While many other retailers close their doors, Ulta Beauty reportedly plans to open at least 100 new stores in 2018.
According to CNBC, the beauty retailer is entering new markets, adding stores in existing markets, and remodeling old stores to stay relevant. Ulta carries upwards of 500 brands, ranging in price from $3 to more than $100, which is nearly double what luxury beauty rival Sephora carries.
Since its stores offer a full suite of beauty services, Ulta competes not only with other beauty retailers, but with drugstores and salons as well. Recently, a report by research firm Piper Jaffray revealed that Ulta has become the top beauty destination for average-income teens, overtaking Sephora for the first time in a year.
Another reason Ulta is seeing success is that 90% of its locations are in suburban strip malls instead of enclosed shopping malls, meaning that it isn’t heavily affected by the ongoing decrease in shopping mall foot traffic.
Sephora has more locations in shopping malls than Ulta, though it’s taking action to move out of malls and open smaller locations, called Sephora Studios, to supplement decreasing mall traffic. It’s also bringing in more exclusive product releases and running programs such as Sephora Accelerate, a beauty startup accelerator.
To see how Ulta and Sephora stacked up against each other, we visited both stores back to back. This is what we found: