Estee Lauder x Victoria Beckham | MAC x Selena Updates
Estee Lauder x Victoria Beckham Collection
Estee Lauder x Victoria Beckham
NET-A-PORTER, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and The Bay have launched the collection this morning. As of this posting, I have only seen the Modern Mercury Highlighter in stock on NET-A-PORTER and The Bay.
Edited at 9:23AM PST: Reader LaMaitresse noted the collection is at The Bay as well.
MAC x Selena Collection
MAC x Selena
The collection is supposed to be available today at maccosmetics.com for all customers. MAC updated press information yesterday stating that the collection will be available in all stores on October 6th. (I’d still double-check and call your local store, if you can, especially if it’s a long drive.) Retailers like Nordstrom, Macy’s, Dillards, Bloomingdale’s, and Saks are supposed to have the collection online on October 3rd, per MAC’s tweet below:
Details on #MACSelena. pic.twitter.com/iC1ZJfBcKq
— MACcosmetics (@MACcosmetics) October 1, 2016
So the MAC experience was as disastrous, if not more so, than what happened on the 28th… Woke up in time to see the Selena collection launch and then dealt with page after page timing out. You expect a multi-million dollar company to do better than this. As someone who works in IT, I KNOW these issues never should have happened. MAC is either that uninvested in their IT infrastructure, or they do it on purpose to drive up hype. Lots of other cosmetic companies have resolved high volume traffic issues… Sephora, Too Faced, TheBalm…. This is so ridiculous. I can’t buy from them anymore. >_<
Yeah, it seems like the MAC site is completely overwhelmed, and the collection–last I looked–said coming soon still. I know that a lot of people do not like the idea of “waiting rooms” or queuing, but I’ve always preferred it over refreshing and having pages load slowly or intermittently! At least I can get in line and do something else while I wait.
I definitely agree, Christine, MAC needs to implement the”waiting room” method! Because today’s fiasco on their site was utterly UNFORGIVABLE. Between the 101 issues on Wednesday, and far worse today, I am not confident in their online site at all. Now, I feel much more inclined to either wait for products to hit their B&M stores or counters. My customer confidence in their handling of LE collections and collabs has been shattered. A “waiting room” feature would have certainly alayed our collective customers anxiety, stress, disappointment and aggravation this morning!
agreed! i wish they did that. i woke up early, kept refreshing the page, including my login page to make sure i was still logged in in case i couldn’t purchase anything. only a few things were available to purchase around 8:30am est, and i was able to snag como la flor & dreaming of you lipsticks, but amor prohibido & the other products still said coming soon. eventually i went thru the whole glitchy process where i thought i was able to add things to my bag, but then i couldn’t even access the bag to checkout. i checked every hour on the hour to see if i could get in, but it was just a hot mess. i eventually went back on hours later to find EVERYTHING was sold out. i was upset that the site couldn’t handle all the traffic since they hyped up the collection so much (that in itself is quite a shock to me bc lately mac hasn’t hyped up any LE collections recently – i kinda thought the trolls collection was gonna be gone in a short amount of time, but there’s still plenty in stock). mac (and even the consumers) should’ve been prepared for the site to be slow bc of the hype. and again, i wish they put in a queue-waiting-line where you had to wait to have access, that way the site will run smooth for those shopping. but c’est la vie. i’m pretty satisfied with the 2 lipsticks i was able to quickly buy. hopefully i’ll be able to get to the mac store in my mall on the 6th to get some other products, but idk anymore. perhaps i’ll look into your dupes.
Hey Caitlin,
I just updated the post to include a tweet from MAC’s official account, but the gist is they are going to try and restock the official site but more importantly, made it much clearer that it will be available at all retailers, both online and at stores, for the U.S. They are still saying “select” for Canada, and then “later this month” for international.
Christine, I just wanted to let everyone know that the thebay.com in Canada just launched the Victoria Beckham collection. I believe The Bay ships world wide, and with the Canadian dollar being about 25 cents less, perhaps a good deal for people? They accept PayPal too, if that’s any help as well, and all major credit cards.
Perfect! Thank you so much, LaMaitresse. I will add that info to the post 🙂
Hmmm. Nordstrom still shows highlighter as not being available. I wonder if they will update to add it or if they are not going to carry that product out of the lineup.
I think they may have already sold out 🙁
But it never came up on their site. I searched all this morning! 🙁
When I go to the collection page (where they have all the products listed), the highlighter shows up but says “Product not available,” which is usually what I see when a product has sold out – at least in the past that has been true!
