Why Ulta Beauty is leaning into experiential store design

As Ulta Beauty continues to grow, it’s given its store design strategy a makeover.

The beauty retailer, which operates more than 1,500 stores visited by 47 million loyalty customers, continues to benefit from CEO Kecia Steelman’s Ulta Beauty Unleashed turnaround plan unveiled last year. In Q1, its net sales rose 11.1% YoY, with comparable sales growing 5.3%.

Its evolving store strategy, including international expansion, experiential design, and a focus on brand-building, have contributed to this growth. And it’s not slowing down: This month, the retailer debuted a new immersive partnership with Supergirl in stores, and announced that it will open a new “experiential” store in Time Square in late 2027,” that will “serve not just the New York area, but have a global presence around it,” Paul Loux, VP of store design and experience at Ulta Beauty, told Retail Brew.

In a firechat chat at our recent IRL event, Loux broke down the retailer’s recent news and evolving experiential store strategy.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How has the approach to store size evolved over the years, and how are you thinking about smaller format stores?

For years, we were always opening a 10,000-square-foot store. If we didn’t find a site that size, we wouldn’t take the real estate. We changed that quite dramatically a few years ago. So now, we have a spectrum of sizes that go from half that size to now bigger. The Times Square store, being a perfect example, is going to be much bigger than that. Smaller-format stores are becoming a key part for us to be able to get all the more fine tuned to the guests in that area. “What are they desiring?” “Do we necessarily, in an omnichannel world, have to have absolutely everything in the store?” No. So we’re really thinking about ways that we might lean into a particular category and be able to augment the experiential look, feel, and consultative process around that in a smaller-format store.

Ulta Beauty’s store design has evolved a lot into becoming more experiential, and obviously that will be a big part of the Times Square store as well. Can you talk about how that approach to experiential in stores has evolved for Ulta Beauty?

Yes, in-person experiences are a really important part of our Ulta Beauty Unleashed strategy, and that can be large and small, and inside the store as well as outside the store. We’ve definitely shown up in key cultural moments that are really big, like Lollapalooza and Coachella and the Super Bowl, and have tied that to in-store activations as well, where you can get looks in advance of concerts.

Then, as we get into in-store eventing, it’s a really key thing about driving that store experience. In our 1,500-plus stores, we did over 100,000 events last year, which were celebrity appearances, brand partnerships, our own store teams offering events, and one of the big experiences that happened just recently was Ulta Beauty World.

All of those brand experiences are then informing ways that we can adapt that and have that be the tip of the iceberg that then can cascade out and appear inside of the stores.

Another huge thing particularly resonating with the youngest consumer are birthday parties in stores. That’s been a huge success, larger than we ever dreamed, and just the idea that you could come in with your friends and actually have that party in the store—guests, particularly our younger guests, are loving it, and it’s instilling brand connection from an early age.

Can you talk about how partnerships have been important to the Ulta Beauty store experience, and how you’ve activated them in stores?

We just recently announced an exclusive partnership with Supergirl…We’re going to be setting in every single store a series of curated looks related to the movie with our Ulta Beauty Collection private label product, as well as OPI, and there are looks that you’ll be able to get in a select number of stores around the premiere date [June 26] and our Ulta Beauty Artist Collective is going to be offering those looks. We also are going to have five stores where we’ve had the chance to partner with the amazing artist that did the cartoon series, Bilquis Evely. And there’s going to be graffiti-inspired treatments on five stores in New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and also in 12 [international] stores, including Mexico. We have digital activations that are going to lean into the graffiti-inspired look that’s part of the movie.

We did something very similar with our partnership with Wicked, and through both chapters of that movie sequence…Our Herald Square store—we actually overtook the branded stripes on the outside with the colors of the Wicked theme, and there were services offered that featured R.E.M. Beauty, Ariana [Grande]’s line, and you could get looks from the movie for hair, for makeup…We did yellow brick roads that led in through the store all the way into the salon.Those are really important, and driving a lot of guest engagement.