Judson, Wendy McDonald and Crosby Matthews of Judson CRE represented the landlord in the deal. Retail by MONA’s Virginia Pittarelli, Christine Jorge and Madison Grossman, who brokered the deal for Lip Lab, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lip Lab, which allows shoppers to customize their lipstick shades, originally began as Bite Beauty in 2011 and was acquired by LVMH in 2014. The company rebranded as Lip Lab in 2022 and now has over a dozen locations across North America.
New York City’s retail market has been a saving grace for the city’s commercial real estate, as a recent report from JLL found that there were few empty storefronts in prime retail areas during the first quarter of 2024, CO previously reported.
Only 15.4 percent of prime retail space was available on average during the first quarter of the year — an all-time low in the post-pandemic world, and even lower than the 21 percent average vacancy rate in 2019 before the COVID pandemic, CO reported in April.
Luxury brands such as Kering, Louis Vuitton and Rolex have driven much of retail’s success in the city, particularly along Fifth Avenue, where Kering made a massive $963 million purchase at 715-717 Fifth Avenue in January.
Isabelle Durso can be reached at idurso@commercialobserver.com.
