Ulta Becomes $11 Billion Beauty Behemoth by Conquering Suburbs

Ulta is by some measures the largest beauty retailer in the country—yes, larger than Sephora—but it sometimes seems to hide in plain sight, with its stores primarily populating suburban and exurban shopping centers instead of thriving high-end malls and pricey urban shopping districts. But even at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday, customers just keep swinging open the doors. The beauty giant is on track to open its 1,500th store—not a grand flagship, but another normal outpost. Bloomberg Businessweek Senior Reporter Amanda Mull joins Bloomberg Businessweek Daily to discuss the story, which is the December Businessweek cover. She speaks with Carol Massar and Tm Stenovec.

On a bright, chilly fall afternoon, the women streaming in and out of the Ulta Beauty store on Passaic Street in Garfield, New Jersey, are in a hurry. One had just popped in on her lunch break. Another left home a bit early to grab a bottle of shampoo on her way to work. A few had come to the shopping center to pick up kibble or cat toys at the PetSmart next door, and hey, why not sniff some perfumes? It only takes a second.

Itzel Alvarez, a student at nearby Felician University, says she came in after class to buy some Arctic Fox hair dye to touch up the purple streaks that frame her face. “But then I saw I had a coupon,” she says, which resulted in the rest of her haul—a MAC lip gloss and liner, an Anastasia Beverly Hills concealer, some extra eyelash glue for Halloween. A self-described former “Ulta hater,” Alvarez has come around in recent years. “I used to work at Sephora, and the rewards here are better,” she says, shrugging. “You can quote me. It’s a fact.”

Garfield Commons, where this particular Ulta is located, is a testament to the reproducibility achievable in the American suburb. Ulta anchors the back corner of the strip mall, where it sits alongside a Marshalls, a PetSmart and an urgent-care clinic. Across the parking lot, an aging Walmart is next to a McDonald’s and an Applebee’s. This might seem like an odd setting in which to sell $64 compacts of Dior bronzer and $190 bottles of Prada perfume, but locations like this—a practical, unexceptional shopping center you might find in any suburb or small town in the country—are the bedrock of Ulta’s business, which brought in more than $11 billion in revenue in 2024, up from just over $6 billion in 2019.

Ulta CEO Kecia Steelman.Photographer: The Tyler Twins for Bloomberg Businessweek

Ulta is by some measures the largest beauty retailer in the country—yes, larger than Sephora—but it sometimes seems to hide in plain sight, with its stores primarily populating suburban and exurban shopping centers instead of thriving high-end malls and pricey urban shopping districts. But even at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday, customers just keep swinging open the doors, one of which bears a flyer for a mid-November class promising to teach participants how to re-create Sabrina Carpenter’s big, bouncy blowout with the Redken hair products she endorses. By the time you read this story, Ulta will have opened its 1,500th store—not a grand flagship, but a normal outpost in Iowa.

If department-store beauty counters are glass-cased, heavily staffed altars to particular brands, and Sephora feels like a candy store packed with ways to extract $40 from you without you really noticing, Ulta is more like the Home Depot of beauty, filled with every possible paint, tool, spackle and fixture imaginable. At 10,000 square feet, the typical store is a brightly lit white box, roughly twice the size of the average Sephora. (That’s a little more than twice as big as a regulation NBA basketball court, if that reference resonates better for you.)

With all that space, the company sells a mix of products that remains unique in the sector: There’s a lot of the same affordable makeup, skin-care and hair products you’d find at a Walgreens, as well as Lancôme lipstick, $550 Dyson hair dryers and discreet-looking pubic-hair clippers.

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