A first look at Boots’ wellness flagship in Covent Garden

In April, Boots announced it was rolling out a totally new concept for its stores and tomorrow the brand’s new format flagship will open in London’s Covent Garden.

The 28,524 square foot store opens at 11am on Thursday and the first 200 customers through its doors will get a goody bag stuffed with hero products from Josh Wood, Urban Decay, Bybi, No7, and many more.

The first 100 will also get a free pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses.

“Our new Covent Garden store starts a journey of reinventing Boots for the future,” said Sebastian James, Boots Managing Director in a statement. “The store is full of exciting beauty brands, ideas for living well and services to help you get better, all with the great care that Boots colleagues give. We will learn what people love and want from this shop and this will help us shape a blueprint for our whole 2,500 store estate.”

Here’s what to expect from the new Boots Covent Garden:

A new emphasis on wellness

The new store will be home to Boots’ biggest ever wellness range, with 36 new brands and over 300 new lines, including sustainable toiletries, eco-friendly sanitary protection and CBD products. An ‘Innovation Studio’ will house cutting-edge health and fitness technology like FitBit, while eco brand ‘Beauty Kitchen’ will let customers refill their empties with its natural skincare products.

Customers will be able to refill their water bottles at a ‘Rehydration Station’, and will be deterred from snacking on those high sugar snacks and energy drinks, by no longer including them as part of the Meal Deal.

Beauty revamp: colour consultations and a mask bar

Covent Garden will have exciting high street firsts in beauty including Josh Wood Colour Consultations and a La Roche-Posay skincare tool. The store will be home to exciting new brands like Fenty Beauty and Urban Decay, and a dedicated skincare zone with cutting edge brands like BYBI and Skyn Iceland.

Due to the rise in popularity of masks, Boots will be launching its first Mask Bar. A new beauty playground of trend zones, discovery areas and live demonstrations, will be crewed by brand agnostic Boots Beauty Specialists. Customers can then show off their new buys in a special Instagram zone.

A friendlier pharmacy

They’ve reworked the pharmacy area to make it a warmer and more inviting space, with seating and carpets and the pharmacy will offer two new services – UTI Test & Treat which allows pharmacists to prescribe antibiotics without the need to see a doctor and the new Skin Scanning Service, a first of its kind in the UK to help people understand and treat skin conditions.

Bye bye bags

Two days ago Boots announced it would be completely phasing out all plastic bags by 2020, and Covent Garden is the first store in which there will be no single use plastic bags available whatsoever. The old bags have been replaced with more environmentally friendly unbleached paper bags.

The switch to paper bags across Covent Garden and 52 other stores will take more than 900 tonnes of plastic out of the environment each year.