Ulta Beauty Aktie

Okay. Great. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us. I'm Adrienne Yih, Barclays specialty retail apparel and footwear analyst. And it is my pleasure to welcome Kecia Steelman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Ulta Beauty; and Chris DelOrefice, Chief Financial Officer.

So I'd like to give a little bit of background on the management before we start for those who aren't as familiar with the company. Kecia joined Ulta Beauty in 2014 and has held leadership roles spanning store operations, merchandising, enterprise strategy, including Chief Store Operations Officer, Chief Operating Officer and President before being named President and CEO in January of 2025, a very well-deserved recognition. Prior to Ulta Beauty, she also held leadership positions at Family Dollar, Home Depot and Target.

Chris is a newcomer, right? So Chris joined Ulta Beauty as the CFO in December of 2025. And prior to that, he served as EVP and CFO of Becton Dickinson and previously to that, more than 2 decades at Johnson & Johnson in a variety of senior client leadership roles. I think what we've really been impressed so far having known you is the amount of rigor that from your kind of CPG background that you're now bringing and overlaying to the retail landscape here. So we thank you for all that work there.

What makes the story particularly interesting today is entering a period where years of investment in loyalty, digital capabilities, stores, services and technology are now beginning to create meaningful leverage. So today, I want to focus on 5 key areas kind of that sit at the center of the investment debate. The first is what investors misunderstand about the beauty category and perhaps the Ulta Beauty story. Why Ulta's moat and competitive advantages remain very difficult to replicate.

Number three, the strength and loyalty of this customer, right, the beauty enthusiast, not just any beauty purchaser, but the beauty enthusiast. Number four, the next wave of growth, including the potential scaling of wellness and other white space opportunities. And then the fifth, to wrap it all up, is how these growth investments translate into more leveraged earnings. So that's where Chris comes in to do all the listing on the finance.

So Kecia, let's start with the consumer. That's -- we're asking all of our companies sort of there's a debate of a consumer macro. You can see it every day and every data point. Where we were at the beginning of the year? At the beginning of the year, we were kind of like regenerating actually, Ulta was returning to positive comps and coming out of kind of the normalization post COVID. Where we are kind of in the second quarter and how you are looking at the backdrop, right, with all the oil going up, gas going up, et cetera?

Yes. What we've seen is that the consumer, you're right, they've been navigating a very dynamic macroeconomic industry right now today. And there's a lot of unknowns that are out there. But we have not really seen any change with our consumer shopping behaviors. And I think it's because they view beauty as an affordable luxury. It's also self-care for them. It's something that they can do for themselves even if they feel like they have to pull back in other parts of their spending.

The fact that Ulta Beauty has categories from low-end entry-level price points all the way to luxury, we have something that is for absolutely everyone in the store. And we're really happy with how we've seen our consumer be weathering the storm right now. And you saw that when we just reported our Q2 earnings that we beat our guidance, and we've raised our guidance for the year. So we feel like this is going to be in the category that the consumer is going to continue to invest in and spend.

Great. And then with Space NK, you have a little exposure to the European consumer and the health of that. We've heard, I would say, notions of a deterioration in that European consumer. Can you speak to that and the fact that Space NK is quite a bit at the prestige side of it?

Yes. Absolutely. Space NK has previously reported strong double-digit comps. We're not seeing any change in that consumer either. We're still actively investing in growth in the U.K. with Space NK stores. So yes, I mean, I think that they're experiencing very similar things to what we are. They're just a little bit earlier in their growth cycle with how Ulta Beauty was many, many years ago, but we're continuing to invest in Space NK. We see the U.K. is still a very important growth opportunity. The U.K. is the sixth largest beauty market in the country. So we're investing. We like what we see, and we're really happy with that acquisition.

Fantastic. Any meaningful differences in income cohorts, age cohorts or regions of the country? And I know that there's been discussion between sort of more of the mass versus prestige that you called out on the earnings call.

Yes, sure. Again, as Kecia said, beauty has demonstrated to continue to be a very resilient category. Folks are very engaged. Our per average member spend was actually up. As we look at the dynamics that played out in Q2, we didn't see any change, whether it be age demographics, income cohorts. Behaviors were pretty consistent across. We actually had increases in all average spend at the income cohort level and age demographics. So I think, again, it's a testament to the category. It's a testament to the competitive moat that we have.

We executed strong in the quarter, and we continue to feel good about that -- how we progress through the year. Obviously, we're watching it, but I think we've set up a guide that we feel confident that we can deliver, as we said on our earnings call and continuing to focus on what we can control and delivering strong performance.

Great. Just as an analyst, I often get sort of these questions about beauty as a category. And within beauty, there are so many subcategories. There's fragrance, skin care, makeup, hair care, services, now wellness. So can you talk about the speed or the maturity of each of those categories for Ulta specifically within the box? And how you think about those over the next 1-year horizon and maybe the 3-year horizon?

Yes. As you mentioned earlier, I've been with the company for 12 years. And what I would say is that we've really evolved into a much more balanced portfolio than when I started 12 years ago. We were so heavily reliant on the makeup category in and of itself. So let me just take those one by one. So fragrance right now is one of our largest growing categories. It's really continuing to propel our business. If you looked at our Q2 results, a little bit of our AOV or average volume transaction was due to the fragrance category itself. We've leaned in to fragrance. We have gone out there and publicly said that we want to be #1 in the U.S. in fragrance, and we're on the path to be able to do that.

Fragrance is really important to us because not only is it continuing to bring in new guests into the category. And as you mentioned, it skews a little bit more higher-end luxury prestige in price point. But it also is bringing in a new consumer around the male consumer. A younger male consumer is coming into this category, and we like what we're seeing because it gets them into our store. The behaviors around fragrance specifically is that you used to buy a signature scent, and that's the one you kind of stuck with. Now it's -- you're buying multiple scents and you're layering and you're actually creating your own personalized scent and you're even changing that from day to night.

So we love what we're seeing in the fragrance category itself. We've also got some great exclusivities that have launched with us with a brand like Noise, some strong partnerships with Ella Langley. So that cultural moment and product coming together is really brought to life in fragrance.

If you look at skin care next, so skin care, the K-Beauty launching stronger in the U.S. for the last 18 months, Ulta Beauty has been the #1 retailer of K-Beauty. And in the last quarter, I shared that 50% of our sales in K-Beauty were due to exclusives. So our merchants have done a fantastic job of really going out and curating the best of the best of the assortments within K-Beauty. I announced on our second quarter earnings call that we're bringing in PROYA, the #1 C Beauty, so from China. So it's not just about K-Beauty. It's also about all types of beauty, and we're leveraging even our partnerships in Mexico and the Middle East to look for other brands that we can bring into the Ulta Beauty ecosystem.

So I think you're going to see that continuing to grow, especially with GLP-1 as part of more common everyday life here in the United States, skin elasticity is really important. And then where we've been facing some challenges, especially in skin care is we're cycling over some pretty big growth in regards to some brands that we launched in a broader base. But as we go through the rest of this year, we will -- that will ease up a little bit on our comps because we will have cycled through that.

If you look at makeup, what I love about makeup is that we went through a period of time where it was like the fresh face look, which does take some makeup to have a fresh, flawless face. But it's getting into a heavier makeup cycle where bigger glam looks are coming back, heavier eye makeup, kind of the 1980s trends, which I personally am happy about, not only for the business, but it's what I loved. That's when I got really involved into makeup. So you're going to see heavier uses of makeup, which is great for us. And I love what I'm seeing in the innovation pipeline for makeup specifically.

If you go to hair care, hair care also -- it's not just about shampoo and conditioners anymore. It's about treatment, scalp health, longevity of your hair, GLP-1s is impacting hair care also. So you're bringing in a new consumer that has different needs than maybe they had 5 years ago into the category. And the fact that you mentioned that we have services in the majority of our stores definitely is a competitive advantage for us, not only that you can get your service, but the expertise that we have with people who really do know and understand this category that can help you shop in a category that can be a little bit mystifying at times.

And then you wrap that up really with wellness and wellness is a huge growth category for us. 95% of our guests are shopping wellness today. And anything we can do to really simplify that shopping experience in a highly complex very diversified space, I think, is going to be a huge win for us in the future. So the fact that we're really diverse across all those portfolios, we have levers that we can pull for all those categories working together, I think makes Ulta Beauty very well positioned to be successful here in the future.

Fantastic. So let's move on to kind of beauty distribution. So historically, department stores, right? And then there are really only 2 specialty multi-brand beauty players. One is yourself and one is Sephora. And then you have mass and you have drugstores and all those. We've seen the continuation of kind of closing stores and department stores. So you're becoming more and more important to the brand. We've also seen you exit the Target partnership as of August. And I think today, actually, they're launching Target Beauty Studio. So can you talk about kind of what prompted that and how you think about kind of the opportunity to take back a lot of that share that preexisted there and whether you think -- what were the competitive elements?

Yes. Well, I want to start with actually the first part of your question was that there's only a couple out there that do specialty beauty end-to-end, and you were talking about us in Sephora. We're really the only ones that do end-to-end low to luxury. So I do think that puts us in a different element around specialty beauty. And especially as the consumers' wallets pressured, I do think it puts us in a really different situation. So I'm very thankful for our founders for starting off Ulta Beauty in a very unique and special way.

You asked about Target specifically. Yes, we ended the partnership in the middle of August, and I'm very thankful for our big brand -- beauty brands, L'Oreal, Estée Lauder, LVMH for successfully exiting the partnership, along with the other prestige beauty brands that came with us. They all came back into the Ulta Beauty ecosystem. That's really important for us because, number one, they understand and recognize how important it is for our associates to be able to bring that brand to life. We've been at this for 35 years to be able to articulate and give service to a guest that is looking for spending a little bit more on a product, you have to have the expertise to be able to do that.

And we were at the end of this partnership with Target. We learned a lot. I'm very thankful for our experience there. But we also now have that data of those guests that were shopping and -- shopping Target and also shopping Ulta Beauty. And we've got full marketing efforts of keeping them and getting them back into this ecosystem because they can only buy those prestige beauty products back in Ulta now. I've seen the beauty studio. I think it's great what Target is doing. However, what we're doing is very different than what they're doing today.

Yes. I think just from a consumer standpoint, take my analyst hat off, I think there is a purpose like say you were off-mall, you're driving to the store with that as the destination and the primary purpose is to buy beauty at your store. And I think that going into kind of larger stores that have this as another component is a very different environment.

Yes, absolutely. And when we initially launched in Target, it did cannibalize our stores. And it was no different, and I've spoken about this many times that it was no different than when a competitor had opened and you'd see a period of time of cannibalization, then you'd recover those sales. This is an opportunity for us to really lean in to those guests and get them back into the Ulta Beauty ecosystem.

Great. So let's segue into competitive position and what investors really care about is kind of building a moat. We touched upon a lot of those, but let's bring it all together. And I always like to ask this, if somebody handed somebody else unlimited capital and they ask them to recreate Ulta Beauty from scratch, what would be the hardest piece of the model to replicate? And why is capital alone out of that?

It's a great question. What I would say is, I mentioned this earlier, we've been at this for 35 years. Anybody can sell products or put products on the shelf. But how you bring those products to life and the experience that you give, this is a very experiential business, and that matters. I today, when I walk into a store, and I think of myself as a beauty guru, but when I meet a great associate, trust me, they're getting a lot of my wallet, and I'm spending a lot of money at that time.

So I would say the one thing that's really difficult to replicate is the associates that we have working in our store, the love for beauty and wellness and how they bring beauty and wellness to life. I love the fact that we're very authentic. Beauty is different things to different people. You don't have to look one specific way to walk into a store. You don't have to get dressed up. You can come as you are. Our associates get that. We just want to help people feel their best versions of themselves. That is really difficult to get into your DNA as a company and to really perfect that. And we've been doing this for 35 years. And I think that's the one thing that really does set us apart from everyone else.

