By Priya Raman

Tower 28 drew nearly 2,000 visitors to its first physical storefront this fall — and sold no products inside. The space, called Sensitive Club, functioned as a community center rather than a shop, and founder and CEO Amy Liu said that was the point.

"This really is not to make money. To be honest with you, I'm pretty certain we will not make money," Liu said before the popup opened. "I know it sounds silly, but honestly, the intention here is really more love and depth of relationship."

Tower 28, a sensitive-skin beauty brand founded in 2019, ran two back-to-back popup experiences this fall. The first, a Jell-O collaboration called Jell-o-teria in Venice, California, spotlighted the brands' upcoming co-branded lip product with Jell-O-inspired frozen yogurt, exclusive merch, a raffle for a PR box, and product samples. Two days later, the brand opened Sensitive Club, where visitors could get shade-matched for the new Swipe Serum Foundation, refill bottles of the SOS Spray toner, and buy limited-edition merch — but not the products themselves.

What does the no-sales tactic change for practitioners?

Most beauty popups are built to convert. Rhode's Summer Station tour, which began in Newport, Rhode Island, in June, served mainly as a channel to sell its latest bronzer and lip products. Shinsegae Hyper Ground, a K-beauty popup running for several months this fall in a New York mall, brings more than 30 K-beauty brands together to drive discovery and purchase. Tower 28 deliberately broke from that model.

Liu traced the idea to the brand's open casting call for models with sensitive skin last year, where she watched fans meet and mingle. Two women who attended later became best friends.

"I thought, God, what a gift it is to be able to find your people in life," she said.

She described the Sensitive Club goal as "creating community amongst our community," and said learnings from the popup could build a foundation for more brand events.

The commercial context matters. According to Beauty Matter, Tower 28, which recently expanded to Sephora Middle East, is a "global nine-figure business," generating $119 million in gross merchandise value in the last year, per YipitData cited by Beauty Matter. Liu credited growth to distribution through TikTok Shop and Amazon, and to a doubled Sephora presence, from one bay to two — the equivalent of four product shelves to eight.

Retail distribution, however, creates distance between brand and buyer. Sephora partnered with Tower 28 on the Sensitive Club popup.

"It's hard to create community. But it's especially hard to create community when your relationship with your customer is, by definition, structurally disintermediated," Liu said. "It makes it even more important for us to try to have a relationship with our customer by doing these types of things, because otherwise, really, Sephora owns a relationship with that customer, not us."

Merchandise as membership

The Sensitive Club did sell merch — hoodies, hats, and tote bags — which Liu framed as identity markers rather than revenue. Visitors also received a safety-pin-shaped pin representing acceptance.

"It feels like people are maybe more excited to go to concerts, sports games. They're wanting that thing that is bespoke to that experience because so many other things have been really commoditized," she said. "My hope is that maybe somebody is wearing this and somebody else is wearing theirs, or they see someone and they're like, 'Oh, you're my person.'"

Liu tied the strategy to the brand's core message: "I want people to feel like when you're with us, we're not going to be judging your skin."

For brands that sell primarily through retail partners, the popup signals one answer to a structural problem: if the retailer owns the customer relationship, owned physical experiences are among the few ways to take it back.