Story of MECCA

Australia’s first-ever beauty festival, MECCALAND, bursts onto the scene — selling out in 45 minutes, and featuring beauty gurus, world-leading MUAs, coveted brands, glitter cannons and more.

MECCA M-PACT gains momentum championing recycling solutions and sustainable packaging and embedding better habits into our work lives.

For International Women’s Day, we partner with artist Atong Atem, whose artwork ‘Self Portrait on Mercury’ adorned a limited-edition To Save Face Sunscreen, with proceeds supporting The Hunger Project to empower women and girls.

And, Melbourne Central has a makeover with a massive MAXIMA launch.

MECCALAND returns, this time in Sydney, with a few more big names like Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Uzo, Zoë Foster Blake, Flex Mami and more to celebrate with us.

“The in-store experience has always been the focus for us for our customers and MECCALAND really is a super-sized, blown-up extension of that. Fun, with a real carnival and festival feeling — a playground for beauty lovers, where they can play, learn and completely immerse themselves in the world of beauty.” Jo Horgan

We also opened our 100th store in Rundle Mall, Adelaide, a key milestone!

With over 100 stores temporarily closed, we found new ways to stay close to our community. We launched MECCA TV to keep beauty inspiration flowing, MECCAversity to keep our teams learning, and MECCA Chit Chat to keep our community connected. We FaceTimed customers for virtual consults, sent surprise hampers to frontline workers, and set up a pop-up school in Support Centre for team members’ kids. Jo also wore trainers for a year to remind her to keep outrunning the pandemic.

And our standout 2020 accomplishment? Launching the biggest beauty store of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere (at the time) in the former Gowings building in Sydney.

After 18 months of tweaks, the MECCA App lands — letting our community browse, save, shop and even scan products from anywhere.

We launched our first official podcast, MECCA Talks, which debuted at #1 on Apple and Spotify charts. It opened a whole new channel for conversation, storytelling, and connection.

And we weren’t done yet! Our first-ever virtual brand launch went live in 2021 – for none other than Charlotte Tilbury, darling!

Having achieved its goal of supporting 10,000 girls with their secondary education, MECCA M-POWER relaunches with a $25 million commitment over five years, marking the culmination of a movement we’d been quietly building since 2011. From mentoring to product to policy, M-POWER is how we use our business – and beauty – as a force for gender equality.

The NGV Women in Design Commission by Mexican artist Tatiana Bilbao is named the inaugural commission on International Women's Day.

As a full circle moment, Jo gets to realise her dream of meeting Jim Collins, the inspiration behind so much of MECCA’s approach to business. Our new ambition becomes “to be the world’s most loved beauty destination”.