Online Marketplace Melanin Grace Opens Brooklyn Store

Melanin Grace, an online marketplace addressing women of color, has opened a store in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood.

Located in Empire Stores, a bustling retail and dining destination housing food hall Time Out Market New York and Soho House-owned social club Dumbo House, Melanin Grace The Shop is the outgrowth of a holiday pop-up that ran from Black Friday to the end of December last year. When daily sales surpassed forecasts, founder Marti Moore was convinced to prolong the 500-square-foot location’s lease. “Sales are very robust,” she says.

The store fits all 275 skincare, makeup, bath and body, and wellness stockkeeping units from 30-plus brands, including AbsoluteJOI, Cheekbone Beauty, Mora Cosmetics, Dehiya Beauty, Black Girl Sunscreen and Lady Suite, that Melanin Grace’s digital marketplace carries. The retailer works with Adit, the retail matchmaking service owned by Beauty Independent parent company Indie Beauty Media Group, to assist with sourcing brands for its curation.

Opening Melanin Grace The Shop is a full-circle moment for Moore, a former marketing executive at Macy’s and Hudson’s Bay. She originally conceived of Melanin Grace as a brick-and-mortar concept in 2019 and signed a lease for a location in Brooklyn neighborhood Bedford–Stuyvesant in early 2020. Then, the pandemic happened, and she pivoted the concept to e-commerce in late 2020. She didn’t let physical experiences go entirely at that point, though, and Melanin Grace executed several pop-ups around Dumbo in 2021 and 2022. 

Melanin Grace
Melanin Grace founder Marti Moore Justin Ifill-Forbes

Moore notes Melanin Grace The Shop’s outpost at the Empire Stores complex exposes it to a more global customer base than its online business. She figures the store’s patronage is evenly split between New Yorkers and international tourists from countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany. The digital marketplace targets American women between the ages of 25 to 45. Fifteen percent of people visiting Melanin Grace The Shop are online customers, too.  

“It affords me the opportunity to speak and communicate my message of Melanin Grace to people from a very broad audience, not just New Yorkers,” says Moore. “I’m getting so much traction that it just warms my heart to know that there is a place for my brand.”

Digital sales at Melanin Grace grew 30% year-over-year in 2022, driven primarily by demand for skincare products that address uneven skin tone and dryness. With Melanin Grace The Shop facilitating discovery, sales from the physical location have outpaced those generated online, according to Moore. 

Makeup and skincare drew equal interest from in-store customers during the holidays, but makeup has since become the top attraction at Melanin Grace The Shop. Multi-use color and highlighter products are popular. As makeup demand has picked up, the store’s average order value has decreased. Moore says it stood at $75 over the holidays and is currently about $50.

“I’m getting so much traction that it just warms my heart to know that there is a place for my brand.”

Women of color are excited by Melanin Grace The Shop’s broad assortment of deep shades. Moore says, “They come in and they’re like, ‘Wow, you’ve got all the colors that I’m looking for, and I can get advice and information that is really targeted to my specific needs.’”

Moore has expanded the assortment to have additional light shades to accommodate European tourists that regularly come through Melanin Grace The Shop’s doors. She says, “I had mostly medium to deeper shades available, but there’s so many Europeans and people from other parts of the country coming into the store that I realized I had to provide a selection for them as well. Now I’m able to serve everyone.”

Insights from Melanin Grace The Shop are informing assortment decisions at Melanin Grace’s online marketplace. Highly giftable fragrance oils, candles and body care and products are selling more briskly in store than online, and Moore may remove those items from Melanin Grace’s online offering moving forward. She’s keen on bringing in premium skincare products priced from $60 to $200 into the assortment. 

She says, “Customers are asking for brands that offer premium plant-based ingredients like saffron, exotic rose oils, gold, plant stem cells and probiotics to achieve maximum results.”

The online marketplace Melanin Grace opened its first brick-and-mortar location at Empire Stores, a waterfront retail and dining complex in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood.

Melanin Grace The Shop is located within a larger 4,000 square-foot space that was once a J. Crew store. A jewelry store called Adina Eden is its companion in the space, which has ample room for brand activations and events. Events typically draw anywhere between 25 to 30 online Melanin Grace customers, but Empire Stores’ traffic tends to increase crowds and transactions. There are six events planned for May, and brow, lash and makeup application services also recently became available at Melanin Grace The Shop.

In March, the store hosted a successful event with body care brand Sade Baron. Customers pre-booked hand and arm massages, and the event moved “a ton” of products, says Moore. She remarks, “Events are very, very lucrative because they not only engage our existing customers, but they also help to draw in new ones.” 

Literally and figuratively, Moore has bigger ambitions for her brick-and-mortar business. In the next three years, she aims to move Melanin Grace The Shop to a larger location featuring aesthetician-led skincare and makeup services in Brooklyn’s busy Flatbush area. It would ideally be sizable enough to hold brand activations and community and corporate events. As Moore hunts for the perfect spot, Melanin Grace The Shop at Empire Stores is slated to remain open through the summer.

And Moore isn’t stopping in Brooklyn. She says, “I see this, in the next five years, not just being a Brooklyn retailer. I see it branching out and having Melanin Grace The Shop and Spa in other major markets.”