Yes. One of the things I always mention kind of as you analyze retail companies is back in the day, it was all about, can you make somebody feel like $1 million walking out of the store from when they came into the store. And Beauty just does that by itself, but I think Ulta does that in space. So Chris, with that in mind, from a financial perspective, it's hard to replicate advantage. How does it show up in the financial model? Is it primarily in customer acquisition, retention, inventory productivity, returns on capital or any of those do you want to talk about?

Yes, a little bit of all of the above. But I love to keep kind of the growth orientation. What I was excited about, love about the model and love about the strategy that we have is there's sort of like an embedded flywheel in who we are, right? Kecia has touched on a lot of these things, but the unmatched access to just outstanding brands that we specifically curate services, experiences, you can't get that anywhere else. That obviously attracts a ton of guests. It builds our loyalty program.

As we're successful executing there and delivering on that promise with guests, the brands want to partner with us, right? So it's this flywheel then of the brands want to put more business there. It brings the best newness. It brings exclusives. As we do that, it attracts more guests into the ecosystem. They're spending more, they're engaging more. We're getting new customers. As that happens, right, it furthers that flywheel with our brand partners wanting to do that, builds up loyalty. That gives us more data. It allows us to engage in a very unique, differentiated way with our guests, which further kind of builds out their loyalty, lifetime value.

And so there's literally like an embedded flywheel in kind of our growth algorithm that allows us in a very attractive market to deliver strong growth, win share. And as the CFO, starting with a strong growth profile, you can make a lot of things happen within your P&L. I'm sure we'll talk about profitable growth later, but it's the anchor part of our algorithm to get to double-digit EPS growth. And I spend a lot of time making sure that our primary emphasis is on serving the guest, winning the guest and making sure there's a healthy top line.

Great. I'm glad you brought up the flywheel because that was my next topic. So when I think about Ulta today, I think about the customer ecosystem, a beauty ecosystem. You have one of the largest loyalty programs in retail, particularly in beauty, but frankly, anywhere. And how should investors think about the value of that asset?

Well, I think -- I often think of us as not just a retailer, but it's -- we're as much of a data company. And the data that we have of our 47 million loyalty members and 95% of our sales are coming through our members, we really know and understand who's shopping with us. The value of that is just incredible. And when I think about the investments that we've made over the last few years in our foundational systems, making sure that we've got really good clean data from end to end.

We've got good data governance processes in place. Doing that hard work early on has positioned us really well to be able to leverage AI. Because if you leverage AI, but you don't have clean data, you're going to get hallucinations and it's not going to really work well for you. So while it was tough for a period of time that we were so heavily weighted on our CapEx, OpEx investments on foundational work, it's paying off for us now in our go-to-market type activities because we can leverage that AI. And I think that's a very unique proposition that we have.

It also is really important, not just for us communicating with the guests in marketing, how we're putting products in front of them, but also with our brands. The fact that we have got clean data, it's real true, 47 million active within the last rolling 12 months. So our members are real clean, too. But that -- when they give us their marketing dollars through UB Media that we can really show the return on that investment, it's really starting to work right now. So to me, we're -- while it's still viewed as the early innings of AI, I think it's going to be a competitive asset for us in the future.

And you tier your members. So what do you learn from your most loyal members that you can kind of bring down to kind of more of that bulk of the membership?

Well, I can't share all my secrets, not here. But what I will share is that we do have really good marketing efforts on how do you convert bronze to platinum, a platinum into diamond and keep your diamonds really happy. That's what we're working on every single day.

Great. So Chris, I'm going to move over to the model itself. It's been -- there was 4 years of the prior management investments. And that was really sort of a catch-up, right? It was 4 years of just structural from the ERP system and then building up all the different layers that are needed. In some ways, you got to leapfrog over decades of pre-existing infrastructure, and we think a lot about the tech stack. You're one of a few companies, a handful of companies that is ready for this next kind of journey on the AI journey.

So last year, we still had some investments. It was still an investment year. In the back half of this year, we are now switching from investing to harvesting that and turning that into growth. And you've sort of committed to this with the long-range algorithm 4% to 6% top line, mid-single-digit op inc and then EPS in the low double-digit range, 12% operating margins approximately, which you're above that. So tell us how all that works together. How should we think about the kind of 12.5%, 12.6%, I believe, is what we're going to get this year. You've talked about not going backwards on margins. So just help investors understand where do we go from here?

Yes. So maybe some principles and how we're bringing it to life. I mean, one, look, best-in-class companies, they need to have financial discipline. My core focus, like I said before, is making sure we're investing. While we're able to harvest some of what was done in the past 2 years, last year, most notably, right, in the second half, we invested further in wellness expansion, got marketplace up and running, international expansion kind of started. So we are -- there's an element of like harvesting and the carryover impact of those.

But I want to make sure there's a distinction like we're still actually investing in the current year, right? So every year you want to start, we want to make sure that we're strengthening our areas of differentiation. We're meeting the -- we're ahead of emerging trends and meeting the guests where they are to kind of drive that top side part of the flywheel around growth, right? Are we growing competitively in a healthy market?

So it starts with that, but then how do you fuel the investment? How do you fuel the growth? One, I don't believe you should have these kind of what I would call 1 year where you have massive investment and not, I think prioritizing and having a steady cadence of investments. letting those kind of prime them in the business, let them soak, let them reap the benefits, have strong KPIs and measurement against them and make sure that they're delivering against the business performance, and there should be a steady rhythm of this.

And then to fuel those investments, there's a handful of things that we've really been focused on doing. One is you have a base spend pool that you always need to repurpose and sort of reimagine and reshape. We kind of call it divest to invest. What you've done in the past, you don't necessarily need that, and you should move those investment dollars to the future. I think the second thing is within those investments is you're getting the most utility out of them. We're always striving to improve the ROI and what we're doing. I think some of the promotion that you see us doing this year is a great example of where we're making sure that every promotion dollar is working as hard as possible for us.

And then lastly, you have to have a strong efficiency productivity agenda where you're kind of reinventing the base, driving productivity, getting true efficiencies and savings. All those combined fuel the investment you need, and that will translate to winning top line growth, profit growing faster than sales. So we will always start the year like we did this year with some leverage opportunity. We're going to grow SG&A slightly less than sales. That will drive some modest margin improvement. We're not going backwards. You noted the margin. We've kind of taken this concept of 12% floor off the table. We're already beyond that. You see us expanding margin this year in a dynamic environment. That translates to nice profit growth in terms of earnings profit dollars.

The principle I brought in is how do I maximize that. At the end of the day, if I can get the profit dollar base larger and grow that faster without coming at the expense of margin, you should want me to grow that. So if I can do it through top line and reinvestment, not at the expense of margin, I'll do that. And then I've been very focused on cash flow, too. We continue to prioritize after supporting organic growth and investment in CapEx, shareholder buybacks. And you've seen us increase that from kind of our normal level to $1.5 billion, and then we further increased it this past quarter, announcing taking that to $1.8 billion this year, and that translates to really nice double-digit earnings.

And so I think 2 takeaways, consistency with financial discipline and a double-digit EPS algorithm that we can compound, it lends itself to a nice value-creating formula over time. And the fact that we can do this in a very competitive dynamic environment, I think, is a real testament to our strategic moat.

Great. Let's just bring that a little bit closer in for the back half of this year because a lot of people have that as the horizon at the end of the year. We're seeing in 2Q that the U.S. consumer just slowed, I mean, as they should have from Q1. But in other areas, not beauty, they're getting more promotional. So across apparel, across staples, et cetera, or they're investing back into price. So one of the things that we've always said is as we get to holiday, you start competing for gift dollars, right? So it's sort of not so much beauty to beauty, but it might be beauty gift to gift. So as we think about that baked into the guidance, how have you thought about that type of dynamic happening?

Yes. Look, we've been very focused on how can we bring compelling value. It's about how do you bring differentiated value to the guest. And there's different ways you can do that, the assortment and how you curate things together, all through the lens of profitable growth and winning kind of that purchase, right? So that's one thing. Two, we did -- we were very transparent, right? We did build flexibility into the back half guide to make sure that we could be responsive in what we felt would continue to have an environment that may have some more promotional intensity. So we feel like we have that dialed in.

So I think holistically, when you look at the newness that we have, our ability to kind of be more personalized and targeted and meet the guests where they are, be effective with our promotions as part of that, right? So you're -- every promotion dollar then is working hard for you or we -- using promotions to either add to our loyalty program or expand average ticket, they then work harder for you. So we feel good based on what we shared coming out of the first half and how we set up the back half guide. We wanted to give a guide that we felt we had conviction that we could deliver, knowing the environment that we were in.

Promotion isn't always discount either. I think that's what I think could be a misnomer at times like gift with purchase. Sometimes when people have a perceived value, that's what's really important, too. So you'll see us leaning into multiple ways to give value to the consumer [indiscernible] always just about a discount or a price.

That's a great point. So in our last few minutes together, let's talk about the next wave of growth, the future. You have so much white space opportunity. The box is only so big. We've -- I've questioned you about services as another leg of growth. But clearly, wellness is a huge opportunity. It's still very small. So you touched on K-Beauty, C Beauty, a lot of trends that are happening globally that we can embrace here in the U.S. So what is the next 3 years look like, 3 to 5 years look like in terms of the next legs of sectors of growth in terms of category expansion?

Yes. I'll talk a little bit about wellness. Wellness itself is a $400 billion category that is outgrowing beauty right now today. It's also very highly complex. It's -- no one is really winning in this category. When we did some research with our consumers, they trust Ulta Beauty. They would trust Ulta Beauty is what they said to purchase their wellness items and categories and 95% are buying wellness. And why would we not want to try to take advantage of that while they're in the box. Like again, I mentioned that it's a very complex category. So the more that we can simplify it.

And we've been on a journey with this. We've really narrowed it down to 4 areas that we're leaning into. It's supplements and nutrition. It's rest and renew. It's intimate care and it's everyday essentials. And -- so those 4 categories are how we're continuing to build. We've opened up a few wellness shops. We've got some good early learnings. We do believe that wellness could be the next $1 billion category for us, and we're really leaning in to continue to drive it that way.

There's other vectors that, as Chris mentioned, marketplace, our engagement with TikTok Shop. I think that there's other avenues that we can continue to grow internationally. But we're going to share more when we have our Investor Days of really showing how those building blocks can really take Ulta Beauty to being even more than what it is today, but I'm very, very excited about the future. And wellness is a big driver that I can really see coming to life right now as we speak.

Yes. It feels like wellness, once it gets sort of that proof of concept and you feel like you have the right tools and the right brands in there, it can really take off. But also wellness to me is an opening for men's, right? Because I think on the makeup side of things and the beauty, historical beauty, we always think of it as traditionally female led. But as you were saying, they're entering the fragrance category, and they certainly see men's really taking care of themselves.

Yes. Marketplace is also another place where we can introduce men's. And we -- some of our top items that we've put on to our marketplace have actually been men's categories. In fact, one of the brands particles is one of the top-selling brands that we brought on to the marketplace. And it's just great to see. Men are leaning more into this category than they ever have before. And what we've heard from them is that they are very comfortable coming into Ulta Beauty, which is a great, great thing for us, and I think a place where we can continue to lean into.

I think it's important to note like wellness, right? It's an end, too. It's a nice growth opportunity, but it's can be very profitable growth, right? We're leveraging our 4 walls, leveraging our full infrastructure. It's an incremental purchase. The guest is there. So this one is -- can be high value creation as you think of it kind of end-to-end down through the P&L.

Great. Two last questions. One for you, Chris. When we think about the margin beyond where you're currently at, should we think about a balanced approach between sort of top line growth, creating leverage and gross margin opportunity? Or does one outweigh the other over some period of time?

Yes. So one, I think we need to make sure that we're competing in the marketplace. That's always going to be core, but never at the expense of margin. I think you're always going to see us be disciplined from an operating margin standpoint as kind of a primary vector to look at. But the honest answer is you have to be disciplined on both. It all starts with a healthy gross margin, and we look at it kind of top to bottom. One, we have an outstanding supply chain team that's doing a great job driving productivity within supply chain and managing channel shift dynamics. managing pressure from fuel. You've seen that show up in our results. Our merch team in terms of the assortment we bring in, how we partner with our brands, making sure we're getting fair share and healthy margin.