Maybe so but I was on the site from about 4 AM this morning and didn’t see it. I detest these LE situations and don’t know why I bother. I can’t risk not buying from a site that doesn’t allow returns because many highlighters look sick on me. Not going to throw away money on this.
I wish I could be more helpful – just wanted to pass on what I know from past experiences! 🙁
My highlighter came in yesterday from Selfridges! It’s wonderful on my fair skin. Shipping was worth it. Still thinking about the eyeshadows….
Got the VB highlighter! So bleeping excited!
Yay!!
I wasn’t able to get a thing and have lost patience with the site. Maybe I’ll just wait for it in stores. Sob!
I’ve been struggling all day with the MAC site. I somehow managed to snag a lipstick at 7 am CST but the other items weren’t live yet. I got the purple eyeshadow around 2 pm, but the lip gloss and a few other items including half of the eyeshadows weren’t live yet. Now the lipgloss is sold out (apparently I had it in my cart but I couldn’t get to my cart to check out before it sold out) and I’m sitting in my cart with a couple more items waiting to check out for the last 30 minutes. It’s is just stuck now and won’t let me checkout with PayPal or on their own site. It’s been so frustrating!
Thanks for the update, Christine! I just ordered the highlighter from NET-A-PORTER. So excited I was able to get one!!!
Me too. I caved in. If it ships in three days, then it will arrive before buying from Saks. Sometimes it benefits to be oatient.
I do genuinely believe that this morning I woke up in shoppers H3LL. Wednesday may have been a nightmare of fairly epic proportions, but it had NOTHING on today! MAC failed on a level of which no polite words would suffice. I woke up on time. Got on their site. Refreshing until it went live. Put Techno Cumbia in my cart, already to check out. Went to pay and it showed the Bidi Bidi Bom Bom gloss in my cart instead! I went back to get Techno Cumbia, and it would NOT react when I hit put in bag!!! Called CS, they said their site crashed, try again in a half hour, I did. Same mierda!!! Called again. Was AGAIN told site crashed!!! “Try again in 25 to 30 minutes”. I did. Techno Cumbia was SOLD OUT!!!! ???
MAC’s Online sucks!!!!
On Thursday, I now have to get up redonkulously early and head to the mall. Which having been told by their “new” mgrs., will allow only 20 in at one time and will have security guards inside the store. Aaaarrrrrgghh!!!
~Rant over~
Nancy, I was thinking about you this morning, wondering if you got the Selena powder, and saw your rant. I saw a swatch of that Fotos shadow on another blog today, thought it was prettier than I thought, and tried to get it. The MAC website was a hot mess!!! Even worse than it was on the 28th. Everything was already sold out except for a few products. And if you clicked a button, it took like 20 min for anything to happen, and sometimes nothing did! I kept clicking, did stuff around the house, came back, stillllll clocking. After multiple tries, finally got to checkout, and it wouldn’t let me checkout. I think that’s the only reason why it didn’t sell out sooner was because people couldn’t frickin’ checkout! After like 2 hrs, it emptied my cart and told me it was sold out. It’s ok though because at least I was able to get the Selena shadow on the 28th. But I can’t imagine how many mad-as-hell Selena fans there must be out there, and they are going to be storming the stores on Thurs 🙁
Exactly Katherine! Biggest, ugliest mess of what MAC *knew* would be an ultra high demand collection. Especially within the Latina community! MAC’s Facebook page is filled with a literal CROWD of extremely p*ssed Selena fans from every racial/ethic group, but obviously, mostly us diehard Selena fans who were so inspired by her rise to fame in an exclusively male dominated genre of Latin music. Yes, we are fuming!!!! Now MAC is saying that they are going to restock at some point, but it will take time. And sadly, ALREADY on eBay, those pend*jos are selling her lipsticks at $120-400!!!!???
The messaging on this has been super frustrating 🙁
Oh, I definitely believe it! Have you seen their FB page? It’s unreal how poorly MAC orchestrated this collex launch.
I’m guessing that originally it was going to be a smaller launch, and that’s why the press materials say select stores, but at some point, they decided to widen distribution to all stores… and I could only get that confirmed at the last minute. Even still, MAC’s FB posted today the same thing as the press release – online today and in select stores on the 6th! I was like, “Wait, did it change again?!” And then their tweet today said all stores and retailers (like a normal MAC launch)…
I get the feeling MAC isn’t improving their website experience ON PURPOSE because they want to keep the collections hyped up and give off the vibe of being ~exclusive~. Someone on twitter described it as the MAC business model and I actually loled. Accurate!!!
