Beauty veteran Carisa Janes is bringing her newest brainchildren to physical retail.
The Hourglass Cosmetics founder is opening a 2,200-square-foot concept store in SoHo, New York, where the two beauty brands she debuted in 2025 — Nature of Things and Outside In — will be housed under one roof along with a café and garden, designed in partnership with Shanghai-based design studio FOG Architecture.
“I want this to be a place for community,” said Janes of the opening. “Retail is, by nature, transactional, but by having a café and garden, we’re inviting people to stay.”
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Located at 31 Crosby Street, the store takes over the space previously occupied by lifestyle and men’s apparel brand Saturday’s, which closed its location in 2025.
The Outside In Café will feature coffees and teas starting at $4.50, plus a menu of specialty drinks including a Dirty Rose Latte and Rooibos Tonic and an assortment of pastries from local French bakeries Claude, Hungry Gnome and Bien Cuit. At 1,120 square feet, the café and Hidden Garden make up more than half the retail concept.
“I love stores, I love to shop and I love creating environments,” said Janes, who saw Hourglass open a global flagship in New York last year, months after she orchestrated a limited-time Barneys New York pop-up reviving the famed retailer alongside its former creative team.
“There’s an important discipline you discover about your own brand when you have a physical space. You have to figure out how to express your brand within four walls, and that’s not easy to do…but once you do it, it helps you out in a lot of other areas of the business.”
Exactly one year ago, Janes relaunched Nature of Things after acquiring it from its founder JP Collett. Under her stewardship, the brand now features an assortment of clean hair, body and hand products, with bestsellers including its $48 hand washes and Awakening Santal Body Wash, as well as the $72 Sea Moss & Plum Oil Volumizing Shampoo.
Original investor Gron Ventures remains a minority shareholder in Nature of Things, while Outside In, which Janes debuted last November with a $64 Silk Serum Foundation and $72 Floral Reserve Face Oil, is self-funded.
A team of seven employees works across the brands at the corporate level, while the store opening adds a retail team of 15.
“It’s [been] a luxury to have the time to be patient and kind of learn about and develop the brands,” said Janes, adding that while it wasn’t necessarily part of the original plan to house Outside In and Nature of Things under one roof, “the two brands complement each other, so they work beautifully.”
The store aims to reflect the respective visual identities of the brands, with the Nature of Things flagship featuring custom curved loofah walls and a stone basin at the entry, while the Outside In flagship emulates the products’ light-diffusing properties with frosted glass elements, stone surfaces and vanities with calibrated vertical lighting.
The retail concept also includes a dedicated Fragrance Gallery, where Outside In’s inaugural trio of eaux de parfum — called Earth After Rain, Light Language and Undiscovered Rose, priced at $260 each — will be displayed and available for purchase.
“It’s a unique way to experience fragrance,” said Janes, who has been ideating the fragrances, which were created with perfumers Frank Voelkl and Clément Gavarry, for roughly a decade and will unveil them for the first time in tandem with the opening. “Fragrance is, to me and to everyone, very powerful. It has this ability to transport you before it even hits you — it’s like music.”
In terms of near-term priorities for Outside In and Nature of Things, Janes is focused on steady product expansion and world building, in large part via this retail concept.
“It’s very important to us that the customer feels like they are discovering something new,” said Janes, adding that while wholesale is in the brands’ futures, “having the flagship gives us the ability to control the experience in a positive way, because as you grow and you scale, you do lose control. So I’m just enjoying my taking my time and agonizing over all the details. It’s torture, but I love it and I’m cherishing this time.”