Dive Brief:

• Online subscription beauty retailer Birchbox has tapped former Sephora executive Philippe Pinatel to be its new COO, the company announced Tuesday. He will lead merchandising, product development, retail, operations, and international at Birchbox, with a focus on strategic growth.

• Pinatel was SVP of Sephora Canada and general manager of Sephora Inside J.C. Penney, one of that company’s most successful partnerships. He was also an executive at Guerlain France.

• He joins a slew of new hires at the ambitious retailer, including former Juicy Couture executive Douglas Simpson as VP of retail, former Apple senior director Ben Fay as VP of retail development and customer experience, and Andrew Lande-Shannon, who has consulted for the company for a while and has executive and creative experience at several top brands.

Dive Insight:

There perhaps is no better way for an emerging retailer to take on the competition than to bring in an executive with extensive experience at one of its most formidable rivals. 

Philippe Pinatel spent more than two decades at Sephora, which was perhaps the first beauty retailer to shake up the industry by democratizing the experience with well laid out specialty stores that offered easy access to a range of products, rather than behind the glass cases at department stores.

“I’ve followed Birchbox’s growth over the past five years and have been continuously impressed by how swiftly and nimbly it navigated the competitive dynamic of the industry and brought to it exciting, profound and lasting change,” Pinatel said in a statement. “A new way to discover beauty, Birchbox is a powerful, winning idea and I’m honored to join the team at such a pivotal time in the business.”

It is indeed a pivotal time for Birchbox, which disrupted beauty retail with its subscription approach that in turn was recently also adopted by Sephora. 

The retailer has also moved assertively into brick-and-mortar, employing its flagship store in New York as a data-mining laboratory of sorts and planning a nationwide expansion of physical retail. 

The company found success with its original online model, growing from less than 1,000 subscribers to 800,000 in three and a half years. But it has also found that its trial-sized products tucked into its subscription boxes were leading to sales at its competitors and has worked online and off to expand its sales of regular-sized products. 

“We are always looking at what the future holds for the business and what the next move will be,” Birchbox CEO Katia Beauchamp told Retail Dive earlier this year.

Many of the next moves will be at the hands of the company’s new hires, which come after co-founder Hayley Barna stepped down as co-CEO in August.