Liberty London has its eye on global expansion. But the iconic London department store has no plans to open a second location — instead, Liberty is spreading the brand through its in-house perfume line.
Liberty first launched its beauty brand, LBTY, in October 2023 through a collection of five perfumes inspired by prints in Liberty’s extensive textile archive. Nearly two years after the initial launch, Liberty launched the collection in the North American market in September via a distribution network that includes the likes of department store chain Neiman Marcus and Manhattan home goods store ABC Carpet & Home.
“Our strategy is to go where luxury fragrance shoppers are looking to buy fragrances,” said Laura Simpson, managing director of LBTY Beauty. “We launched online with Neiman Marcus — they have had a fast-growing fragrance category. And we launched in just four doors of Bluemercury, because we [focused on] some really lovely doors.”
According to Simpson, the LBTY perfume line has seen double-digit sales growth in the past year, leading the company to pursue international expansion in 2025, beginning with perfume retailers in the E.U. Simpson said Liberty has plans beyond fragrance and will add two additional categories to the LBTY beauty brand in 2026.
It is not uncommon for major retailers to produce their own in-house brand. But whereas retailers like Sephora and Target use their in-house private-label brands to offer lower-priced versions of popular product categories, Liberty envisions its fragrance line, whose scents retail for up to $320 a bottle, as competing with other luxury perfume powerhouses outside of Liberty’s flagship store.
“The fragrance is not the private label of the store. The fragrance is developed to be a global fragrance — a project that’s inside of the brand,” said Liberty CEO Adil Mehboob-Khan.
All of the LBTY scents were developed by perfumers at Swiss fragrance giant Dsm-Firmenich, including Pierre Negrin and Honorine Blanc. LBTY’s best-selling scent, the woody-fig Zephirine, was created by Frank Voelkl, also the nose behind hits like Le Labo Santal 33 and Glossier You. A travel-sized version of the scent gets the first slot in Liberty’s 2025 beauty advent calendar, which retails for $365 and, according to Mehboob-Khan, is a major sales driver for the store each year.
“Beauty is always the top or the second-best performing category,” he said. “And inside of [beauty], fragrance and the advent calendar are always the two drivers of the numbers.”
Beyond creating its own fragrances, Liberty has increased the footprint of its fragrance counter in response to the growing perfume boom. In 2024, the store opened its purposefully low-tech Fragrance Lounge to offer customers a more intimate fragrance shopping experience away from the main shopping floor. It is not the only major retailer to do so: In September, Nordstrom remodeled the beauty section of its New York City location with an expanded fragrance offering.
While some analysts have speculated that fragrance’s exponential growth may soon cool, Mehboob-Khan and Simpson are confident that the category’s post-Covid boom will keep growing. Market analysts Circana found that the category remained the fastest-growing beauty sector in the U.S. market for the first half of 2025. According to Circana, prestige fragrance sales grew 6%, with new brands representing one-third of total fragrance dollar gains.
“We don’t see any dampening [in sales]. Especially at the luxury price, [fragrance] is continuing to grow,” said Simpson.
But even with the Liberty brand as a whole growing via fragrance, Mehboob-Khan said the company has no plans to open a second store beyond its original storefront, which has operated in London’s West End for over a century.
“I always say, maybe the magic [of Liberty] is there is only one,” said Mehboob-Khan.