And I am wondering if there are MAC employees who are doing the reselling on eBay. I have seen other people on twitter and Instagram wondering that same thing.
The launch today was a joke. Didn’t they publicly state the other day that this was their biggest launch ever? It’s one thing for a company like Kylie Cosmetics to have crashes and items selling out thisfast, but that’s a new company and it didn’t even take them long to figure out how to fix these issues. MAC is an established and successful company, and they should be embarrassed by what they allowed to happen today.
I’m hoping to purchase from Nordstrom online on Monday or in store.
Do you have any idea if any of the Europe countries will launch Selena collection? Like UK
I know it is going to some international locations, but the press release is really sparse on international info, just “October 6th” at select locations internationally.
Didn’t I say that I thought cos did the early info so they could forecast the demand? Clearly I gave them too much credit. These are Estee Lauder cos. Major corporate entities. You cannot tell me that they are unable to hire mbas, etc. to run projection models of the demand, and their ops mfg accordingly. Somehow, this sniffs…but not outright stinks…of a deliberate action. One thing is certain: this cannot have been fun for the order fulfillers, either. Take that amount of stress for a low wage job? Forget it. I’d quit. And if there ever were a major red flag that a major IT overhaul is overdue this is it. This was shameful. And I did not play. I never will again. My sympathies to the legions of fans who have been totally deflated. Think of the young girls who grew up with Selena as a lasting cultural icon they could share with their parents and community…and just wanted some Selena as their first real makeup. It makes you cry.
I am just glad I was able to get a purchase a couple of items (Selena eye shadow/Dreaming of You lipstick) during the MAC select presale. I tried to grab the blush and the brush this morning but the website was crazy! I doubt that I will go to my Macy’s next week though. I live in SoCal and I know for a fact the line outside the store will be crazy. I just don’t have the patience for it. I am so over how MAC conducts business on these limited edition releases. They really need to get their act together, seriously. I will be content with what I was able to get online and continue to watch the movie Selena which is airing on VHF this evening. My husband just walked in and says “how many more times will you watch that movie!”. It is one of my all time favorite movies that I can I never get tired of watching. 🙂
Edit: “I am just glad I was able to “purchase” a couple of items. I wish there was an edit function on this site. LOL!!
The problem at the MAC site wasn’t a crummy system- it was those darn “bots” and resellers that plague every limited release on the planet.
MAC has a “quantity of four” limit usually, and I’m pretty sure it would have been in effect for the Selena collection.
Normal buyers simply can’t compete with the bots. They hijack a companies website and overwhelm their system with orders which is why you have to fight like crazy to get in.
Waiting rooms or “in queue” aren’t effective deterrents to the bot buyers either. As someone who stalks first releases from sneakers to makeup to fashion, I can assure you the best and probably only effective way to combat this issue is to applaud companies that put in bot deterrents by offering lotteries or who like Sephora, pay to get a list of known or suspected resellars web addresses.
They then go in a cancel orders that are deemed suspicious which is why you can often return to sold out collections and snag the occasional item once it’s returned to online stock.
MAC did the best move possible by announcing that the collection will be available at numerous sites in a couple days. But it will absolutely be popular even with a variety of sellers so get in there early if you really want it.
And as far as the Victoria Beckman collection goes- if you want it, you best order it soon because all available stock has shipped to retailers. It will absolutely sell completely out worldwide.
Will Nordies add stock? I assume they will, mostly because they are such a behemoth of a retailer that they would be given delivery preference over smaller stores. Word of mouth has just exploded on her collection and you have women of all ages pursuing the most favored items. It’s an extremely versatile collection which is why it appeals to so many. Even I doubled up on a few items which is something I rarely do, but when a product works for me it’s just in my DNA to never want to run out of it!
In regards to the Selena collection, this is the worst shopping experience I have had. I was up all night waiting like everyone as and for the site to be a mess. I didn’t get an opportunity to purchase anything like most people as well. SO I will be waiting to purchase online on the 3rd from one of their lease partners or go to my local counter. Also people are reselling for ridiculous prices. My boyfriend saw 3 of the lipsticks go for 550.00 today on EBay. MAC has truly frustrated me, they should of shut down the site until the problem was fixed.
I understand how some of you feel, I was unable to get anything on the day it launched on their website nor on the day that it went on sale at department stores websites. wah, wah!!!!
It upsets me that some people got multiples to sell on ebay, one person is selling 4 complete sets and 1 person is selling the set MAC sent them for review.