A banner for the hair salon that once occupied these quarters still hangs outside an abandoned West Broadway storefront in the heart of SoHo’s main shopping area in Manhattan. Inside, the 4,500-square-foot duplex space is utterly empty, with no hint of what — if anything — will fill it next.

Two young, stylish women emerge from a car-service S.U.V. on a chilly Monday afternoon and open the locked door with a key. They are Katia Beauchamp, 31, and Hayley Barna, 30, former Harvard Business School classmates, founders of the fast-growing online beauty subscription company Birchbox — and now, the latest in a string of successful Internet entrepreneurs to try to open an actual store.

Birchbox, known for the vivid pink cardboard boxes of sample products that it sends to its subscribers each month, shook up the cosmetic and beauty industry by figuring out a way to get consumers to buy makeup online, and to pay for samples that department store makeup counters usually give away.

Now the four-year-old company, which was all about making an almost exclusively offline industry work on the web, is quietly planning to open its first retail store this spring, probably in late May.