So there's a lot of time spent on gross margin, how we go to market with our stores. You actually saw us in this quarter actually get some leverage. And so we will be focused on both is the answer. Within the year, like if you have to make small tweaks between the 2, between the dynamics that are going on or quarterly nuances and timing, I wouldn't worry about that, but we're going to have an agenda on both. I think you'll net see gross margin be a little more stable. I think SG&A is where the -- like the core investment is it will always under-index versus sales to make sure that we're getting the leverage we need on operating margin.

Great. And to close, Kecia, with you, if we're sitting here 5 years or 5 years from now, what would investors today have misunderstood about these stories?

It's a great question. One of the things that I think investors miss today is that this beauty category is a replenishment category. They also feel that we talked a little bit earlier that value is only based on price. And I'd say the third thing is that online is going to take over the world, and the consumer is only going to shop online. What I would share is just a couple of facts. Number one is that our stores are still -- 80% of our sales are coming through the stores, about 20% is coming through online. 75% of our members shop exclusively in store. 20% shop omnichannel and only 5% shop only online. So this whole thought process that stores are not going to be relevant, it's a misnomer.

The other piece is this replenishment piece. Only 15% to 20% of our sales through our members are replenishment items. And the average consumer doesn't buy an item and wait until it's gone before they buy another one for replenishment. That means that 80% to 85% of our sales coming through our members are new items that they've never purchased before. It could be in a different category. It could be newness that comes, but that's a healthy part of our business. So while replenishment is important, that's not the end all be all.

So what I would say is that this is a growing category. We're leaning into newness, exclusivity and innovation. And I think that's what separates us from everyone else and why our sales, I'm confident that we will continue to grow.

Great. Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Ryan, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome you all to Ulta Beauty's Second Quarter and Fiscal 2026 Earnings Call. This conference is being recorded [Operator Instructions]

I'd like to turn the call over to Ms. Kiley Rawlins, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Rawlins, please proceed.

Thank you, Ryan. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for a discussion of Ulta Beauty's results for the second quarter of fiscal 2026.

Hosting our call today are Kecia Steelman, Chief Executive Officer; and Chris DelOrefice, Chief Financial Officer. During today's webcast, our presentation is being displayed live and has been posted to our website, ulta.com/investor. As a reminder, today's earnings release and the comments made by management during this call include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, factors identified in this earnings release, and in our most recent 10-K. The company undertakes no obligation to revise any forward-looking statements.

To allow us to accommodate as many questions as possible during the hour scheduled for this call. We respectfully ask that you limit your time to one question with no more than one follow-up question. And as always, the IR team will be available for any follow-up questions after the call. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Kecia. Kecia?

Thank you, Kylie, and good afternoon, everyone. The Ulta Beauty team delivered another quarter of impressive results, including 8.9% net sales growth, 10.1% operating profit growth and 13.3% diluted earnings per share growth. Our results reflect consistent operational execution and disciplined financial management. We stay close to our guests, manage the fundamentals with rigor and continued to invest in capabilities that will drive long-term growth. Our differentiated model continues to resonate with guests.

This quarter, we saw strength across a number of key performance metrics. We delivered 3.8% comparable sales growth, expanded the number of active members in our loyalty program by 3%, drove an increase in average spend per member, launched 15 new brands and increased earned media value and unaided awareness to record levels. At the same time, we strategically leveraged promotions to drive traffic and sales, fueled incremental sales through personalization and increased app engagement with the app now accounting for more than 60% of online sales.

Importantly, our sales outpaced the U.S. beauty market in a dynamic environment. We increased our share of prestige beauty while holding mass share flat according to Circana. Quarter after quarter, we continue to translate strategy into results, delivering on our commitments, strengthening our business and reinforcing the durability of our model and what our teams can achieve together. As a result of our first half performance, we've raised our sales and earnings guidance for the year, which Chris will cover more in detail shortly.

Let me now share more details on our second quarter performance and the progress we're making across our Ulta Beauty Unleashed pillars. Beginning with our core business growth pillar. Our U.S. business continues to power the company's overall performance supported by our focus on delighting guests at every interaction, advancing our go-to-market approach, delivering compelling merchandising innovation and strengthening our marketing leadership.

Starting with the heart of our omnichannel ecosystem, our stores. We fuel growth with the addition of 13 net new Ulta Beauty stores during the quarter and drove modest comp growth in stores as we lapped our strongest quarter from last year. Performance was driven by effective execution of key promotions and events along with the impact of compelling newness. Our store associates maximize key selling opportunities and drove guest excitement in sales during key events like the Big Center Beauty sale, Mother's Day and Father's Day.

During the quarter, we held more than 40,000 in-store events to support significant brand launches and brand activations. These high energy events featured brand education and drove indoor traffic, strong guest engagement and sales. Commerce momentum continued in Q2 as we delivered our sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit sales growth driven by ongoing investments in our guest experience, omnichannel capabilities and emerging channels. Sales were fueled by planned merchandise and marketing promotions that resonated with guests along with the enhanced convenience of our Buy Anywhere, Fill Anywhere capabilities.

During Q2, we fulfilled more than 50% of our e-commerce orders through our vast network of more than 1,500 convenience store locations. Ulta Beauty's TikTok shop continued to gain traction during the quarter, supported by the official brand opening campaign and the addition of several new brands to the shop including TikTok first live celebrity fragrance launch by Rapper, Ice Spice. We also used our new Chelsea New York store as a TikTok shop live shopping video, driving in-store guest excitement and online impressions. Since the launch, our TikTok initiative has driven over 100 million impressions.

Notably, we're attracting significant attention from brand partners who are interested in joining our TikTok shop assortment and from creators who are interested in collaborating with the Ulta Beauty brand. We're pleased with the ongoing success of TikTok initiative and the competitive differentiation that is enabling for Ulta Beauty. From a merchandising perspective, we're focused on creating a continuous sense of discovery, bringing guest products, brands, trends and experiences to give them reasons to keep coming back to Ulta Beauty. Our merchants are curating innovation across established brands, emerging brands exclusive offerings and fresh beauty trends, effectively translating what is culturally relevant into a guest experience that feels accessible and exciting. This starts with our focus on brand building.

First, let me highlight some of the exciting go-to-market and brand-building efforts underway to advance our ambition to win in fragrance. Fragrance continues to be an important growth driver for Ulta Beauty, supported by a strong pipeline of newness and closely relevant brand launches that are bringing excitement and discovery to the category. During the second quarter, we launched several new and exclusive fragrances, including [ Cloud R ], by Drake's Better World fragrance, [ XO Blue ] by Khloé Kardashian, [ Pacro Summer ] by Megan Stallion, and [ Victor & Roth’s Bond ] collection among several others.

[ Branding ] compelling newness to our assortment, our marketing team reinforced Ulta Beauty as a destination for fragrance through a number of high-impact campaigns while our store and e-commerce teams brought these launches to live through prominent, engaging experiences both in-store and online. Together, these efforts help drive meaningful market share expansion in fragrance. Beyond fragrance, K-Beauty momentum continued. We expanded our leading assortment with the addition of five new K-Beauty brands, including Dr. [ Milan Nelonen ], Dr. Rio, [ Dia ] and [ Centalin24 ], a robust double-digit growth in K-Beauty sales compared to the same period last year gives us confidence in our K-Beauty assortment.

Importantly, nearly half of our K-Beauty sales during the quarter came from exclusive brands for products. Our efforts contributed to continued share gains and reinforced our optimism in the longevity of the K-Beauty brands over time. From a broader neatness perspective, newly launched brands like Rare Beauty, Amika and Moroccanoil contributed nicely to performance.

During the quarter, we launched 15 new brands, including Bath & Body Works, Frenshe, JUNOCO and others. And in addition to new brand launches, our merchants are collaborating in close partnership with existing brands to fuel the innovation pipeline and address key white space opportunities. During the quarter, we launched exclusive newness from our existing brand partners, including L'Oreal's infallible cushion foundation, Charlotte Tilburys's exagger-eyes waterproof eyeshadow sticks and Saltair's shimmering body oil. We continue to advance our marketing strategy, strengthening Ulta Beauty's position at the intersection of beauty, culture and community. Our rewrite to rule summer campaign, Champion self-expression, amplified through our partnership with Super Girl and Milly Alcock across high-impact theater, store and social experiences that invited every beauty lever to rock your look and find your power.

We showed up at the center of culture with activations at BottleRock and Lollapalooza, bringing beauty and music together with Ulta Beauty at the center. We amplified our reach through a powerful creator ecosystem, spanning influential voices across social platforms, the UB collective, our own Ulta Beauty's brand partners and celebrity founders. We also expanded social commerce through TikTok Shop and TikTok Live, creating new pathways from inspiration and discovery to engagement and purchase. Together, these efforts drove strong growth in brand awareness and consideration with earned media value and impressions reaching record levels.

Our robust loyalty program, which now encompasses about 47 million active members, remains central to inspiring members through personalized experiences meaningful rewards and exclusive benefits that deepen engagement and build lasting relationships with Ulta Beauty. We are advancing our personalization capabilities, turning the strength of our first-party data and technology investments into even more relevant and impactful guest experiences. Our teams are increasingly focused on anticipating guest needs across key moments in our journey, using customer insights to identify behaviors and intent. From predicting replenishment needs to improving cart conversion, we're creating more opportunities to drive engagement and incremental sales while delivering greater relevance for every guest.

Moving to our second pillar scaling new businesses. Our international operations continue to scale. We recently celebrated the 1-year anniversary of our acquisition of Space NK which operates stores in the U.K. and Ireland. Performance continues to be strong. And during the quarter, the Space NK team drove robust sales growth and continued market share expansion. In Mexico, we continue to expand our footprint with the opening of a new store in Chiapas, remain total stores to 12 at the end of the quarter. The team went into the excitement of the World Cup as a sponsor of [ Campell Martes ] in our national Software Fan Festival where they held an experiential beauty activation, driving awareness and guest excitement. In addition, our franchise partner in the Middle East, Alshaya is making progress on several new store openings planned for later this year.

We are navigating the ongoing geopolitical environment in partnership with Alshaya and remain optimistic about the expansion opportunities in the region over the long term. We are expanding our assortment and giving guests even more choice through Ulta Beauty's marketplace initiative. During the quarter, we continued to add new brands and SKUs across each of the seven marketplace assortment focus areas. Closing the quarter with more than 450 brands and over 12,000 SKUs in our marketplace assortment. Our marketplace is an excellent example of how each element of our model makes the next better.

Marketplace is attracting new and reactivating lapsed loyalty members, serving as a source of newness that elevates our assortment with high potential brands and fueling incremental UB media growth as more marketplace brands leverage our media network to drive awareness and sales. Moving to overall UB Media performance. We're seeing solid momentum as the team drove double-digit growth compared to the second quarter in 2025. The strength of new products, including Connected TV, along with new brand investment from both core and marketplace brands growth and profitability. We continue to test and expand new product offerings to round out our suite of tools to support brand partner advertising effectiveness and sales growth.

In wellness, our assortment continues to resonate with guests, and we're fueling incremental growth through this important element of our business. We held our [ inaugural ] find your feel good wellness event, which sparks meaningful guest engagement and awareness. We built on our first for success incorporating wellness into our strategic temple events like big summer beauty sales and continue to elevate our assortment with the addition of four new brands, including exclusive only at Ulta brand, Good Day, by Patchology and HigherDOSE, a wellness tools brand designed to ignite vitality from the inside out. I'm proud of our teams are thoughtfully building our position in wellness, continuously applying what we learn to strengthen our approach and better serve the evolving needs of our guests.

And finally, our third strategic pillar aligning our foundation for the future. Within supply chain, we are effectively leveraging prior investments in technology, automation and network optimization to improve speed to guests, improve efficiency and help offset the impact of rising fuel costs. In addition, our AI-powered sourcing capabilities continue to optimize the omnichannel inventory across all nodes, allowing us to meet greater guest and customer demand more efficiently and reduce markdowns.

Beyond just supply chain, we are advancing our AI capabilities across the business to elevate the guest experience and unlock meaningful operational efficiencies. As consumers increasingly turn to AI for search discovery, we have scaled content creation and a much product information across AI platforms like OpenAI's ChatGPT positioning Ulta Beauty as an authority of source for beauty discovery, inspiration and expertise. We also leveraged our partnership with Google Gemini to launch first-to-market capabilities, including multi-SKU purchases.

At the same time, we enhanced our on-site shopping agent, Ulta AI, with new features and broader placement and a high-performing discovery experience. These efforts are delivering encouraging results, driving meaningful increases in site traffic and improved conversion. At the same time, we're in the early stages of applying AI across key corporate uses to enhance how we work, improve productivity and drive greater efficiency. As these capabilities mature, we see opportunities to scale AI thoughtfully across the organization and deliver incremental value over time.

Turning to the operating landscape. We see continued beauty and wellness resilience and strong consumer interest and engagement. At the same time, perceived value continues to influence purchase decisions and consumers are being choiceful as they navigate actual uncertainty and higher everyday expenses, including elevated fuel cost. Against this backdrop, we are uniquely positioned to meet our guests wherever they are. We are focused on emphasizing the multiple ways we deliver meaningful value while continuing to deepen engagement with our brand including an assortment that spans all price points, giving guest choice and flexibility to shop on any budget, a seamless omnichannel experience for convenience shopping and fulfillment options and a powerful value-rich loyalty program that rewards members with personalized promotions, relevant offers and exclusive perks.

Looking ahead, we will remain disciplined and responsive as we manage the evolving operating landscape with a focus on serving our guests, driving sales growth and positioning Ulta Beauty to consistently capture market share. As we move into the second half of the year, we're excited about our ability to execute on our key strategic priorities within our Ulta Beauty Unleashed Strategy to further fuel core business growth and scale new growth vectors while aligning our foundation for sustained profitable growth.

In closing, our year-to-date performance, including strong sales and earnings growth as well as continued share gains is a compelling demonstration that Ulta Beauty's differentiated model is more relevant than ever and that our Ulta Beauty Unleashed Strategy is working. What sets our differentiated model apart is the power of our entire ecosystem, leading assortment, services, loyalty, omnichannel convenience, beauty expertise and shopping experience, all working together. This combination creates a flywheel that attracts more guests, more loyalty, more data and some insights and more brand partnerships, which in turn makes Ulta Beauty the ultimate beauty discovery destination and represents a strategic advantage that is very difficult to replicate.

By leveraging our unique understanding of our guests and the beauty landscape, we are strengthening trust and deepening loyalty to ensure Ulta Beauty is the beauty destination, our growing number of guests choose again and again. I want to thank all of our associates for delivering these strong results and advancing our long-term strategic priorities amidst a dynamic operating environment. We are energized by our continued progress and confident in the enduring relevance of beauty, the powerful connection our guests and associates have with Ulta Beauty and the significant growth opportunities ahead. I'm confident that we have the right team, strategy and model to continue to win in beauty and drive profitable growth and meaningful long-term value for all of our stakeholders.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Chris to cover the financials.

Thanks, Kecia, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll begin with the discussion of our second quarter results and then share our updated expectations for the year. The Ulta Beauty team delivered strong profitable growth again this quarter. Our performance reflects the power of our Ulta Beauty Unleashed Strategy, which drove healthy revenue, operating profit and earnings growth.

This performance was enabled by effective management of gross margin in a competitive environment and a balanced approach to SG&A, including investing to support growth, complemented by a focus on expense discipline, and delivering productivity. I want to express my sincere appreciation to all our teams for their continued focus and thoughtful execution in driving these strong results.

Highlighting our performance in the quarter, beginning the sales, net sales for the quarter increased 8.9% to $3 billion compared to $2.8 billion last year. Importantly, excluding the impact of Space NK, total sales increased in the strong mid-single-digit range. During the quarter, we opened 13 net new Ulta Beauty stores and one new Space NK store. Other revenue grew approximately 2% to $54 million.

Comparable sales for the period increased 3.8%, driven by average ticket primarily reflecting the impact of category mix shifts with transactions roughly flat to last year. From a channel perspective, both store and digital channels contributed to comp growth with e-commerce delivering high teens sales growth and comp stores delivering modest growth.

Turning now to sales by category. Fragrance continued to be our strongest category this quarter, delivering high-teen comp growth, driven by successful Mother's Day and Father's Day activations and compelling newness. Incremental marketing support for key fragrance moments and a thoughtfully curated assortment of both breakthrough exclusive newness and beloved luxury fragrance icons continue to drive momentum. Guests responded to the excitement of discovering what's new, while continuing to turn to Ulta Beauty for key gifting occasions, this performance was supported by strength in our core luxury brands, Prada, Carolina Herrera and YSL as well as the exclusive new brand launch of Megan Thee Stallion, exclusive brand noise through its innovative milk sent format and standout newness in collaboration with award-winning singer songwriter, Ella Langley drove virality and strong guest engagement.

The hair care category delivered high single-digit comp growth again this quarter driven primarily by strong performance in prestige hair care and hair tools. Newer brands, Amika and Moroccanoil as well as exclusive brand Sacred, continue to drive healthy growth in prestige hair care as hair treatments such as scalp regimens continue to resonate with consumers. Innovative offerings from Shark and T3 contributed to growth within hair tools.

Comp sales in the makeup category were approximately flat with growth in prestige makeup, offset by a decrease in mass makeup, compelling newness, including an early lead from Charlotte Tilbury and an exclusive launch with HAFMAGIC as well as ongoing performance of new brand, Rare Beauty drove guest excitement and low single-digit growth for prestige makeup. Mass makeup declined in the low single-digit range with exclusive newness from L'Oreal, strength from Milani and sustained growth for Morphe, which was more than offset by select mass brands, which lapped meaningful newness from last year.

Comp sales in the total skin care and wellness category declined modestly this quarter. Wellness delivered another quarter of double-digit growth with nutrition and supplements, including [ Lemme ], [ Mary Roots ], in Cymbiotika as well as self care brands, including Therabody and Sage driving category performance. Prestige and mass skin care continue to contribute to growth as K-Beauty brands, including Medicube, [ Anula ], an exclusive brand, Peach & Lily, a newness from existing brands, including Tatcha and La Roche-Posay drove category performance and strong guest engagement. This growth was more than offset by lower sales in body care as we lap meaningful expansions of key brands last year.

Finally, services delivered mid-single-digit comp growth driven by strong member engagement in salon and specialty services, including ear piercing and makeup services. Gross margin decreased modestly to 39.1% of sales compared to 39.2% of sales last year, primarily due to the impact of the Space NK business mix. Regarding the Ulta Beauty business, we continue to effectively manage gross margin delivering modest improvement in the quarter through shrink reductions, increased supply chain productivity and preservation of merchandise margin while absorbing the impact of channel mix and slower other revenue growth.

Moving to SG&A. We continue to execute against our expense optimization plan, maintaining financial discipline and driving efficiencies while prioritizing targeted investments. For the quarter, SG&A increased 8.2% to $803 million, primarily due to the acquisition of Space NK. As a percent of sales, SG&A decreased 20 basis points to 26.4% compared to 26.6% last year, largely due to lower incentive compensation and leverage of corporate overhead partially offset by the impact of Space NK and increased investments in advertising to support growth and market share gains.

Operating profit grew double digits at 10.1% to $380 million. As a percent of sales, operating margin was 12.5% of sales compared to 12.4% last year, reflecting strong execution across the P&L. Interest expense was $4 million, primarily reflecting the continued utilization of our revolver to support our previously communicated increase in share buybacks. Wrapping up the second quarter P&L, net income increased 8.1% to $282 million and diluted earnings per share increased double digits at 13.3% to $6.55 per share.

Turning to the balance sheet and our capital deployment strategies. We continue to maintain a disciplined approach to cash and capital expenditures, driving improved near-term cash efficiency while investing against our long-term growth priorities. We ended the quarter with $213 million in cash and short-term investments and $340 million in short-term debt. Total inventory was flat at $2.4 billion, reflecting improved inventory management, offset by inventory to support new brand launches and the addition of new stores.

On a per store basis, inventory decreased 4.1%. Capital expenditures were $81 million for the quarter, primarily driven by investments in new and existing stores and technology. In the quarter, we continued to return excess capital to shareholders, deploying cash and leveraging our revolver to support $236 million of stock repurchases bringing the year-to-date total to $791 million.

At the end of the second quarter, $1 billion remained available for our current share repurchase program, and we now expect to complete the current board authorization in fiscal 2026, increasing our stock buyback target to $1.8 billion for the year. We expect stock repurchases to remain a poor part of our capital allocation strategy in the future as we work with our Board to define the next iteration of our buyback program.

Turning now to our updated outlook for fiscal 2026. We intend to expand market share and drive compelling profitable growth this year and our teams delivered against these goals with strong execution across the P&L for the first half of fiscal 2026. Reflecting the strong performance, we have raised our full year expectations for both sales and earnings. We now expect fiscal 2026 net sales growth to be between 6.7% and 7.2% with comp sales growth between 3.2% and 3.7%. We expect operating profit growth to be between 8.3% and 9.3% for the year.

We continue to expect to generate strong operating cash flow which will enable reinvestment to support future growth and also support our increased plan to return $1.8 billion in capital to shareholders through our stock repurchase program in fiscal 2026. We also now expect diluted EPS to be between $28.70 and $29 per share, representing growth between 11.9% and 13.1%, respectively, compared to previously announced growth expectations of 10.6% to 12.3%. Note, our estimates assume a weighted average share count of approximately 43 million shares and a tax rate of approximately 24.5%.

For modeling purposes, we now expect modest improvement in operating margin for the year with opportunity to increase margin up to 20 basis points. We intend to continue to balance investments across cost of sales and SG&A to support market share expansion and strong profitable growth. We continue to detect gross margin for the year will be roughly flat as we leverage growth and productivity to balance channel mix, fuel costs and the need to compete in an evolving environment. We continue to expect SG&A expenses will increase less than revenue growth for the year as we lap Ulta Beauty unleash investments made last year, including the acquisition of Space NK and drive efficiencies while continuing to invest with discipline to support market share gains and maximize profitable growth, reflecting our intent to continue to leverage our revolver to support our stock buyback program, we expect interest expense will be between $14 million and $16 million for the year.

In addition to reflecting a strong first half performance, our updated guidance reflects appropriate briefings for the second half given the evolving macro landscape. For the second half, we now expect net sales to increase 4% to 5%, inclusive of comp sales growth of between 2% and 3% as we lapped stronger performance during the same period last year.

Based on this expectation, we anticipate our 2-year stacked comp for the second half will be greater than 8%. Consistent with our prior guidance, we expect operating profit will increase between 6% and 8% for the second half. We continue to plan SG&A growth in the low single-digit range, which will more than offset planned pressure from gross margin. Recall the gross margin in Q3 last year benefited from the timing of market-wide price actions from select brands, which are not expected to repeat this year. Reflecting these expectations, we expect to deliver diluted EPS growth between 9% and 12% for the second half of the year versus the same period last year.

One final comment as you review your models. We expect normal seasonality between Q3 and Q4 as we invest in Q3 to prepare for the holiday season and therefore, would expect less EPS growth in Q3 versus Q4.

In closing, Ulta Beauty continues to be well positioned to deliver compelling long-term value creation for shareholders. We remain focused on executing with discipline against our plans including focused investments to increase market share and deliver strong profitable sales growth and double-digit annual earnings growth for shareholders.

And now I'll turn the call over to our operator to moderate the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from Rupesh Parikh with Oppenheimer.

And also congrats on a nice quarter. So I wanted to kick it off with the makeup category. So comps were flat during the quarter. I was just curious from an industry perspective, what you're seeing in the category and then how you're thinking about the back half? And just curious if you expect any green shoots as we enter the back half of the fiscal year.

