There’s been plenty of chatter the past week about Sephora closing its community.
This is sad news for anyone who’s been in the community space for a while.
For many years, Sephora was held up as the totemic example of a thriving brand community that wasn’t centered on customer support.
It’s genuinely hard to think of others (not impossible, mind, but certainly difficult).
Which is why its closure is worth considering.
After all, if the best-in-class example can’t thrive in the modern era, which community can? Does the past approach to building brand communities work in the new era?
Why The Sephora Forums Are Closing
While plenty of folks have mourned the loss of Sephora’s forums, surprisingly few have reflected on why they are closing.
(Note: FeverBee has consulted with Sephora several times over the years, and we were among those who recommended closure for the forums.)
Closing a community is almost always a last resort. You want to fix the problem first.
But there are some problems you simply can’t fix. And that’s what makes the Sephora community a totemic case for a different reason today.
Sephora Forums Should Be Thriving
If you look at sales figures alone, the Sephora community should be on a tear. Revenues are at record highs. There should be more people eager to discuss Sephora products than ever before.
And yet, it’s no secret that engagement in the forums has declined over the past five years.
Which raises one of two possibilities:
- Customers don’t want to talk about Sephora products anymore.
- Customers want to have those discussions elsewhere.
The first is possible, but unlikely. It’s hard to think of a reason why customers would stop wanting to talk about beauty products en masse.
This makes problem two far more likely.
The Rise Of Reddit
Whenever we face an enticing community mystery (p.s. I love this talk), it’s always helpful to look at some data. And the data in this case puts the smoking gun very clearly in the hands of third parties, notably Reddit.
Let’s examine the growth of the Sephora subreddit over the past few years. Archive.org isn’t a perfect tool, but it lets us compare snapshots of the community at different times (alas, not at identical times of year).
But taking snapshots of Reddit by year and comparing membership growth shows some rather startling results.
That’s a staggering level of growth, especially between May 2023 and Oct 2, 2024 (approximately the time when Google began diverting large amounts of traffic from other channels to Reddit).
But you can argue that figure pales in comparison to the 5m+ members the Sephora community might have. What we need isn’t just membership growth, but the level of engagement.
Let’s begin with the official community.
I can’t share the data Sephora has provided, but we can create a ‘back of the napkin’ estimate by looking at the total number of posts in the Sephora approximately a year ago (3,216,003) and subtracting that from the number today (3,184,561) and then averaging out the difference between the two dates (31442/354 days).
This gives us a post-moderated average of 89 posts per day …or approximately 621 posts per week.
As of today, May 11, 2026, the Sephora subreddit attracts 6,400 posts per week…
That’s 10x higher than the official community volume!!
That’s about as strong a smoking gun as you’re likely to see in data terms.
And this is before we factor in the post-pandemic rise of influencers, Facebook groups, and the plethora of other places where people can discuss Sephora outside of the official community.
The problem isn’t that people didn’t want to talk about Sephora; it’s that they wanted to do it in places Sephora didn’t control.
Why Are External Channels Preferred?
It’s worth looking at feedback on the closure announcement on Reddit to understand why external channels are preferred.
A (Claude) analysis put the responses into a few clear categories.
You can read this and think well, if more people knew it existed, then more people would use it.
And that’s a valid argument, but it lacks nuance. The reality is, Reddit has become the de facto place for people to discuss topics that interest them.
It overcomes the single biggest problem all non-support-centric communities face: finding a trigger to get people to visit. People are already there, and they get alerts, notifications, and prompts to visit the other subreddits they are a part of. It has a built-in trigger.
The Sephora community offered a range of unique customizations, benefits, and rewards for engagement. But ultimately, none of that came close to matching the one that members valued most: ease of use.
As I’ve written before, members are like water. They follow the path of least resistance to achieve their goals. Reddit is the path of least resistance. It’s one of those rare 5 to 7 websites people visit every day to see what’s new. Most brand communities are not.
And that’s a killer when members don’t need to visit your site to solve a problem.
Five Strategic Options
It’s good to reflect on the five strategies available to enterprise community pros right now.
