Ulta tightens up, leans on exclusives

Ulta is trying to fix a retail problem that shows up fast in beauty: if shoppers can buy the same lipstick and shampoo everywhere, the store has to win on speed, novelty, or price. On April 8, Chief Executive Officer Kecia Steelman said Ulta is tightening spending, lifting planned share repurchases to about $1.5 billion, and resetting strategy instead of chasing growth everywhere at once. (finance.yahoo.com) This is happening after a year when Ulta got bigger but also more expensive to run. For the fiscal year ended January 31, 2026, net sales rose 9.7% to $12.39 billion, while selling, general, and administrative expenses climbed to $3.30 billion from $2.81 billion a year earlier. (ulta.com) Steelman’s answer is a narrower playbook called Ulta Beauty Unleashed. At a March 2026 investor event, she described three lanes: push the core retail business, build higher-margin side businesses like the marketplace and media unit, and rebuild the company’s operating foundation. (finance.yahoo.com) (ulta.com) The “core business” part is not subtle. Steelman said Ulta added 100 new brands in 2025, and the company tied itself to big culture moments including the Cowboy Carter Tour, Lollapalooza, and Coachella to keep beauty launches feeling like events instead of shelf restocks. (finance.yahoo.com) That same logic is showing up in exclusives. Sheralven Enterprises said Messi Elixir Parfum Intense will launch exclusively at all Ulta Beauty stores, Ulta.com, and Ulta Beauty Mexico on May 17, 2026, with a 3.4-ounce bottle plus travel spray priced at $95. (prnewswire.com) Exclusive drops only work if checkout is frictionless, so Ulta has been tuning the plumbing too. The company’s 2026 annual report says more than 1,000 United States stores now fulfill online orders, up from about 500 stores in 2024, and TheStreet reported this week that Ulta also changed product pages so shoppers can add items to bag without leaving the page. (sec.gov) (thestreet.com) Ulta is making that digital push because beauty shopping is moving online much faster than it used to. TheStreet, citing NielsenIQ’s State of Beauty 2025 report, said United States online beauty sales grew 21% year over year and were growing more than nine times faster than in-store sales. (thestreet.com) The company is still opening stores, but the store is now part showroom, part mini warehouse, and part launch stage. Ulta ended fiscal 2025 with more than 1,500 locations overall, and its ship-from-store network lets a celebrity fragrance drop or prestige skin-care launch hit both impulse shoppers in stores and convenience shoppers on phones. (ulta.com) (sec.gov) That is why the cost cuts and the exclusives fit together instead of fighting each other. Ulta is trimming overhead with zero-based budgeting under new Chief Financial Officer Chris Dilauris while spending where shoppers can actually feel it: faster checkout, faster fulfillment, and products they cannot get from every other beauty chain. (finance.yahoo.com) So the bet is pretty plain. If Ulta can keep comparable sales growing, hold onto the traffic spikes from launches like Messi’s fragrance, and stop expenses from rising faster than the business, it gets a cleaner version of growth than the one that pushed selling, general, and administrative costs above $3.29 billion last year. (ulta.com) (finance.yahoo.com)