Ulta Joins TikTok Shop Where Beauty Sales Are Exploding | Fast Five Shorts

Ulta Beauty.

Their CEO Keisha Steelman announced that Ulta is launching on TikTok shops while delivering Q4 results showing an 11.8% year over year jump in net sales to $3.9 billion.

Steelman also is saying that Ulta has gotten their quote Chris swagger back.

Wow.

Swagger.

Yeah.

So according to glossy Ulta launch in TikTok shops on March 17, they brought 15 brands across the makeup, skincare, hair, from fragrance along the more, along with 25 other exclusive bundles.

Critically, the launch was anchored in this only at Alta exclusivity.

Right.

That brought this unique spin to the TikTok shop.

The company also cited a 15% Ulta app growth and launched more than 100 new brands in 2025 as part of their broader turnaround momentum.

Chris, here's the deal.

Alta CEO says the company got its swagger back, as I said.

But on a scale of 1 to 10, how much swagger do you really think Ulta has right now?

And is TikTok Shops truly the right move for the specialty beauty retailer or is it going to disrupt and degrade ultimately their core business?

That's my question.

Chris, what do you think?

All right, Carter, you're making it hard for me here to start the show.

Yeah, I mean, so two part question.

So I think, I think Alta, I think Ulta definitely has its swagger back.

I think CEO Kesha Stillman's peacocking a little bit here, and rightly so, because they've done a great job and they've made some, they've made some tough strategic choices here over the years as well, which I'll probably talk about in answering the second question.

And so, you know, the second question is TikTok shop, you know, the right move here or is it a distraction?

I 100 think it's the right move.

You know, the difference between TikTok.

I'm curious to get your take on this too, Carter, but the difference to me between being on the TikTok Shop marketplace and being on the Amazon marketplace, because you could make the argument of like, if you're going to do one, why wouldn't you just do both of them?

But the difference for me with TikTok shop is it's about inspiration, it's about social, true social commerce versus just search and buy, which is always the delineation that I think is important for people to think about.

And so that's what you're doing with TikTok shop.

You want to be at the place where inspired traffic is being inspired to buy products and that is particularly important in the beauty.

So 100% Ulta should be on TikTok's marketplace and exploring how best to utilize it.

So I like also that they're starting off slow.

They're gonna test the waters with exclusive, you know, kind of exclusive collections and products, and then they'll decide what to do from there.

And that's a really smart way to think about it from a smart retailer who knows when to call its bets back.

Even, like, and that's what I alluded to at the front.

Like, they made the big call to pull out a target, like, it wasn't gonna work for them to the way they want.

That was a huge capital investment and a huge partnership that they just said, nope, we're not.

Now we're gonna fund more attainable, more easily achieved revenue growth through means like this.

This is one of them.

I'm sure they've got a whole host of ideas.

And so Keisha Steelman, yeah, she's doing a great job of putting the.

Putting the chips on the table in terms of where they're going to pay off the best.

What do you think?

Yeah, I'm a huge fan of this.

And I was.

I've gone real deep in the TikTok shops world.

I was actually.

We launched one of the first food and Bev TikTok shop experiences when I was at General Mills.

And.

And the reality is this.

There is no category that performs better than beauty on TikTok shops.

And it's for many of the reasons that you talk about, plus some traditional reasons of E commerce, if you think about it, right?

So beauty, it's all about inspiration, but also like, meeting them where they are for an emerging consumer market.

Like, this is where these consumers are getting that inspiration, are making their purchasing decisions.

And we're seeing continuously, especially in this category of beauty, that TikTok shops people want to buy.

Like, there is no barrier to entry there.

You're inspired, you're targeted.

All of a sudden, purchasing is a click away.

And then I mention.

Mention the more traditional side of things.

There's no better category than beauty to ship.

E commerce, right?

You got margins, small, lightweight products.

And then back to your point when you can be in an immersive video experience compared to a dimly lit target aisle, like, which better way is it to bring this new brand, your brand, to life and keep it to be a premium experience like that?

That's really, like, when you look at where you put your chips, I would put it on TikTok shops all day versus a retailer where you can't actually control that experience.

Yeah.

Your return on assets are gonna be a lot higher.

You know Carter, I never thought about this until you, until I just started listening to you talk there too.

How does TikTok, TikTok shops marketplace, how ultimately defensible is that against the rise of the GPTs and the LLMs?

Like, you know, how, how, how will that marketplace factor into things compared to Amazon where Amazon is definitely under threat from the activities that's happening there?

Is.

Is TikTok shop relatively more immune to some of those threats or how do you think about that?

Yeah, 100%.

I think you have to think about what the actual shopping experience is.

Right.

So.

Right.

You know, you put large language models, whatever shopping experience you want and Amazon doesn't love it because you're not sitting browsing their site.

Right.

You're not, you're going right to the pdp.

You're making that purchase or maybe even making the purchase on a third party site like Chat GPT or whatever it might be.

Right?

Yeah.

With TikTok, like first of all, the amount of time younger consumers are spending on these platforms is just insane.

Right.

If you look at back some of the social commerce stuff we talked about six years ago, right.

Like I mean you're not sitting in Target cruising on Amazon, right.

You're sitting on TikTok looking at all your friends and inspirational content from your favorite brands that you can buy before you actually hit the checkout at a more traditional store.

Right.

And so I think when you look at that experience, this is defensible because you're not getting that immersive video experience in ChatGPT.

Now to say that, you know, that won't come around and there won't be some AI driven, you know, experience on that, sure, maybe.

But you know, the other thing you got to remember is, is that the TikTok algorithm is one of the best in the world at serving you the exact content that you want, when you want it.

And yes, you could say retail media is the same thing, but it's very different when I see a banner ad on a PDP or on a search results page versus seeing this beautiful content come to life full bleed on my phone between some of my best friends and the most entertaining content that I look at all day.

So I do think it's defensible.

Yeah.

And for that reason it's a very clairvoyant move, you know, when you think about it.

And there's nothing to say too that TikTok couldn't go and evolve in a way similar to what the LLMs are doing too.

You know, Facebook's trying to do that.

But Facebook, for some reason, you know, basically left their marketplace business, you know, for the most other than like the traditional third party marketplace business.

But, you know, and I've been trying to get that back to a degree, but.

Were you going to say anything else, Carter?

Yeah, I was just going to say I think the other thing is that there are categories that don't work in social commerce.

And I think we've seen that there's not this huge boom like grocery, I found out firsthand is not something you use on social commerce for a variety of very good reasons.

Margins aren't good enough.

You don't have the complete basket.

The shopping journey is just different.

So to say that social commerce is this massive home run that no one's been seeing isn't right anymore.

But for specific categories, in this case, beauty hits on every single checkbox that's needed inspiration, easy to purchase, one off purchases, easy to ship, you're good to go.

And so I just think this again is a home run.

Yeah, it's interesting way to think about TikTok too.

Yeah.

And I misspoke to.

I meant to say Facebook shut down its traditional B to C marketplace.

Correct.

But the C to C marketplace is what's still firing.

So.