Thanks, Rupesh, for the question. Mass makeup performance was mostly a reflection of lack of newness from some of the major brands as they lack some strength from last year. But we are seeing some encouraging activity in the category like when you're looking at what we're seeing going into the second half, this fuller face look, more expressive eye, et cetera.

And then we're also very optimistic at some of the newness that we're seeing that's coming with the category in the back half. So I'd say between what we're seeing with trends with a little bit more of a heavier use makeup case going into the back half of the year, along with some newness that we're seeing in both mass and prestige, -- it gives us what we see, you mentioned about green shoots. We see that potentially there's some green shoots for us in the back half of this year in regards to makeup.

Our next question will come from Lorraine Hutchinson with Bank of America.

The competitive environment continues to intensify. Can you comment on how the promotional cadence has been for both Ulta Beauty and the competition? And then what's included in your outlook for the second half?

Thanks, Lorraine, for the question. As we shared in the remarks that value is an increasingly important consideration for the guest as they are facing some heightened economic uncertainty, and everybody is watching their pocketbook. The overall promotional environment did tick up a little bit with the market, and we were a little bit more promotional year-over-year.

But what I would say is that we were really strategic in our promotional plan, and we were very thoughtful in how we participated. The big summer of Beauty Sale, Mother's Day and Father's Day and then we did also target some promotions to protect market share. And a good example of that is brand days. We did participate in that, and we had planned in that in doing that in this quarter.

There's three focus areas that we're really looking at with value because to me, it's not just about the promotionality, but it's also about value and the value you're bringing to the guest. We're utilizing our investments that we've made to really power our personalization capabilities and maximize our promo efficiency. We're also leveraging our marketing to really highlight and reinforce that value message both in stores and online.

And then we're continuing to balance promotionality and profitability as that environment continues to evolve. One of the things that we've been talking about here internally is that we want to evolve our promotional strategies to really drive profitable growth and what that really means is that we're looking at a promo holistically. We're not just looking at that specific moment in time. We're also looking at like how does this promo potentially drive AOV, member engagement a core assortment lift.

So it's not just a stand-alone onetime period that we're looking at when we're investing in promotional activity. It's really more holistic and it's a little bit more strategic in nature. So what I would say is for the back half, we've got built into our forecast, the ability to be flexible and really respond in a dynamic environment, and we're focused on continuing to take share and to drive profitable growth.

Our next question will come from Christopher Horvers with JPMorgan.

So your sales came in better than the 2-year stack math for the second quarter. That would seem to imply some sort of acceleration from the time of the first quarter call. Is that fair? And what came in just overall better than expected, whether that was the newness or was it the engagement around some of these planned promotional events?

And then as you look at that back half, that 2% to 3% same-store sales, is the message that there was something unique in the second quarter that doesn't persist? Or to what extent or is it just, hey, we don't know the world is very uncertain, and you've got back-to-school and holiday ahead of us. So let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Thanks, Chris, for the question. I'll take the first part, and then I'll kick it over to Chris. What I will say is that when we gave guidance, we gave guidance based on the information that we had at the time when we had our last call. And we did see sales continue to pick up as the quarter went through.

So what I would say is that I'm pleased -- I was just answering the question earlier with Lorraine, around how our review of how we're attacking the promotionality and how it's playing out and how the consumer is responding and really the levers that we're pulling on in more of a 360 approach. So it's not just about a promo, it's about how are we activating it in store with the experience and being really thoughtful in how we're bringing the brands to life. We were pleased with how that continued to play out throughout the quarter. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the numbers in the stack Chris?

Yes. Thanks for the question. Look, first, overall, our sales guidance, we did increase it meaningfully for the full year, down 6.7% to 7.2% and a total comp 3.2% to 3.7%. As you think of the second half of the year, we continue to make an assumption on growing share as we move into the second half of the year. The implied kind of second half growth in total is 4% to 5% comp growth of 2% to 3%.

I think it's probably easier to look at maybe a first half, second year, 2-year stack. We did say that the second half, we expect to be above 8%. When you look at the first half of the year versus the second half of the year, there's a meaningful step-up in the comp from 2025, right?

We're a little over 6% in the back half of 2025 versus a little over 4.5% in the first half of 2025.

So there's a meaningful step-up there. And so I would say there's not a significant difference between first half, second half. I do think to your point, we want to remain prudent in a dynamic macro environment. We want to provide a forecast we have conviction in. And overall, we just see the guidance as very strong, and we see how that's also flowing through from strong profit and a really nice double-digit EPS portfolio. We think it sets up the balance of the year nicely, and we're pleased with the execution to date.

Your next question will come from Anthony Chukumba with Loop Capital Markets.

On another really strong quarter. Going back just a little bit to the competitive landscape. I mean, obviously, your former partner is now opening some beauty shop-in-shops. I know you've always said this is a very competitive category and a very attractive category. But as you think about the back half of this year and the upcoming holiday selling season, do you -- what is your appetite for, if necessary, getting more promotional to continue to gain market share?

Well, Anthony, what I would say is that Beauty has always been a competitive category. We expect the battle for share to remain intense. Our job isn't to chase competitors. It's to really lean into what differentiates Ulta Beauty and execute it even better. We're the ultimate beauty discovery destination and we really own that beauty journey end-to-end.

And our competitive moat is really self-reinforcing, unmatched choices, attract guests to our guests, attract the best brands, and those brands bring greater newness and exclusivity that differentiation really deepens the loyalty and brings guests more into our ecosystem and makes Ulta Beauty even more valuable to those brands. So I was talking in my prepared comments about brand building and how important that is and how we're leaning into fragrance and K-Beauty and exclusives are very, very important. And when you think about like even K-beauty and our double-digit growth there, it was 50% of that was exclusive to us in our assortment.

So we're just going to continue to lean into what it is that we do well. We will respond to any kind of dynamic environment that's out there. But we feel like we've got all of the levers that are playing to our advantage. And our guidance has built in the ability for us to remain promotional if needed.

Yes. I would just add that the team has done a really nice job of driving productivity both in gross margin and in SG&A that's enabled us to make sure that we're investing for strong returns, again, both as you think of kind of go-to-market plans that may be in COGS, but also you saw an increase in marketing advertising, which has helped fuel growth as well. So really pleased with how we're managing the P&L, getting productivity, efficiency out of the areas we should and putting investment back in the business to fuel growth while preserving that flexibility to deliver on our increased guidance.

Our next question will come from Krisztina Katai with Deutsche Bank.

Congrats on a nice set of results here. I had question on K-Beauty, right? Kecia, you said it delivered double-digit growth. I think nearly half of the sales are coming from exclusive brands or products. But as K-Beauty becomes more widely available, how are you thinking about maintaining Ulta's competitive advantage and authority within the space? And then if you could help quantify or maybe contextualize for us, just the contribution that, that category has had on your comp growth?

Well, Krisztina, as the U.S. leader at K-Beauty for the last 18 months, and we've been continuing to accelerate, we continue to lead into the assortment innovation of bringing the best and global beauty to the U.S. market and our international markets around the world. This also announced the launch of [ Proya ], the #1 skin care brand in China. So it's not just about K-Beauty anymore. I think C-Beauty is also very, very important to us.

And one of the things that we're going to really hold true here at Ulta Beauty is I think you can get really caught up into this K-Beauty hoopla about it being very fast fashion. Our merchants are very responsible and very thoughtful of creating the best brands that have great formulations and putting our guests first and making sure that they have strong efficiency and efficacy in our high-quality products that we're putting in front of our consumers.

So we're not going to get caught up into this fast fashion of K-Beauty because there's a lot of noise out there. We want to put the very best of the assortment and have that trusted experience from our guests that are coming into the stores. So going forward, I'd say, I mentioned K-Beauty, it's C-Beauty, and there's other global trends that we're staying really close to. We feel good about the global innovation pipeline.

We've got a lot of new products and categories that are coming across the broader assortment in merchandising. And we're really good at the storytelling and bringing those brands to life. It can be a little confusing on how you shop this category specifically, and we're going to do a really nice job of continuing to simplify and be able to help that consumer shop a category that's still relatively new in the U.S.

And then we're just going to continue to leverage our scale and our differentiated model and introduce brands. We're learning quickly from the guest response, and we're just going to continue to scale the strongest concepts across our ecosystem in a broad-based way. So it's not just about skin care, there's also makeup and there's also hair care. So we're really leaning in it across the broader Ulta Beauty portfolio.

Our next question will come from Sydney Wagner with Jefferies.

So our store fulfillment climbs pass 50% of e-commerce orders and digital channel growth remains strong. Can you just update us on the progress of closing the profitability gap between digital and store sales and then are there any other levers beyond fulfillment that are meaningfully contributing there?

Yes. Thanks for the question. One, I mean, look, you see us this year as channel shifts continue to play out for us to nicely manage gross margin. We have a really strong supply chain productivity agenda. We actually got some leverage this quarter on strong growth from our store fixed costs, and this is inclusive of absorbing headwinds like increased fuel costs as well. So the team across the board has done an outstanding job.

To your point, kind of the leverage of our store footprint becomes an effective mechanism to manage the delta between the transportation costs, and we're going to continue to drive that lever in addition to additional productivity. We feel confident using this year as sort of a proxy for our productivity agenda and just continuing to drive strong growth and get leverage across gross margin to continue to be able to balance this. We're treating things as omnichannel.

Obviously, with strong growth too. We're getting leverage from our broader fixed cost in our overall overhead structure within corporate. And then as you think of going forward, we'll continue to benefit from accretive growth from new value vectors like Marketplace and UB Media that will also be enhancing to gross margin. So we feel good about how we're managing things this year. And I think it sets up nicely for the future as well.

Our next question will come from Susan Anderson with Canaccord Genuity.

I guess maybe just looking at the newness, I don't know if you could talk about kind of what you see coming for the back half and I guess, just the strength of newness you see coming versus what we saw in the first half? And are there any certain categories that you think will be stronger than others such as fragrance or skin care?

And then also, I guess, just when you look at mass versus prestige, I guess, how do you balance the investment between the two categories? It definitely seems like prestige has been stronger maybe now. So I guess just curious if you feel like the competition has increased at all in the mass area, particularly as like Walmart and stuff starts to kind of refocus back on their beauty.

Susan, you asked kind of a 2-part question here. So the first part would be around how do I feel about the newness coming through in the back half. We feel great about the newness, and we feel like it's very balanced. It's one of the things that Lauren and the merchant team have done a fantastic job with is really forecasting what newness we had in the pipeline last year, what do we have in the plan this year? And how are we looking at making sure that we're bridging potentially any gaps that could be out there.

We feel really good about the back half, and that's built into the guidance into the plan. In regards to mass in mass, it's different than in prestige. In mass, we participate in a largely highly distributed market where the opportunity is continuing to gain relevance and share. But when you look at the mix of our business, about roughly 30% of it is coming from mass and 70% is coming from prestige. So we are a much smaller player in the beauty space in mass than where we are in prestige.

So while we held share roughly flat in mass, especially with there not being a lot of newness in some of that mass category, I feel like that was a pretty good representation of the strength of our business in this last quarter. In regards to prestige, we've gained share in prestige in the quarter in both brick-and-mortar and e-commerce, which that's really where the majority of our business is coming from. But when you look at where our focus is, we really want to lean into being where you find discovery in mass.

A great example of that is this cushion foundation where we were the launch lead and exclusive for L'Oreal, where we're bringing that brand to life in our stores, giving it credibility before it expands in other modes of distribution. And I think you'll see us playing in mass more in that way. And then we'll go on to the next new launch that could be playing.

But I think when you look at the competitive environment for mass as a whole, I feel that we're going to continue to lean into exclusives, first to market that really differentiate us versus the other mass players because if it's just purely about price and total assortment, it's less than like 30% of our business right now today. So it's not really where we're totally leaning in.

Our next question will come from Olivia Tong with Raymond James.

