Ulta leans on broad spring promotions
Ulta's spring 'Let’s Haul' event is running with discounts up to about 40% across brands from Clinique to Rare Beauty and Medicube, showing specialty retail using big promotional windows to drive traffic. That mix — legacy names alongside digitally relevant brands — suggests promotional cadence is widening across prestige and masstige. (allure.com)
Ulta is running two spring discount tracks at once: a “Let’s Haul” event with up to 30% off budget-friendly brands through April 18, and a separate online-only 20% off promotion on more than 40 prestige brands including Rare Beauty, Tarte, and MAC. That means a shopper can now find markdowns in the mass aisle and the prestige aisle in the same week. (ulta.com) That is a shift from how beauty chains usually train customers to shop. Ulta’s better-known tentpole is its semiannual Beauty Event, formerly called 21 Days of Beauty, which centers on rotating daily deals rather than one broad storewide-style promotional window. (retailmenot.com) Ulta can afford to play that game because it is huge. The company said fiscal 2025 net sales reached $12.4 billion, helped by comparable sales growth, new stores, and the Space NK acquisition. (ulta.com) It also has a built-in audience to push those events to. In its annual filings, Ulta describes Ultamate Rewards as the core of its model, with members earning points across products, salon services, and co-branded credit card spending. (sec.gov) The timing is not random. Spring Haul lands right after the March Beauty Event, so Ulta is effectively extending the sale season from limited-time daily offers into a broader April traffic push. (retailmenot.com) The brand mix tells you what Ulta is trying to protect. The prestige promotion names MAC and Rare Beauty, while the haul event page pitches “budget-friendly brands” across makeup, skincare, haircare, and wellness, so Ulta is discounting both the legacy counters and the newer social-media-friendly names that pull younger shoppers. (ulta.com 1) (ulta.com 2) Outside coverage shows how wide that basket has gotten. NBC’s Today shopping team highlighted Rare Beauty, Clinique, and Shark in the same Spring Haul roundup, which is a mix of celebrity makeup, department-store skincare, and premium tools rather than one narrow beauty category. (today.com) Ulta’s own results help explain why traffic matters so much. In March, the company reported fourth-quarter fiscal 2025 revenue that topped Wall Street expectations, even as earnings per share missed, which is the kind of split that keeps retailers focused on keeping shoppers coming through the door and onto the app. (cnbc.com) So this is not just a few sale stickers on mascara. It is a specialty beauty chain using April to keep customers in a promotional loop after March, with discounts that now stretch from lower-priced staples to prestige names in one continuous spring campaign. (ulta.com) (retailmenot.com)
