A former manager for an international seller of cosmetic and beauty products has filed a federal lawsuit alleging hiring practices require that the race of staff in local stores match the demographic of customers in those stores.
Nixaliz Mestre was a nine-year Sephora employee before she was fired last year from the store located at Avalon in Alpharetta.
While the reason given for her firing was failure to discipline an employee, Mestre’s attorney, Artur Davis, says she was actually terminated for not hiring sales people who were Caucasian — the same race as 96% of that store’s customer base, according to the attorney.
Davis’s firm, HKM Employment Attorneys, filed a lawsuit May 1 against Sephora USA on behalf of Mestre in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. The lawsuit follows a Right-to-Sue letter that Mestre received from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Sephora USA sent an emailed statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Friday, saying their hiring policies conform to the law.
“While we do not comment on the specifics of any ongoing legal matters, or any individual’s employment history, we can say that Sephora is an equal opportunity employer and our hiring practices are in line with applicable law,” the statement says.
Sephora USA is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. There are more than 3,000 stores in 35 markets worldwide, according to the company’s Linkedin page.
Mestre is Hispanic and lives in Forsyth County.
She was hired by Sephora in 2014 and became manager of the Avalon location in 2020 when she was transferred from another store, according to the lawsuit.
The suit says a district manager told Mestre at that time that “Sephora USA practices a hiring strategy that aims to match its sales associates with the demographic profile of the customer base at specific locations.”
Davis said the message for Mestre was that she had to hire mostly Caucasians.
Mestre instead hired sales people based on qualifications, the lawsuit states, which resulted in a sales force that included African-Americans, Hispanics, East Indians, persons of Arabic descent, and Caucasians.
The lawsuit says Mestre is suing the company for “retaliatory mistreatment based on her opposition to discrimination, in the form of denied promotional opportunities, an unwarranted negative performance review, and her subsequent termination.”
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