Sephora's 46-Million-Member Loyalty Play: Feel Known, Not Tracked

More than 90% of Sephora's sales come from members of its Beauty Insider loyalty program, a base of more than 46 million people that the retailer treats as its richest first-party data asset. Emmy Brown Berlind, SVP and general manager of loyalty at Sephora, laid out the strategy in a conversation with Matt Britton as the program approaches its 20th anniversary.

Her framing of the market shift is direct: a new retail battleground is the AI assistant deciding what to recommend before a shopper ever visits a store or site. That shift, she argues, makes loyalty more valuable, not less.

What does that change for loyalty practitioners?

Berlind's answer is that loyalty must feel personal, not transactional. The program's birthday gift has expanded from a single reward into multiple options, including points, because clients value choosing for themselves. The broader goal is recognition rather than a mechanical reward for spending again.

Personalization also turns rewards into discovery. Beauty Insider Challenges use limited-time tasks with point rewards, personalized on purchase history — for example, prompting a member who has never bought a hair product at Sephora to explore that category. More than 30% of clients have participated in a challenge since the format launched in 2023.

Where do stores still fit?

Stores remain central to the model. Berlind points to highly trained beauty advisors, discovery-oriented layouts, and sample rewards that let loyalty members try something new. Her lesson for retailers and marketers: digital convenience does not automatically replace physical retail when the store creates expertise, exploration and value that online channels struggle to reproduce.

How does Sephora use AI without crossing into "creepy"?

Berlind's standard is straightforward — apply AI where it creates practical value for the client. Tools such as Beauty Skin Scan improve shade and skincare recommendations. The AI Beauty Chat remains optional. The technology earns its place by making the experience easier, she says, not by showing off what it knows.

What about agentic shopping?

Sephora does not expect every beauty journey to begin on Sephora.com. The brand wants to be wherever people are shopping for beauty, which now includes AI-powered environments. Concretely, Sephora has:

• An app inside ChatGPT
• A Google Agentic Checkout partnership that lets consumers discover and purchase without leaving those platforms

The strategy is less about protecting a destination and more about protecting relevance, according to Berlind.

Client-friendly decisions are not always the easy ones

Berlind's leadership philosophy returns to a question she encountered early at Sephora: "Is this client friendly?" The answer can create operational complexity. Birthday gifts, rewards and loyalty experiences require coordination across multiple departments. She argues that advocating for what clients genuinely want is part of the job, even when the simpler internal answer would be easier to execute.

Berlind has spent more than a decade at Sephora across innovation, content, commerce and loyalty, after earlier roles at Clorox and Yes To. That range shapes her view of how stores, digital experiences, rewards, creators, personalization and AI-powered tools connect. For loyalty operators, the message is that a 20-year-old program stays relevant by combining first-party data with human advisors and a willingness to follow the shopper into whatever interface sells beauty next.