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This blog post is a response to ongoing commentary about the closure of this long-standing community. For a detailed data-driven analysis of the Sephora closure, Richard Millington’s piece is well worth a read and you can find it here.
When Sephora announced the closure of its Beauty Insider Community, the reaction across the industry was immediate. Group chats lit up. LinkedIn filled with takes. And underneath a lot of the noise was a question that many community professionals have been quietly carrying for a while now: is what we’re building still worth it?
The short answer is yes. But the longer answer is more useful.
The Beauty Insider Community was, for many years, one of the most cited examples of a brand community done right. It was active, passionate, and built around genuine enthusiasm for Sephora’s products. Members shared techniques, reviewed products, connected over a shared love of beauty. For a long time, it worked.
What changed wasn’t the passion. People are still talking about Sephora constantly. They’re doing it on Reddit, in Discord servers, in WhatsApp groups, on Instagram. The conversation didn’t stop. It just moved somewhere Sephora didn’t own.
That’s the real story here. And it’s a story about a specific organisation, with a specific product set, facing a specific set of circumstances in 2026. It’s not a verdict on community as a discipline.
Community professionals are already operating under pressure. The rise of AI is absorbing some of the work communities used to do. Platforms like Reddit have matured into genuine alternatives to owned forums. The question of whether forums feel “old school” is one that gets raised in boardrooms more often than most community managers would like.
So when one of the most recognisable community brands in the world shuts down, it lands differently than another closure might. It adds weight to doubts that were already there.
That reaction is understandable. But it’s worth separating the noise from the signal.
New communities are launching every day and growing fast. The ones doing well tend to share something in common: a very clear reason to exist that is directly tied to what the brand actually does.
Asana’s community is a strong example. So are Adobe’s and Lenovo Legion’s. The OpenAI and Anthropic spaces have grown rapidly. What these communities offer is specific, practical value to their members. There are real questions to answer, real problems to solve, real expertise to share. The purpose hasn’t drifted.
Where communities tend to lose momentum is when that clarity fades. When a community becomes a general conversation space rather than a focused one, members find it harder to justify visiting. And in 2026, there is no shortage of places to have a general conversation.
One of the more important shifts happening right now is that community isn’t contracting. It’s fragmenting across more surfaces than ever.
Social media platforms are quietly building out more community features. Reddit keeps growing. Brand pages on Instagram are full of members who want to talk to each other and to the brand itself, yet most brands are still treating those spaces purely as broadcast channels. There’s a real opportunity being missed.
The same is true of Reddit. Subreddits form organically around brands all the time. Brands can’t always walk directly into those spaces, but there’s more that can be done to support the moderators and community leaders who are already there. Giving them access, information, and a connection to the brand team costs relatively little and can make those spaces far more aligned with the brand’s interests.
Think of it like a real town. People gather at pubs, parks, cafes, theatres. They all have different structures and different purposes but they’re all community. The modern internet works the same way, and the brands that understand that will be the ones that stay connected to their audiences.
If the Sephora news prompts anything, it should be this: a genuine look at whether the purpose of a community is still relevant now, not when it was written two or three years ago.
That means asking:
Communities that lose momentum often do so quietly. They become siloed. They stop being editorially connected to the wider business. Leadership stops hearing the good stories. And eventually, the community starts to feel like an asset nobody quite remembers commissioning.
Staying relevant means staying connected, to members and to the people inside the business who hold the budget.
Human beings have always gathered. They learned from each other how to farm, how to build, how to stay safe. That need to share knowledge, find belonging, and form groups is not something that disappears because a forum closes. It’s not even something that can be owned by a single platform.
You see it in primates. In insects. In almost every social animal. Collaboration is not a community industry trend. It’s a survival mechanism. What changes is where and how it happens.
If reading about Sephora made a community manager feel uncertain about what they’re building, that energy isn’t wasted. Use it. Draw out the things that are working. Create those stories for leadership. Ask hard questions about purpose and relevance.
There has never been more help available. The community profession has grown enormously in the last decade. There are more resources, more peers, more spaces for community managers to learn from each other than ever before. AI can help surface those things faster if used well.
Sephora made the right call for Sephora. That doesn’t say anything about what’s right for anyone else.
Community is not dead. It’s just not staying still.
