A year ago, when I sat down to talk to Michael Tompkins he and his board were promoting their new Life in Balance Spa with Clarins and announcing plans to roll Miraval out in up to six new locations, making it one of – if not the – biggest rollout of a destination spa brand ever in the US.

At the time, Philippe Bourguignon, chair of Miraval, said he believed one of the most exciting opportunities in the spa industry was to develop spas for the proximity market, commenting: “We we think we can get half our clientele from within a two hour drive.”

Now, a year later, these plans have moved on apace, with a dream deal signed for the development of a second Miraval to open at Natirar just an hour from New York City in 2015 and the likely announcement of a third US site in spring 2014. The company is also planning international expansion as a result of growing awareness of the brand.

With all this high level activity underway, Tompkins – who has just taken the chair of ISPA – is in great spirits. “I’ve been assigned by my board to find five locations for new Miravals in the US,” he says. “At the same time, we’re continuing to evaluate a number of different projects outside this country: we’d love to have a Miraval in Europe, for example and are working on this now.”

Tompkins attributes the growing international awareness of the Miraval brand to Clarins’ hard work on the PR front and the skincare brand has been leveraging its international press contacts to raise the profile of the Tucson-based resort: “Miraval wasn’t known outside the US,” says Tompkins, “but we now have a growing profile and the proportion of visitors from overseas – although still small – is increasing. We were just nominated for a World Spa Award in Spain – something which would never have happened before we joined forces with Clarins.”

Trading & profitability
The tie-up has obviously worked well for both parties and has matured into a strong working relationship. Tompkins is complementary about the role Clarins has played in the success of the spa: “When I tell you our retailing is up 54 per cent year on year, you’ll see how well it’s working,” he says. “Miraval’s trading is up 10 per cent year on year and the spa is up 30 per cent. I attribute this growth to the innovative services we’ve created and 70 per cent of those have been developed with Clarins products.”

I ask Tompkins why some spas seem reluctant to take on retail brands alongside spa brands and he gives a robust reply: “When I came into the spa market, I was told spas had to use only niche brands because they were more exclusive and because customers wouldn’t be able to find the products in stores near home, so they’d call back to buy more. That’s what I was trained to believe.

“But in fact, we’ve found the exact opposite,” he says. “Because our guests know and trust Clarins, they come out of their treatment and they purchase the product. And frankly, I don’t care where they buy it after they leave here, because the truth is that when we had exclusive brands, people never called back to buy again anyway, in spite of our efforts with telesales.”

So where does this perception come from? Tompkins says it’s a myth perpetuated by competitors: “A lot of the other skincare vendors haven’t gone down the retail route,” he says, “so exclusivity is their pitch, and the industry listens. When I first started in spa, I assumed all this information we were hearing from suppliers was the truth – the unfortunate thing is it isn’t the truth. The best decision we ever made here at Miraval was going with the Clarins line. It’s been a benefit beyond retail sales because of the comfort our guests feel in the brand.”

Strategic alliance
Ghislain Waeyaert, director of Clarins’ spa activities, says the tie up is wholehearted and supported from the highest level: “From the beginning it’s been a partnership based on respect and strong relationships, which is the way Clarins treats everyone, from employees to suppliers and customers to partners,” he says. “Clarins is still a privately owned business and our CEO, Christian Courtin-Clarins, has visited Miraval on a number of occasions to talk to the team and explain his vision – you don’t get many CEOs of US$1.6bn turnover companies doing that.”

“Miraval is one of the top destination spas in the US,” says Waeyaert. “It was important to us in the rollout of Clarins as a global spa brand to be able to prove that our professional and retail product lines work within a high-end spa operation such as this.”

Staff buy-in
Tompkins believes the buy-in of the Miraval staff has been an essential part of the success of the Clarins launch. The products were blind tested by therapists who were offered the choice of three professional lines. Once the decision was made, literally every member of the resort’s staff was trained by Clarins. Tompkins says he’s read guest feedback forms which say ‘I was talking with one of your landscapers and they mentioned I should try a Clarins facial’. “It cost a lot of money in labour to train the entire team,” he says, “but it was worth it because we got everyone’s buy-in.

So plans are on track at Miraval: “We routinely win 10-15 awards a year,” says Tompkins. “The year we relaunched the spa we won 21 and this year we’d won 35 by October, including Best US Spa in the SpaFinder Crystal Awards.”