Colorlab Custom Cosmetics, a Rockford-based makeup manufacturer, is moving into Sears as the department store chain expands its beauty business and looks for tenants.

Colorlab opened its first boutique inside Sears at Oakbrook Center in Oak Brook in November. A second shop is scheduled to open inside Sears at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg in April.

The in-store shops range from 300 square feet to 400 square feet and are staffed by beauty consultants trained to create custom-blended foundations, lipsticks and eye creams while shoppers wait.

The deal comes as the Hoffman Estates-based retailer is two years into an effort to revive its cosmetics business. It also dovetails with Sears’ push to make more productive use of its sprawling retail real estate holdings by leasing space inside its stores.

“Sears is at a competitive disadvantage not to have a decent cosmetics department given the number of stores they have in the malls,” said Anne Brouwer, senior partner at McMillan Doolittle LLP, a Chicago-based retail consulting firm.

Rival J.C. Penney Co. has had mini-shops from beauty retailer Sephora inside scores of its stores since 2006.

Colorlab intends to roll out more boutiques inside Sears’ high-traffic mall stores nationwide as space becomes available, said Mary Swaab, founder and CEO of Colorlab.

“We want our product to be affordable and available to the masses,” Swaab said. “Our intention is to make sure we can touch as many people as we can instead of waiting for the traffic flow to come into the store. It just gives us wider exposure.”

Colorlab, founded in 1996, operates beauty counters inside stores in Paris, London and Mexico. It sells its own products on its website and makes private-label cosmetics for other companies out of its factory in Vermont.

The makeup firm had an arrangement with Macy’s Inc. in 2007 to sell its products inside some Macy’s stores, including Chicago’s State Street flagship. But that deal ended in 2009 after the New York department store chain consolidated its regional divisions and restructured its buying operation.

Sears, for its part, declined to discuss the agreement, saying the company will have more to say about its beauty business next month. Sears re-opened 13 staffed beauty counters in 2009. At that time, Sears said it planned to expand the beauty business to 100 Sears stores initially and to as many as 400 stores by 2012. Sears operates 894 full-line department stores.

“We have been testing the beauty concept over the last two years in 13 stores,” said Amy Dimond, a spokeswoman at Hoffman Estates-based Sears Holdings Corp. “We are now exploring expansion. We will be prepared to make a broader statement to that end the first of April.”

Sears has been in and out of the beauty business for decades, exiting cosmetics in the 1980s only to return with an in-house brand called Circle of Beauty in 1995. Sears got rid of the beauty counters again in 2001 as part of a broader move to shut down poorly performing businesses.

Last year, Sears signed an agreement with Edwin Watts Golf Shops LLC to operate golf boutiques inside a dozen stores. Sears also reached deals with Whole Foods to open a 34,000-square-foot store in a Sears store in Greensboro, N.C., and with fast-fashion retailer Forever 21 to take 43,000 square feet at a Sears in Costa Mesa, Calif.

smjones@tribune.com