Ulta: Still A Beauty?

"An increasingly competitive category"

From an unassuming start - a chain of five stores in Chicago that opened their doors in 1990 - Ulta Beauty has grown aggressively over the past 35 years to become the largest specialty beauty retailer in the United States (a notable competitor, LVMH’s Sephora chain, entered the U.S. market in 1998).

As CEO Dave Kimbell explains, Ulta’s founding vision was to reimagine an industry that was failing to adequately serve the customer: “Ulta’s founders did market research in the late 1980’s that tried to understand what was missing in the category; what they found is that most beauty enthusiasts shopped across price points and across categories, yet the industry was largely setup to have mass products at drug and grocery stores, with more prestige and luxury products at department stores… That insight was key.”