TRENDS
FROM GRASSROOTS TO GLOBAL: How Mecca is championing change by Jo-Anne Hui-Miller
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n the beauty industry, Mecca is known as the much-loved retail powerhouse that has curated and nurtured some of the world’s most coveted brands, then shared them with customers across Australia and New Zealand and watched them flourish in the spotlight. But in the same way that the beauty giant works closely with brands and gives them a platform to connect with customers, it also showcases the incredible work of more than 20 not-forprofit partners through its community arm and online platform M-Power. “As a workplace, Mecca is full of people who are creative problem solvers and deeply motivated to see other people shine, whether that means I’m going to give you that magical Mecca experience in-store, or I’m delivering the very best education experience around a particular brand. It’s a very nurturing, incredibly uplifting environment,” explains Lisa Keenan, executive director of M-Power at Mecca. “M-Power is just a very natural extension of what Mecca has always done for its customers. It’s turning its customer-obsessive culture into a community-obsessive culture.” M-Power supports a diverse mix of changemakers that range from grassroots to global, but they all have the same purpose – to advance gender equality, an issue very close to Mecca’s heart. This group of organisations is known as the M-Collective. There’s teen mental health charity Flourish Girl; CAMFED, a pan-African movement that supports girls going to school; Stars Foundation, which supports Indigenous girls and women across Australia; The Man Cave, which supports mental health for boys and men – and plenty of others. “We’ve got 8000 people working in our organisation, most of them women. And we have about five million or so customers – the vast majority of whom are women. Because of the way the world works, a good deal of those people will have encountered inequality or discrimination at some point,” says Keenan. 30| RETAIL BEAUTY SUMMER 2023
“If you haven’t already thought about that, that’s sobering. If your motivation in life is to help people to look, feel and be their best like we do at Mecca, then you can’t accept a world in which the structural impediments to that are so real for so many people. And if we don’t get behind changing that, then who’s going to do it?”
A CHAMPION FOR CHANGEMAKERS In the modern retail landscape, it’s now commonplace for retail businesses to run one-off community initiatives or donate money to a charity, especially during certain times of the year, like Reconciliation Week, Mardi Gras, or International Women’s Day. But at Mecca, supporting social causes is an integral part of the business and it’s a consistent and long-term effort. And in the same way that the retailer works hand-in-hand with its beauty brands to help them flourish, M-Power is a champion for its M-Collective members. One of the ways that M-Power helps these non-profit partners is by providing them with untied funding, giving the not-for-profits the freedom to use that investment however they best see fit. “We don’t say that we’re just going to give you money to open up a shelter or launch a website. We give you money over a number of years and we’re going to back your strategy and your vision,” explains Keenan. “We don’t care whether you use the money to buy toilet roll, pay salaries or send 10 girls through school. It really is about being true collaborators and supporters.”
