category finalist
masha@transportnewyork.com
With 1,500 stores, 46 million loyalty program members, and $19 billion in market cap, Ulta Beauty is the U.S.’s largest beauty retailer. In 2021, they’d dipped a toe into the $500 billion American wellness market with a test-and-learn pilot called The Wellness Shop. More of a merchandising play than a brand or even a shop-in-shop, it got traction, and a mandate was born: transform those early wins into the enterprise-level growth that makes a dent in earnings reports.
Our job was to build the new wellness brand infrastructure, creating a fully realized sub-brand from positioning and consumer insights down to the smallest shelf-talker detail of the design system. It would have to resonate with Ulta enthusiasts who came to wellness through beauty and skincare. And it would need to invite a whole new kind of guest—a more urban, more male, more wellness-first audience.
Our big idea: Wellness should make you feel good. It’s so obvious it sounds vaguely insane, but wellness noise—cultural, commercial, even political—sometimes seems almost deafening. We wanted a brand that would effortlessly rise above all that baggage. So from the jump, every strategic and creative decision we made stemmed from the dead-simple idea that wellness from Ulta Beauty always feels good.
Bringing our “destination wellness, created to empower every journey” positioning to life meant threading a lot of needles—peer vs. expert, energy vs. calm, relatability vs. aspiration. And our mission to expand the Ulta brand world required a deft balancing of masterbrand fit and expansion—not just reassembly—of those same masterbrand equities. To get there, we leaned into consumer research throughout our brand development, conducting 30 qualitative interviews and quantitative surveying of more than 1,000 respondents nationwide.
The end result, Wellness by Ulta Beauty, is a brand built to find your feel-good. A brand that doesn’t let you feel inadequate or pretend to promise you total self-actualization. A brand that welcomes you as you are—and for whoever you want to become.
Wellness by Ulta Beauty launched on January 26, 2026 in three flagship boutiques carrying 58 brands (including key new introductions like Naomi Watts’s Stripes), supported by an omnichannel Wellness Week promotion particularly targeting the 46 million loyalty program members. By the close of Q1, the rollout will have extended to a fourth flagship boutique, 1,500 stores in the Ulta Beauty fleet, and all digital channels. The launch has earned media coverage in dozens of retail, beauty, and lifestyle outlets from Forbes, Glossy and WWD to trade publications.