- Double down on AI and focus on the community being part of the AI tools your organisation is developing?
- Focus on building a sense of belonging that AI can’t compete with?
- Optimise what you’re already doing and ignore the noise?
- Embrace ‘Community Everywhere’ and engage across multiple platforms?
- Five Strategic Exit.
Of the five, I’d much prefer that Sephora pursue option four rather than a strategic exit. But that’s easier to recommend from the outside than to implement from the inside.
That path forward isn’t always viable within unique organizational structures and constraints.
So rather than renew for another three years on an increasingly abysmal community platform, a strategic exit makes sense.
Strategies From 2010 Flounder In 2026
The reality is, times have changed. Case in point, back in 2021, a former Sephora exec moved to Athleta and tried to replicate the same Sephora template there by launching a near-identical community.
I predicted at the time it would fail, which it did.
The reason is that the strategies that succeeded in the 2010s don’t work as well in the 2020s.
Times and technology have moved on – and we need to move with them.
The Crest Of The Community Everywhere Wave
A few years ago, I gave this talk about Community Everywhere.
Essentially, members’ preferences have changed, and we now prefer to meet the majority of our engagement needs on platforms outside a brand’s direct control. For many brands, especially those with non-support goals (loyalty, sales, retention, etc.), the new game was to engage in and support ecosystems comprising different groups, platforms, leaders, and more.
This approach is harder to measure and organize (it doesn’t fit neatly into most departments), but also the most aligned with current audience preferences.
And as strategists, it’s always critical to go with the tide vs. fight against it.
Now, the crest of the community everywhere is beginning to crash against some of the larger rocks in the community industry, and Sephora shutting down its forums is the result.
The Blockbuster Problem
There have been and will be some folks who cling to a purist idea of community – a place which a brand controls and where you (theoretically) own your data.
And there will be a few who will look at this Sephora news with a thought of;
“Why didn’t you try [x]?”
And, I’ll bet pretty good money. Whatever X is, it has already been considered, tried, and/or incorporated. The problem isn’t the engagement activities the Sephora team was or wasn’t doing. The problem is quite simply that the forums are on the wrong side of trends.
I remember reading an article many years ago about him closing his Blockbuster video store. Everyone had some advice about how to save the store. Video clubs, membership schemes, social media advertising, etc., and yet, if it were that easy, there would be more than one Blockbuster store in the world.
The only thing that would’ve saved Blockbuster was to acquire Netflix and change the entire business model.
There are some trends you simply can’t fight. You can either completely revamp your approach to incorporate them or admit it’s a losing battle.
The same is true here. No brand community will last forever. They rise and fall like the tide over years, potentially decades. The best run lasts for decades. And Sephora lasted for decades. That’s an incredible achievement.
Can Forum-Centric Communities Survive?
I made similar comments about forums during a debate with Marius at Higher Logic’s Superforum in Washington, DC, a few weeks ago.
I noticed in the poll responses, one skeptical attendee said
“People have been predicting the death of forums for over a decade!”
Which is valid, but also misses the point.
It’s not that binary. It’s not about death (non-existence of forums) vs. life (existence of forums).
There will always be forums in some capacity (people still use videotapes, too!), and there are plenty of degrees of nuance along the continuum between the two extremes.
It’s about the increase or decrease in their popularity and, subsequently, when and where they are the best tool to achieve our goals.
And over the past decade, we’ve seen a sharp decline in the popularity of forums for most engagement-related activities.
For customer support, forums are fantastic. They may even see an AI-driven revival as authoritative and useful sources of information.
But for almost any other needs, the Community Everywhere wave is about to crash upon them and carry the remnants out to sea.
The Community Everywhere Era Is Here To Stay
If you want a simple takeaway from all of this, it’s this.
You need to keep your community fully aligned with your audience’s needs and preferences. And when those needs and preferences shift, so does your approach. That often means changing the technology, goals, or approach. But the moment you try to cling to what you have, seek control, or try to fight against the changing tide is the moment your community begins its long journey towards irrelevance.
And if you want help knowing if your community is aligned with your audience’s needs and preferences, drop us a line.
Good luck!