Gap Inc. is launching beauty across its brands, but with a saturated beauty retail scene, is there actually a gap in the market for yet another player?

As a refresher, Gap Inc. announced that a curated assortment of beauty and personal care brands will launch at 150 Old Navy stores this fall featuring Old Navy-branded products as well as other brands, with around 45 stores offering dedicated shops-in-shop and beauty associates. In 2026, the company plans to scale its Old Navy beauty business, while beauty will be rolled out at Gap, beginning with fragrance.

As part of this, the retail group tapped former Estée Lauder Cos. exec John Demsey as an executive director to advise on the beauty expansion and respected Nordstrom veteran Deb Redmond as general manager.

Speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference earlier this month, Gap Inc.’s CEO Richard L. Dickson said: “The beauty business is a phenomenally exciting business. It’s one of the fastest growing and most resilient categories in the U.S. It’s expected to surpass $100 billion in 2025. Within the context of how beauty is done, mass beauty represents about 60 percent of that number. So, our value proposition speaks well to the core business as to what it can represent. It is a margin driver, high margin business. It’s a traffic driver and it attracts younger consumers.”

He added that while there’s already some small pockets of beauty within Old Navy and a historical fragrance collection at Gap, he intends to “start to invest in those categories and start to build them up as true businesses within our brand and within our portfolio.”

Gap Inc. joins a crowded market of apparel retailers in the mid- and lower-tier ranges, who have been diving into beauty at a steady clip, including H&M, Primark, Zara, Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie.

Nevertheless, industry sources told WWD that there is space for Gap — as long as it plays to its strengths.

“I’m in the store to accessorize and create a new fashion moment for myself,” said Wendy Liebmann, chief executive officer of WSL Strategic Retail. “So, now I need this lip gloss or eye shadow. But the challenge with beauty, is that you’re either in it or you’re not. It has to be innovative and connected to fashion in a legitimate way.”

For Gap to win, industry watchers believe nostalgia is key. Lindsay Ullman, a cofounder of beauty consultancy View From 32, said: “From what I’ve read, they’re coming back with some of these scents from the ’90s, early 2000s — the good old days. There’s such a desire happening for nostalgia and people are looking for something positive and longing for better times. So I think it’s catering to future consumers kind of quite nicely. And obviously you have the Juicy Tubes example that Lancôme did, which was incredible.”

Emma Vernon, a popular fragrance influencer, is, for one, nostalgic for Gap fragrance. “I can picture the day. I was in Gap with my mom, and I was in third or fourth grade. We were in line by the register, and they had these travel size cans of different scents. And that’s when I saw Gap Dream, which is a freesia scent, and I was obsessed with it, and my mom bought it for me,” she said. “I just remember putting on perfume before school, and it was like, this is what my grandmother does.”

It’s also not a bad time to reenter fragrance, with the subcategory continuing to boom. On the mass side, fragrance jumped 17 percent in the first half of the year, according to Circana.

Consultant Ed Burstell agreed that nostalgia is certainly a helpful entry point, but if Gap Inc. wants to be a serious player it will have to push its offering further. “These Millennials would love to smell the fragrances,” he said. “The easy path to take is to recreate the hits and satisfy a demand that’s built on nostalgia. But if you want to really expand the category, that’s a different proposition. They can certainly do it, but it’s going have to stand on its own.”

Like how Vernon picked up her first Gap fragrance, having beauty in the checkout line is also a key strategy in Old Navy’s rollout of beauty.

“It’s impulse shopping. Don’t know you need to have it, but have to have it kind of moment,” Ullman said, adding that this is a smart customer acquisition strategy for consumers who may be shopping at more approachable price points and looking for smaller items.

Indeed, in its early days, the expectation is for Gap Inc.’s beauty play to boost basket size and not to drive traffic from beauty-specific shoppers.

“When you see an Anthropologie or Urban Outfitters, and how they’ve created this personal care and beauty space, they clearly understand who the shopper is and how to entice them,” added Liebmann. “It’s the impulse, it’s the add-something-to-basket. Unless they create a major beauty brand, which maybe they’ll do. But I think it’s going to be a little surprise at the end of the checkout line.”

And when it comes to tapping into younger shoppers, Gap Inc. will have to take cues from its fashion playbook.

“I don’t think there’s any question about how iconic so much of Gap’s recent advertising has been,” said Ziad Ahmed, head of Next Gen at United Talent Agency’s marketing division. “As it relates to resonating with a Gen Z cohort and demographic strategic partnerships with Katseye, Troye Sivan, and a lot of ‘It’ girls — Gap has been at the forefront of what culture marketing looks like.”

Ahmed posited that Gap will have to rev that marketing engine — albeit more frequently — to win in beauty.

“Fashion as a category revolves around the fall and spring seasons. Beauty has a very different expectation of volume, as it pertains to content,” he said. “For any brand to be successful in the beauty space as opposed to the fashion space, there needs to be this embrace of speed and volume that might be scary to a slower-moving marketer. That expectation might exist in other categories, but it is essential in beauty.”