Beymen Bets 20 Million Euros on Turkey's Defiant Luxury Market

Beymen expects its 130,000-square-foot flagship in Istanbul to overshoot its first-year sales target by around 15 percent, defying a global luxury slowdown. The store, Beymen Tersane — Galleries of Luxury, sits inside a 600-year-old former Ottoman naval shipyard in the city's emerging Tersane district. Beymen Group chief executive officer Elif Çapçı laid out the stakes: "This is more than a store for us. From a business perspective, it is now our biggest store, so there is a sizable business plan and a big expectation for this business to scale up."

The retailer, owned solely by Qatari fund Mayhoola for Investments since 2019, invested close to 20 million euros in the project. The wider Tersane Istanbul development carries an estimated global investment of more than $2 billion. Rachid Mohamed Rachid, CEO of Mayhoola and chairman of Beymen, admitted the gamble gave him pause. "I was very scared, to be honest," he said during a Saturday visit to the store. Architects at Rem Koolhaas' OMA agency had to build a world-class retail interior without touching the walls of the historical structures. His verdict on the market: "Forget what is happening in the rest of the world: The reality of luxury in Turkey is that it's a growing market and it will continue to grow."

What drives the bet on Tersane?

The complex's developers hope to draw 45,000 to 60,000 visitors per day, with peaks above 100,000 on weekends and during events like Contemporary Istanbul, according to local media reports. International visitors already account for 18 percent of sales at Beymen Tersane, versus a 10 percent average across the retailer's other multibrand locations. A Starbucks flagship opened only 10 days ago, and Çapçı said "the team downstairs were saying they started to feel the impact." She cautioned that the plan is deliberately gradual: "not a very aggressive business plan, I must be very open about that. But we are running slightly ahead of that business plan."

Unlike a traditional department store, the flagship spreads horizontally across nine interconnected fashion galleries, each with distinct color palettes and materials. It houses the restaurant Bardot Bleu, a Golden Goose coffee shop, a homewares floor, four VIP shopping suites and pop-up spaces. "I always say in multibrands, the drama effect is important, because you have very strong monobrand competitors," Çapçı said. "Also digital is growing very significantly, so multibrand stores have to be beyond transactional shopping."

What opened this weekend?

An exhibition, "Timeless Treasures — The Eternal Journey of the Bag," features 80 embellished bags from 55 brands including Dior, Etro, Dolce & Gabbana and Roger Vivier, many made exclusively for the event, curated by Laurence Benaïm with set design by Bureau Betak. It runs until Feb. 6. Guests over the weekend included Valentino's Alessandro Michele, Balmain's Antonin Tron, Nicky Hilton, Giuseppe Zanotti and Harry Nuriev among 700 attendees, with a concert by Diana Ross. The display sits alongside a Louis Vuitton wardrobe trunk made in 1886 for Sultan Abdülhamid II.

How big is the growth plan?

Beymen Group operates 290 locations and expects revenues of 1.4 billion to 1.5 billion euros in 2026, up from 1.3 billion euros in 2025. First-nine-month revenues rose 15 percent year-over-year in euro terms, Çapçı said. Middle East conflict has not dented demand; if anything, "a bit of traffic being diverted to our side from Dubai," including more Russian shoppers, she noted. Tourism supplies just 15 percent of revenues, Rachid said, warning against over-reliance on visitors: "In Turkey and in the Middle East, we know disruption." He predicted "more localization now, so you are going to see more interaction with local cultures and local artworks and local workmanship."

Where does beauty fit?

The new stand-alone format Beymen Beauty Studio, launched last year, has three Istanbul locations with four more planned for 2026 and an eventual 30 stores across a dozen cities. "We don't have enough space for it in the stores. So this became a very obvious business opportunity for us," Çapçı said. E-commerce accounts for 30 percent of luxury and beauty revenues. A Foster + Partners-designed luxury mall, with Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Miu Miu as model-scale future tenants, is set to complete by September 2028 — the clearest signal yet of whether Tersane can rival Zorlu Center and İstinyePark. Çapçı's bottom line: "We continue to invest because we believe in the future potential."