Welcome back to Ulta Beauty Strategies, Glossy’s new monthly series breaking down the latest strategies of the retailer and its most popular brands.
Ulta Beauty is doubling down on in-person events for 2025.
“This year we have 70,000 events planned across our stores because we so heartedly believe this notion of human connection is where it’s at,” Amiee Bayer-Thomas, Ulta Beauty chief retail officer, told Glossy. “Eighty percent of the [sales] volume we do is generated in our stores, so brick-and-mortar and that in-person experience is more important than ever.”
Ulta’s event cadence is up from 50,000 in-person branded events held in stores last year. The retailer’s 2025 experiential investment also includes the addition of the retailer’s largest-ever out-of-home consumer event, Ulta Beauty World, and more activations around cultural events like festivals and sporting events.
Ulta Beauty World is a new, ticketed consumer event that takes place on April 26 at the Henry B. González Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas. Tickets go for $160 and include a swag bag worth more than $1,000 and access to the full-day experiential event with more than 195 brand partners offering giveaways and demonstrations. Ulta is also set to provide food and drinks, games, ear piercing, live music, photo booths, and more.
The event has been strategically leveraged off Ulta Beauty’s long-running Field Leadership Conference. FLC, as it’s known in the industry, is a multi-day event that brings its roster of brand leaders and store managers together for education and connection.
“[Brands] show up and they show up big for our field leadership conference [because] it’s their opportunity to engage with our store leaders one-on-one to educate them on key products and the brand,” said Bayer-Thomas. Think: Large, colorful booths and plentiful swag. “We thought, ‘How could we not bring something similar to our guests?’”
Instead of betting big on a new experiential event, Ulta has extended the conference with the Ulta Beauty World consumer day added to the tail end of FLC.
“We will have 195 brands on the [convention] floor, very unique meet-and-greets with influencers and founders, and master class demonstrations,” Bayer-Thomas said. “We are creating powerful touchpoints that are going to ultimately lead them back to Ulta Beauty after this event.”
Driving consumers into brick-and-mortar stores continues to be the main KPI for Bayer-Thomas and her team. This year, the retailer added 20,000 in-person store events to its already robust roster. These include primarily small, brand-led activations in-store, including master classes, product demos, gifting opportunities and more.
To ensure consumers can find and sign up for these events, Ulta Beauty also rolled out a new consumer-facing sign-up platform in January. Found on its site, the new store events page was upgraded with a way to reserve a spot at an event while signed into one’s loyalty account, similar to how a consumer would book a workout class or manicure on a business’s website. All events are free and most come with free gifts, a large driver of attendance. Consumers can scroll through the events page to find ones near them and RSVP quickly.
For example, events on the roster now include a masterclass with an Estée Lauder makeup artist, skin-care routine guidance from a Dermalogica expert, and a brow shaping tutorial from Benefit. Each is tied to a new or bestselling product with bookable slots ranging from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
“Success comes from how our guests respond,” Bayer-Thomas told Glossy. “When we poll our guests about what’s most important to them, it’s convenience and experience.”
When planning an event, the focus is on community. “Human connection is priceless,” Bayer-Thomas told Glossy. “When you make a connection with someone —when they feel cared for, they feel heard, they feel seen — they’re going to come back, because now it’s personal.”
It’s also a great way to convert guests into shoppers. Most consumers who visit their local Ulta for an event bring a friend or family member and buy at least one item, Bayer-Thomas told Glossy. “[Human connection] does result in purchasing frequency of the guest and, quite frankly, [a strong lever to get the consumer to] choose us,” she said. “[When they attend an event, they] not only purchase what it was that they needed, but they also often discover something maybe they didn’t know they needed.”
Ulta’s bet on experiential is part of a larger shift towards in-person events. According to marketing platform AnyRoad, 51% of companies plan to increase their experiential marketing investments from 2024-2026. And according to EventTrack 2025, an annual event research report, 74% of Fortune 1000 marketers expect to increase experiential marketing spending in 2025.
Outside of its in-store events and beyond Ulta Beauty World, Ulta is also betting big on out-of-home experiential events tied to cultural events like the Art Basel art festival in Miami or the Super Bowl in New Orleans, both of which saw Ulta events in the past year.
“When we think about events and experiences and what we consider to be a beauty destination for a lifetime, our goal is to create special moments to have fun, discover beauty and celebrate the different moments in our lives,” Bayer-Thomas told Glossy. “We get to engage beauty lovers and give them an opportunity to express themselves and celebrate these different moments in time through their own individuality and within the communities.”
Ulta Beauty opened its first store in 1990 and currently operates 1,437 stores across 50 states. The company reported its fourth-quarter 2024 results last month, which showed a net sales decrease of 1.9% year-over-year to $3.5 billion. When looking at its full fiscal 2024 compared to 2023, net sales increased 0.8% to $11.3 billion.
As previously reported by Glossy, Ulta Beauty has undergone several C-suite changes in the past few months. Newly-appointed Ulta Beauty CEO and president Kecia Steelman announced several executive changes during last month’s earnings call, including the promotion of Bayer-Thomas into the newly-created chief retail officer role. She previously held the role of chief store operations officer and has been with Ulta for more than eight years.
