[In the picture] Beauty brand Cent Pur Cent aims to build awareness with a flagship store in Antwerp

The skincare brand Cent Pur Cent opened a flagship store in Antwerp on Saturday, September 19. It is only the brand’s second standalone store—after Hasselt—and its products are available at more than 1,000 pharmacies in Belgium and online.

“The country’s most discerning beauty market”

Cent Pur Cent is already a well-established name in Limburg, but the brand is less well-known in Antwerp. According to founder and CEO Caroline Rigo, the brand store on the prestigious Schuttershofstraat—the first outside the brand’s home province—is first and foremost a tool for building that brand awareness, and only secondarily a point of sale.

“In Hasselt, we learned what a standalone store can do that a shelf in a pharmacy cannot,” says Rigo. “People don’t come in with a product question but with a usage question: I want to use it, but I don’t know how. That takes about half an hour of consultation. Anyone who’s experienced that once gets to know the brand and asks for it at their pharmacy. The store builds demand, and the pharmacy captures it. For a brand that has grown through pharmacies, that’s the logical way to enter a new region.”

The choice of Antwerp was deliberate: “It’s the most discerning beauty market in the country and the city where we have to prove ourselves. If this model works there, it’ll work anywhere.”

Pharmacies remain the core channel

The store is conceived as a consultation space rather than a sales floor. Customers go through a personalized consultation process—the “Signature Route”—either by appointment or on a walk-in basis, during which they discover, based on their skin type and preferences, which look and which products suit them best. The store operates with a local Antwerp team of three employees. The storefront and in-store signage are in English, reflecting the street’s international character; customer communication is in Dutch.

Cent Pur Cent emphasizes that pharmacies remain the core channel and that the brand stores do not compete with them but rather build awareness for the brand. Antwerp pharmacists were the first to be welcomed into the store on September 10, ahead of the press and the public. “The pharmacy is the channel where trust lies, and trust is what sells a skincare product,” says Caroline Rigo. “We’re not going to trade that for shelf space. What we are doing is creating the space ourselves where people can get to know the brand, in the cities where that still needs to happen.”

Is further expansion on the horizon? The brand isn’t making any statements on that: “First, let’s get Antwerp right. We’ll evaluate this store over the course of years, not months, and based on what it does for the brand across the entire region, not just on its own sales. If that works out, we’ll look further.” Cent Pur Cent is part of parent company RiGorgeous, which also owns the brands i.am.klean and Take It From Jones.