Origins at Cherry Creek North.

• Author: Cote, Mike
• Position: SPOTLIGHT - The Estee Lauder Companies Inc. - Company overview

SUSTAINABLE PRACTICES:

At the new Origins store at Cherry Creek North, patrons can sip Green Buddha tea drinks, munch on vegan cupcakes, check their e-mail via free wireless and peruse a book from the store's wellness library while they wait for a spa treatment.

Call it an upscale cosmetics cafe for the Whole Foods crowd.

Since the Estee Lauder Cos. launched its Origins cosmetics division in 1990, the brand has always emphasized the use of natural ingredients for its skin care, body products, aromatherapy and makeup. With its prototype Denver store, the brand is reaching deeper into the neighborhood, aiming to redefine how a corporate chain connects with both customers and local businesses.

Origins doesn't brew the tea; that's left to the Pekoe Sip House, a store within a store operated by the proprietors of a tea shop of the same name in Boulder. Pekoe gets it baked goods from WaterCourse Foods, another local vendor. And Origins gets its organic flowers from Pastures of Plenty, owned by Alfalfa's Markets co-founder Lyle Davis, the husband of Sylvia Tawse of Fresh Ideas, a public relations agency that specializes in the natural-products industry and worked with Estee Lauder on the Cherry Creek store concept.

"One of the things we want to learn is how to be a community store, not just a big retail store," said Jane Lauder, senior vice president/general manager of Origins and the grand daughter of the publicly traded company's namesake founder.

The 3,200-square-foot store, built to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) silver standards and powered by wind energy, embraces the "go local" movement that has been at the heart of sustainable practices. The company also sells a line of products certified organic by the USDA.

"When we first started the Origins brand in Cambridge, the first retail store was supposed to be a laboratory for trying new ideas," said Lauder, who in July took over the Origins brand, sold in more than 30 countries and territories. "Coming to Denver and creating a new store concept again was trying to take the revolutionary idea and seeing what's revolutionary now vs. 20 years ago."

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Extending the local theme, Origins sells a collection of Denver-centric products, such as face and body creams designed to help customers fight common symptoms of a high-altitude dry climate. Ingredients include pine, floral and herbal scents meant to conjure the mountain surroundings.

"The idea of Origins...