Two questions. One on the overall environment, whether you're seeing any noticeable or observable trade down or affordability behavior. We obviously talked about the challenges in mass makeup, although it clearly sounds like it's more newness and competition, but you're seeing if -- you're seeing anything there. And then on the overall portfolio, you've now had Space NK for a year international rollout marketplace. Would just love to hear a little bit more about your learnings from these endeavors.

Sure. Thanks, Olivia, for the question. What I will say is that we remain pleased with how our teams are executing in a dynamic environment. We have not seen any notable changes in consumer behavior in the quarter and that means both the demographics from an age perspective and also from an income perspective is that we're seeing increases in spend across the broader segmentation. So we've not seen trade down behavior happening. And again, us raising our guidance for the back half of the year does share that we're confident in what we've got out there that we will be able to continue to drive the business.

In regards to what we've learned from the portfolio enhancements of Space NK, we've just now cycled on a year of having Space NK, it's gone really fast. We're really pleased with what we're seeing. There's been a lot of learnings for us in regards to clienteling, loyalty, second purchase. We're taking some of those learnings and we're really applying them into our Ulta Beauty ecosystem.

And on the flip side, I think some of the things that we've been able to bring to them is a little bit more around our -- the scale, the size that we have, our operational efficiencies and effectiveness. So again, when we made that acquisition, it was to me a 1 plus 1 equals 3, where I felt like we could be much stronger and better together than we would be as operating as independent company.

So I like what I'm seeing. I think we're learning a lot about their private label and their private branding there. The way that they're bringing their storytelling to life even more in stores. And I think that we're still in the early innings, but I'm really pleased with what I'm seeing also from their comp growth and how they're really performing and taking share still in the U.K., which is great. There has been no big surprises, and we've been really pleased with the overall performance.

Our next question will come from Adrienne Yih with Barclays.

Great. And I'll have my congratulations, well done. It's a pretty darn tough environment. Kecia, I wanted to talk a little bit more about kind of the growth opportunities for the longer-term horizon. Health and wellness, that's obviously and then K-Beauty, those being sort of the new categories. They're very small today. How do you define wellness?

I mean it's very, very broad. And how do you kind of curate an assortment that's trustworthy, as you said earlier, to grow that at an accelerated pace. And then secondarily, another area that teams get opportunity is all your services business. It drives them into the stores. Is there anything that you are contemplating or strategically thinking about that might grow beyond the haircare, primarily haircare.

Yes. Thanks, Adrienne, for the question. I'll start with wellness first. What we've done is over the course of our introduction of wellness, we've really focused on four strategic pillars.

The first one is around nutrition and supplements. The second one is intimate care, third is rest and relax and the fourth is essential routine. So we're trying to not be everything to everyone. We're really focused on these 4 primary categories and bringing the best of these categories to life for our consumer. And we're learning very quickly from the insights that we've gained from the stores that we've expanded in right now and then also our expanded assortment in our marketplace online.

I do believe that this could be one of our next big pillar categories of continued growth. It doesn't cannibalize on the existing sales and also could help the trip frequency purchase, very similar to how our services does in our stores, too. In regards to the services and any type of new services that we're looking at, we're continuing to always lean in and how the guest is continuing to evolve the needs they have. We've added the ear piercing in stores in the last few years.

That was due to the guest asking for it. While we backed away from skin, I think there's still something there that we've not maybe cracked the code within skin that we could maybe in the future. But in regards to like anything that's big and new in regards to services, we don't have anything to share at this point in time.

I would just say that we do -- we're proud of how our salon business has been performing. We're very proud of how we've actually started to make it a little bit even more profitable within the walls that we're working in right now. So I would say more to come. We're always continuing to evolve and change and meeting the guests where they're at and staying very close to them and making sure that we're offering all the services that they're looking for.

Ryan, I think we have one -- I think that we're out of time. So Kecia, do you want to take us...

Yes, absolutely. I would just like to thank you for joining us today. And to wrap up, I would thank our guests, our trusted brand partners and our dedicated associates for their continued engagement and support. We're proud of the consistency of our results and the progress we continue to make. Our increased guidance underscores our confidence in the path ahead and our ability to drive sustainable long-term growth and value creation for all of our stakeholders. We look forward to updating you on our progress on our next earnings call on December 3. But thank you, and have a great evening. Thanks, everyone.

Thank you for joining. This concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.

My name is Dylan Carden. I'm the analyst here at Blair that covers Ulta. Very pleased today to have Kecia Steelman, Chris DelOrefice, CEO and CFO of Ulta respectively. I'm required to tell you that there's disclosures on our website.

And let's get into it. So I want to start just sort of broadly your background, let's say, you've been with the company now 12 years, 11 years, you've worn different hats. Kind of as you're easing into the leadership role, what your past experience with the company even before then sort of brings to the table and kind of how you see the position of the company currently?

Well, I want to start off by saying thank you, Dylan, for having us in William Blair. Just to give a little background on what Ulta Beauty is. Ulta Beauty is the largest specialty beauty retailer in the United States. And now we are an international beauty retailer. We have everything from beauty to wellness and we cover all price categories from mass to luxury and everything in between along with services.

Yes, I've been at Ulta Beauty now for almost 12 years. Time has gone really fast. My background was, I started as an hourly associate at Target Corporation in the early '90s, grew my career there into management positions and then went to Home Depot and was a VP GM for specialty retail Expo Design Centers there. And then went to the Dollar store segment, where I was responsible for real estate and then went into operations, and I ran 2,000 Family Dollar stores, tough job.

And then when Ulta Beauty called, I wanted to see what this store was about because I'd never even walked into a store. And when I walked in, I was like, wow, this is one of the best kept secrets out there in retail. When I joined the company in 2014, we had about 600 stores. And I was leading the store operations side of the business as an SVP. We now have 1,500. So I've seen over 900 stores kind of come to life. And before I took over the CEO position, I was the COO for about 3 years.

And what I would say is that this is a fantastic model, all centered around the experiential piece of beauty. Our passionate 60,000 associates really bring our brands to life, and it's a true asset that we have. I do think that my experience of over 30 years in retail and being in almost every single position gives me a unique perspective as a CEO and an understanding for the role that everyone has to play in the organization and the value of how hard it is to really make this machine work. And again, I'm truly, truly blessed to now, the last 18 months have been into the role of CEO. And it's been a long journey to get here, but it's been a lot of fun and well worth the journey to have arrive now as the CEO here at Ulta Beauty. It's been a lot of fun.

Absolutely. Chris, same question to you. Quite the opposite set up. You're relatively newer, find yourself in a very important role as it relates to messaging. Kind of your background and just sort of your philosophical approach to the CFO role, how you address the Street, deal with the Street and sort of what you find here as far as sort of that skill set?

Yes. I appreciate it. Yes. Thanks, everyone, for being here and taking the time. One, it's been great to be at Ulta. It's about 6 months now. So my role prior to this, I was the CFO, Becton Dickinson, large med tech player. There, I led strategy, corporate development, technology transformation and then all the traditional CFO functions. Prior to that, I had about 20-plus years with Johnson & Johnson. I did spend about 8 years leading various roles in the consumer business there, including global CFO and CFO of their North America business. So familiar with the beauty market. I had the great opportunity to be presented with this opportunity.

Kecia is an outstanding leader, brought together a really great team. And I was really excited about the Ulta Beauty Unleashed strategy. One, it's just a great resilient market, which I think is very relevant for the discussion today. But on top of that, as you think of Ulta Beauty Unleashed, I really see opportunity with new growth vectors that will both support top line growth and profit growth on the bottom line. And they're all in very early innings. So I'm excited about the journey that we're on, the opportunity ahead of us.

And look, as I think of my role as CFO, it's how do we scale those opportunities in a thoughtful way, focus on discipline, focus on profitable growth, kind of orchestrating the plan that paces in the right way, fix the right priorities and unlocks and maximizes value creation. At the end of the day, my lens should be maximizing value creation. And I think you see that reflected in our plan this year and look forward to talking more about that.

Yes, absolutely. Let's start near term, and we can kind of blow it out. A lot of debate kind of coming out of the first quarter, which you reported the other night. Why not flow through more of the EPS beat in the quarter? You beat gross margin, you grew gross margin 100 basis points, you're kind of guiding flat on the year. The questions we're getting, is there conservatism in there? Are you seeing something currently that gives you some pause? And maybe just some points of upside and downside as you kind of look to the balance of the year.

Yes. It's a good question. If you step back, last year was a year where the goal was to drive share, we did that. We fully executed. We did what we said. This year, we wanted to take that to the next level, still focused on strong top line, driving share gains, but driving profitable growth. At the end of the day, we want to deliver guidance that delivers against our long-term algo. We view that as a compelling value creation algorithm. We want to deliver double-digit EPS growth at the end of the day. And you saw that reflected in our initial guide at the start of the year. There was really nice strong top line, 6% to 7%, strong flow-through on the bottom line, double-digit earnings at the midpoint. Really pleased with how we executed through the quarter. There was consistent execution throughout from sales down to EPS, positions us well for the back end of the year.

So coming out of the quarter, we did enhance our guidance, right? The way we think of it is on the strength of the quarter, we wanted to hold top line. Again, remember, our top line growth is 6% to 7%. That includes the benefits we're getting from an acquisition we did, Space NK. If you take that out, we're still nicely positioned with our long-term top line sales growth algorithm goal of 4% to 6%. And we have nice flow-through in terms of discipline on profit. The original operating profit growth was 6% to 9%, and then we had strong double-digit EPS growth. With the strength in the quarter, we increased the bottom end of our operating profit growth to 6.5% to 9%. I think that reflects the strength in the P&L and what you saw in some of the margins.

With that said, I would frame it as we wanted to be prudent in kind of an uncertain backdrop, right? We came out with the quarter with strong performance. As we move through the back end of the year, we still have strong 2-year double stack growth rates in the high single digits, and you have nice balance in terms of earnings growth. I think what we've cared for is if you think about other things we've done, right, you have increased fuel costs, which we cared for. We had talked about that. That's reflected in there, and we think we've built in the flexibility to be responsive in a competitive marketplace.

So the way I look at it is strong Q1 performance. The original guide was strong. It positions us nicely to execute through the balance of the year. We increased the profitability goal. We also doubled down in share buybacks given what you're seeing in terms of the stock price and what we see in terms of the compelling value proposition given the intrinsic value. So we increased our share buybacks in April from $1 billion to $1.5 billion. You saw us execute about over $550 million in the quarter and just feel nicely positioned as we enter the year and feel like we have the flexibility built into our guide to deliver and execute through the balance of the year.

And then forward-looking longer term, you're kind of guiding 12%, 12.5% on op margin. This has been sort of the focal point in the model over the last year plus. Is that the right level sort of that 12-ish percent looking forward where you can take share and kind of continue to invest? And even broader than that, those investments and sort of what are allowing you to take share, maybe we can move on.

That's a great question. So when we set out our -- the investor and long-term algo, we had talked about a floor of 12%. Last year, we actually delivered -- this is on operating margin. Last year, we delivered 12.4% in the peak of our investment year. And we've been very clear. We're not going backwards. So the 12% is no longer relevant. I would take that off of the table. The goal every year, really the positioning we want to do is how can we maximize profit growth. We're going to be disciplined on margin and 2026 is very illustrative of how you could see us execute our guidance profile. So we exited 2025 with 12.4% margin. You see in our 2026 guidance, profit growing faster than sales. We've talked about operating margin being anywhere from flat to up 20 basis points.

As we execute through the year, what we want to do is continue to try and not only deliver against operating profit, but look for opportunities to continue to accelerate operating profit. That's what we did in this updated guidance by increasing the low end of our guidance range on operating profit growth from 6.5% to 9%. The way we think about that in any given year is if I have opportunities to reinvest back in the business as we deliver on our top line, and I can fuel top line, I can drive flow-through to profit, which ultimately flows through EPS and continue to grow it that way. If I don't see prudent investments to capitalize in the marketplace, the leverage opportunities are there, and I can drive leverage.

We want to get to sustainable operating profit growth at the end of the day. And so you're going to see us be disciplined. There's a floor that's already nicely above the 12%. Again, the 12% is off the table. This year, we're going to drive profitable growth, and there's opportunities to continue to expand margin. It is a competitive category. I think it's important to have that flexibility. And it's not just about running profit up too fast. You want to be investing back in the business, growing share and driving operating profit growth as fast as we can go. So again, when you look at Ulta, we can compound earnings at double digits. We have strong cash flow. I think the financial discipline with the strength of our go-to-market model, driving strong top line, growing share is a nice formula of value creation.

The only thing I would just add is that we said last year, we were going to grow top line revenue and take share, and we did that. This year, we said we're going to do that with better financial discipline, of which we showed that we could do it in the first quarter, and you should expect that from us the rest of this year.

Excellent. And just to be clear there, operating margin growth as far as margin or dollar, when you say sort of...

Operating profit dollar growth.

Dollar growth. And then...

But again, to be clear, I don't want people to leave to think, it's not at the expense of margin. You have to do both, right? It's going to be discipline on margin. Think of our guide this year. We're going to maximize operating profit dollar growth while being disciplined in margin. There will always be a floor in the guide and opportunity for leverage. And then it's just a question of what's the best way to maximize operating profit dollar growth? Is it a leverage opportunity, or can I reinvest and drive it through the top line, but not going backwards.

So state of the union then. I think last year was supposed to be sort of a reset year for the industry. It wasn't. There's a lot of different sort of pieces of the category that are growing fragrance, wellness sort of away from sort of your traditional makeup. I'd love to know kind of where you see yourself positioned there. And then you speak to these investments to sort of drive top line. What are those? Let's unpack those as we sort of talk through it.

Yes. Well, we made quite a few investments last year in our go-to-market. If you just take a quick step back, when I was the COO before stepping into the CEO role, we were very invested in our foundational investments. We were a little bit behind. We had to upgrade our ERP system. We had multiple POS systems. So now we're on one common POS system. Our data governance, we needed to make sure was really clean as we were going through this ERP upgrade, which I'm very excited about because if you can leverage your data and you have clean data with AI, you can really unlock a lot of future potential opportunities for us.

And then we were investing in the supply chain. So it was taking up a lot of CapEx, OpEx and also talent resources within the organization because we had to do some catching up. In 2025, then we started to really reinvest into our go-to-market strategy. And what I was pleased about is in 2025, not only were we investing in go-to-market, but our top line revenue really started to respond very, very quickly.

A couple of things that we did in '25 that I feel have positioned us even greater for '26 is, number one, we did make some management changes in our team, and I realigned the way that the teams were working internally. The benefit of being here for a longer period of time is I saw where we maybe have some opportunities to do things a little bit more efficiently and better in the future. So we made some talent changes out to position us for the next generation of growth, and they're all performing...

[indiscernible]

Yes, sure. So we -- previously, we had somebody that was leading marketing, and they also had digital. It didn't make sense to me that digital was not aligned with merchandising. Digital to me and stores are the consumer interaction. So I moved to digital out from underneath marketing, and we promoted somebody internally that had really deep -- in fact, she helped build the loyalty program for us. So she really understood the data behind our members and how to really grow the members.

And when you think about marketing today, it's not just about your traditional print marketing, that's all gone. It's really about how do you leverage the data insights to really drive the consumer behavior. So she is very well positioned from a marketing perspective. And you can see some of the great things that we've done on a social perspective and also behind the scenes with leveraging AI. So that's one big change aligning that.

And then we brought in a great leader for -- that was the previous CEO actually for brand, Lauren Brindley into our merchandising team, and she's the leader there. And then I had a Chief Store Operations Officer, who's been with us for a while, Aimee Thomas, that we elevated her position and made her Chief Retail Officer. So all things that touch stores from store planning and design to real estate to stores, all aligned under her.

When we now go to market with our brands, it's the 3 of them and a lot of the bigger meetings I'm sitting in there, too, whether it's Estee Lauder or L'Oreal or it's a brand that we're trying to get into our ecosystem. The fact that we can now move with speed and alignment, and we've got the decision-makers sitting at the table has really quickly elevated our ability to execute and bring new product and newness into the assortment. That was part of the change that we saw really happening live and in action in 2025, and it's continued into 2026.

And then our investments that we made in our digital platforms for e-commerce. So we were a little bit playing behind some of the traditional e-commerce sites that you see out there that are selling beauty, and we really closed that gap. The leverage that we have that makes Ulta Beauty a little bit more unique on that is that we have a store within 20 minutes of the beauty enthusiasts in the United States now with having 1,500 locations. The fact that we not only can sell online, but one of the fastest growth online is buy online, pick up in store. So the fact that I have that convenience play of stores, and I also unleashed in this last year, ship-from-store capabilities. So my time to consumer has shortened and the cost to ship to consumer has shortened too because of the miles to get there. And also the labor in stores is less than the labor in the distribution center. So there are those things that we were investing in that we're seeing the returns on those investments this next year, and that's been great to be able to see and witness.

I want to get to online, as you know. But so when you're saying, if you see the opportunity for investment, profitable investment, is that then after you put in place these systems, it sounds like it's sort of a harmonious relationship between marketing, brands, store experience. Is that kind of the investments that are out there that you're seeing? Is that the right way to think about it? Is it sort of more of a harvesting period now that you put these systems in place where you can grow more profitably?

Yes. I mean the systems that we had to have in place were kind of table stakes that we couldn't unlock some of the capabilities that we wanted to do until we had the systems in place. We've invested a lot in the systems in place in 2025. There's still a little bit of work to do from our ERP because we did a little bit of some MVPs like just had to get some stuff done. And then we've got to make a few more investments, but nothing to the scale of a full ERP system platform. So there is some general investment that needs to happen.

But really, when we're looking at where do we invest the dollars, it's like where can we get the return on that investment right now. And we're looking at that cohesively as a team. We have an Analyst Day that's going to be coming up in 2027, very, very quickly. This year I know it's going to go really fast. And we'll be able to share more at that time of exactly what it is that we're going to be looking at doing in terms of investments to really continue to drive our business forward for the next generation of growth.

And you touched on this. So my -- we've been in conversation about this. One thing that I've worried about just in the category is that it's depending on whose number you want to use, 25%, 30% online, right? If you look at other categories, historically, that has been an inflection after which it becomes much more cannibalistic to retail, right, which is sort of beyond a retailor's control in that the risk is your every dollar that moves online, it cannibalizes more directly in physical retail.

I look at a quarter like the one you just put up where you're holding it feels like retail margins even with that massive growth in online. And so it feels like your business is positioned in a way perhaps more uniquely whereby you can manage through some of that disruption. The ship from store, leveraging sort of the fixed costs through that. You talked about sort of exclusive brands and events through the retail channel.

Can you sort of unpack how you're seeing that threat to the extent that it is one and how you manage sort of the fixed cost deleverage in the retail channel through that?

Yes. I'll start, and then, Chris, maybe you can talk about the -- how it's flowing through the P&L. So what I would say is that this sector is a little bit unique because the consumer likes to come in store to touch and feel and play with the products. And when we just announced over the last quarter, we had 40,000 events that happened in store. So giving the guest a reason to get off the couch, get in the car and come to your store location is really important. We also see that the younger consumer, so the digitally native consumer likes to shop in store. They actually prefer to shop in store. And I think part of that is they're getting off their devices and they want to come in and touch and feel and play and they want to do with the friends. So you'll see us continuing to lean into that.

I just announced on the call on Tuesday that we're opening a new store in Times Square. It's going to be very experiential. You'll see us looking at elements of that, that we can put into our other stores that are out there. And then buy online, pick up in-store is a huge growth driver in our e-commerce, and that actually flows through like a store sale because it's actually kind of getting picked up by our store associates, the guest is coming there. We don't have the shipping cost, et cetera. So we like that we're seeing that, that's a lever that's being really responsive to the guests.

But Chris, maybe I'll let you share how it's flowing through the P&L.

I mean the premise makes sense, right? It's cannibalistic. It doesn't matter which channel is more profitable. It just -- it comes down to deleverage on the labor, the rent and all [indiscernible].

Yes. Well just one other thing too is what's unique about our model is 80% of our sales -- sales are still flowing through the stores. And even though the e-commerce channel is growing, our store channel is growing also. 90% of the guests are shopping in our stores still today. So there's this concern like is that guest going to just go purely to an online play. I don't think that's going to happen. I think our very best guests shop both channels.

And you're stimulating that. I guess that's embedded in the question is sort of how are you doing that? How are you making sure that the 2 channels are cohesive in that regard?

Yes. And I think that's where you have to have the reason for being -- to get them to come into the store, you're leveraging your app to bounce people back into the store, the more that you can create gamification of even shopping through a store, leveraging your mobile devices, et cetera. That's all like, I think, table stakes going forward.

Yes. I mean it's worth doubling down on -- Kecia noted the percent of sales. But when you think of our loyalty membership and how they activate, 95% of our member base is operating in both channels with a significant portion of it still in-store, 75%, the balance being kind of omni across, right? This is not an ecosystem where they're discrete channels. They're going to constantly interplay off of each other. And that's the way we manage it from a profitability. We're thinking of kind of like an omnichannel P&L. We both look at the pieces to make sure that we're trying to optimize costs individually and then collectively, where do you take advantage of scale.

So as I think of the P&L, you have to kind of manage the pieces, but also look at holistically, how are you getting scale in your business. Distribution is a good example, right? As we continue to grow and we're growing in both channels, right, we're getting scale, we're getting good supply chain optimization leverage with what we're doing from a cost optimization standpoint out of our distribution centers and building kind of capabilities on transportation as well, right? So you're creating these leverage points and efficiency opportunities, some of them cut across omnichannel, and then you're also looking for opportunities to optimize within the respective channels as well.

I mean e-commerce alone, too, right, it's -- you're going to naturally get leverage and scale there as well that helps the total profit picture. I think on the retail side, we're super disciplined around how we're going to market and you think of store footprint and optimizing those assets as you think of new store, different footprint, smaller store footprint. There's still plenty of opportunity for us to get leverage points, how are we managing shrink in store and DCs.

So it's a constant thing. Every year, you have to have this balance of being very disciplined on leverage, kind of a zero-based mindset of investments and what are you investing in that's new to fuel growth. What are you doing from a cost optimization and having a strong funnel there. We're doing a nice job there that both helps get the profitability we need and reinvest back in the business. I mean, at the end of the day, if our growth rate consistent with our long-term algorithms in that mid-single-digit growth, we're going to find opportunities to get leverage throughout the ecosystem.

And I'm no concern around how to drive that with what's happening in the marketplace. I would view it the opposite actually, that I think our unique go-to-model with a really strong e-commerce capability and our store footprint is actually a competitive advantage. And you're even seeing that play out from a complementary standpoint, both from a cost and a revenue standpoint with like buy online, pick up in stores, right? That's a way to engage with the guest 2x, right, if you think about that, and it does improve the cost picture so.

And to be fair, I mean, a lot of other industries didn't have that capability back in 2015, like in apparel, when it was really sort of laying ways to that space. You mentioned kind of the data sort of the reorg in some of those positions. UB Media, how you're using data and some of the initiatives online for the efficiencies of marketing. I'd be curious sort of how you use data to your advantage.

Yes. Well, I will just say that the fact that we have 47 million loyalty members, and those are active loyalty members that had to shop in the last rolling 12 months for us to count you into the ecosystem is a very powerful tool that we have. I'll start first with our marketing. Some of the things that we've changed within our marketing is you've got to be in the cultural moments where the guests are today. And you've seen us maybe change in 2025 being a little bit more engaged with festivals.

And even we just did this unique thing with Beyonce on her Cowboy Carter Tour, where there was this authentic connection with her brand and our brand and getting our brand in front of her loyal following and us traveling around through the cities and creating unique looks. That -- the old days of just putting products out in front of people, that's kind of over. You've got to be immersive in all of their thought processes and where they are in their communities. So that's one great example.

You'll see us at festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza. We just were at BottleRock. So we're looking at different ways that we can be front and center, so we're top of mind. And then our Ulta Beauty world, which we just recently had where the lucky 3,000 of the 3 million people that wanted to go, we're able to see 240 brands that are really being brought to life and then leveraging that social content because everyday consumer was taking video content and sending it out, that's all part of marketing, believe it or not. So there's unique things that we've done that are really making Ulta Beauty top of mind to that consumer.

And then UB Media, there's a huge unlock there because it's not just about taking in that revenue dollars, which we're happy about. I know Chris and I both really like that it flows nicely through the overall P&L. But it's generally also about letting -- giving the brand a way to leverage their dollars and get a good return on their dollars of investing in advertising to generate sales. That's a win for them. That's a win for us. So we're really pleased with how UB Media is really coming to life. It's continuing to grow.

And we think that we've got the right support behind it because one of the opportunities that we had is giving the brands the good clean reporting that they wanted, like are these dollars really working on driving the sales? Yes, you can look at the overall top line and the category is growing or not. But for us, we give more specific data to them. We're getting more closed-loop type reporting.

I just announced on the last call that through YouTube, now we have an enterprise view where if a guest clicked on YouTube and they ended up purchasing through us, we can now link those to actually show back to the brand this was the return rate on that. Pinterest is coming now in Q2. So we're seeing more and more of these social platforms leaning into this in partnership with the retailer on giving this information to the brand. So it's not just about taking that revenue in, which I'm happy about, but it's about driving the top line revenue at the same time.

We're going to run out of time here in a bit, but what I kind of hear you guys saying today is just spent the last 2 years making some sort of foundational investments that were perhaps unsexy but necessary. Now this year and beyond, you've kind of got a baseline of growth, right? You sort of speak to mid- to high, while keeping 12.5% plus and looking for opportunities to kind of accelerate in a market that's dynamic, but you're learning kind of ways to improve your -- particularly your sort of online muscle, right, which I think some people kind of discounted you before TikTok in particular, I think at your Analyst Day, you even have the TikTok box, right, checked. And so I don't know if you'd want to add to that or sort of leave with a different message, but I'll kind of leave it open to both of you to close it out here.

Why don't you start and I'll finish, Chris.

Yes. I think we're committed to that compounding earnings growth at double digits, and we have multiple ways to do it. I think maybe that's what's unappreciated. We're in a great category that's resilient in terms of core beauty. You heard us hit some examples of other things that can create both halo on sales growth, but also drive profitable growth like UB Media.

The other one I would point to that gets right at the heart of your retail store question is wellness, right? We're very early innings there. You think of 4-wall revenue, there's still opportunity to grow that and expand that in store. It's going to leverage our asset base. So it's quite the opposite dynamic, right, where that should flow through at stronger operating profit growth and margin. So there's some exciting opportunities of things that are still very much in their early innings, but we're still also competing and driving our core beauty business. And I think that lends itself to a really nice value proposition.

Yes. And I'll just wrap up by saying, this is what we do. Beauty is a competitive environment. Everybody wants to be in it because of the strong margins that come along with it. But this is what Ulta Beauty does, and this is what we do well, is beauty and wellness. This is the reason for us being. And we have invested in these core systems to enable us to really unlock even future value and be very agile at the same time.

You're right, TikTok wasn't even on the radar before, and we very quickly because they've got such great talent in this organization now, we were able to activate and bring it to life very, very quickly. So I believe that we're in a great category. It's not necessarily recession proof, but it's recession-resistant. The consumer is going to continue to prioritize this category as they're looking at their spend. And we are here to be able to take care of any guest regardless of the price that they can spend because we cover everything from mass to luxury, everything in between along with services.

So I look forward to what we're going to be able to continue to deliver at Ulta Beauty, and I believe the best is still yet to come.

Thank you, everyone.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Leila, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to Ulta Beauty's First Quarter and Fiscal 2026 Earnings Call. This conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Ms. Kiley Rawlins, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Rawlins, please proceed.

Thank you, Leila. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for a discussion of Ulta Beauty's results for the first quarter of fiscal 2026. Hosting our call today are Kecia Steelman, Chief Executive Officer; and Chris DelOrefice, Chief Financial Officer. During today's webcast, a presentation is being shared live and has also been posted to our website at ulta.com/investor.

As a reminder, today's earnings release and the comments made by management during this call include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, factors identified in the earnings release and in our most recent 10-K. The company undertakes no obligation to revise any forward-looking statements.

To allow us to accommodate as many questions as possible during the hour scheduled for this call, we respectively ask that you limit your time to one question and no more than one follow-up question. As always, the IR team will be available for any questions after the call.

And now I'll turn the call over to Kecia. Kecia?

Thank you, Kiley, and good afternoon, everyone. After meeting our ambitious goals in fiscal 2025, we entered fiscal 2026 with a keen focus on continuing our progress while optimizing our model with financial discipline to deliver profitable growth.

Before I dive into the details of our first quarter performance and priorities for the year ahead, I want to share my perspectives on the business. First, our core U.S. business is fundamentally strong and delivering healthy sales growth. Second, the strategic initiatives we are driving to scale new businesses are gaining traction, are contributing to our results and position us well for long-term growth and value creation. Third, we are exercising financial discipline and working thoughtfully to optimize our costs and investments to position our business to deliver consistent double-digit earnings growth.

Next, growth in the beauty category remains healthy, even as consumers are increasingly value focused. And Ulta Beauty's diverse assortment omnichannel convenience and compelling loyalty rewards program uniquely positions us to meet our guests' evolving needs. And finally, we are staying focused on capitalizing on the strengths of our model and executing our Ulta Beauty Unleashed strategy to deliver long-term profitable growth and value. And while we are continuing to monitor how the macro landscape could evolve, we remain execution-focused and are confident we will deliver our fiscal 2026 expectations, which Chris will cover further during the call.

Turning now to our first quarter performance and the progress being made on our Ulta Beauty Unleashed pillars. The strength of our business continued as we delivered first quarter net sales growth of 11.1%, comparable sales growth of 5.3% and 15.5% diluted EPS growth. Performance was broad-based with all channels and major categories contributing positively to our strong results. From a market share perspective, we gained share in prestige beauty, and we were roughly flat in mass beauty.

Beginning with our driving the core business growth pillar. Overall company performance continues to be fueled by the strength of our core U.S. business, reflecting a relentless focus on delighting guests with every interaction and building on our new go-to-market approach, marketing leadership and compelling merchandising innovation. Our stores delivered another solid sales performance, supported by the successful execution of key promotional and marketing events, including 21-plus Days of Beauty in Spring Haul. As we begin the new fiscal year, our store team is focused on driving engagement, education and excitement.

During the quarter, together with our brands, we executed more than 40,000 in-store events, including key activations to highlight newness from brands like Coach, Cecred, Live Tinted and held several workshops to support education for brands Redken, Rare Beauty and Lancome. As we look to Q2, we will stay focused on the fundamentals to ensure we are delivering great guest experiences, driving conversion and fueling sales growth. E-commerce momentum continued with the team delivering another quarter of robust sales performance. The sustained strength of our e-commerce channel is powered by the investments we've made over the last several years to elevate our infrastructure and the ongoing enhancements we're continuing to roll out, like expanded same-day delivery options through Uber Eats and new buy now, pay later options through Klarna to improve functionality, expand convenience and improve the guest experience.

The convenience of buy anywhere, fill anywhere capabilities including buy online, pick up in store, have been a key driver of our e-commerce growth and of our strong guest satisfaction metrics. This quarter marked the exciting launch of our TikTok Shop with a strategic focus on our Only at Ulta exclusive brands. We hosted our first ever TikTok shoppable live stream at our Ulta Beauty World event garnering more than 5 million impressions and strong GMV, rivaling top affiliate live stream performances. This initiative is driving a lot of excitement with guests and the creator community, which is showing high interest in collaborating with us. In addition, a number of brand partners have expressed interest in offering their products as part of our curated TikTok assortment and bundles. This new channel positions Ulta Beauty at the center of a critical discovery point and will enable us to spotlight our exclusive brands, build influence and fuel our marketing efforts, particularly with younger consumers.

Turning to brand building. We are making meaningful progress on our -- and to build multiple $100 million-plus exclusive brands over time. To compete and win in beauty and wellness, we are driving the innovation pipeline, co-investing in marketing with strategic and exclusive brand partners and creating exciting activations in stores and online. We have several exciting success stories on this front. And today, I'd like to highlight an exclusive fragrance brand, NOYZ, an approachable vegan and cruelty-free fragrance brand inspired by relatable real-life feelings and self-expression.

During Q1, NOYZ launched its innovative Mylk de Parfum, part fragrance, part hydrating skin care. Milks are perfect for layering and are creating a new subcategory that has excited our guests and is helping drive the brand's continued growth. Ulta Beauty collaborated with NOYZ on a 360-degree go-to-market activation strategy that helps catapult the brand into our top 20 in the category for the quarter. And NOYZ continues to fuel social buzz into Q2 with the recent debut of Be Her, our fragrance collaboration with award-winning singer-songwriter Ella Langley. From a broader newness perspective, our balanced approach is driving consumer excitement across categories and fueling positive performance.

During the quarter, we launched more than 20 new brands including our record-breaking launch of Rare Beauty in makeup, Balmain, an exclusive early lead brand in fragrance, Bloomeffects in skin, Hairstory in hair care and Gruns in wellness. These launches are in addition to exciting newness from our existing brand partners like Estee Lauder, TATCHA and exclusive brand, Cecred. In marketing, we focus on engaging storytelling to capture core moments in beauty and further Ulta Beauty's authority and high-impact shopping moments. The team drove outstanding activations around key marketing and promotional events including Valentine's Day, 21-plus Days of Beauty in Spring Haul.

In April, we hosted our flagship consumer event Ulta Beauty World in Orlando. Approximately 3,000 Ulta Beauty fans attended the event to engage with nearly 240 of our brand partners and discover newness through immersive high-touch experiences with master class education offered as a separate experience. Building on last year's inaugural event, Ulta Beauty World drove strong engagement across PR and social and expanded into new platforms like TikTok Shop Live, more than doubling earned media value year-over-year.

During the quarter, we expanded our Ulta Beauty Rewards loyalty program to nearly 47 million members, up 4% year-over-year. We are leveraging our vast first-party data and recent tech improvements to enhance our leadership in personalization. Our teams are building around key customer journeys and actions to maximize incremental sales driving opportunities. This includes utilizing our loyalty data to understand behaviors, predictors and purchases and drive card conversion.

Moving to our second pillar, scaling new businesses. Beyond the U.S., we opened a handful of new stores across our international markets. Space NK, which operates stores in the U.K. and Ireland, continues to deliver healthy, well-balanced growth, expand its loyal customer base and gain market share. In Mexico, we opened 2 new stores, including the grand opening of our Madero store, a unique 2-store building that blends modern beauty retail with historic architecture and charm in the heart of Mexico City. In addition, our franchise partner, Alshaya, opened our third store in the Middle East at the Dubai Mall, one of the largest and most visited shopping destinations in the world.

While the situation in the Middle East remains fluid, we continue to be excited about the potential of this flagship location and for the expansion opportunity in the region over the long term. Our marketplace continues to gain traction with the addition of exciting new brands and items. We closed the quarter offering more than 325 brands and over 8,000 SKUs across our 7 marketplace assortment focus areas. During the quarter, we successfully integrated marketplace brands into our 21-plus Days of Beauty promotion contributing to strong ongoing guest engagement. I'm incredibly proud of the way our team continues to execute this important initiative and the strong guest satisfaction we are seeing for those who purchase products from marketplace.

In wellness, we're helping guests find their feel good with expanded assortments across key wellness focus areas, nutrition and supplements, intimate care, rest and reset and essential routines. During the quarter, we launched several new brands, including nutritional gummies brand, Gruns, and intimate skin care brand, Medicine Mama. We drove awareness and guest acquisition through our wellness-focused events and integrated wellness offerings into key tentpole events. We also enhanced our digital navigation and storytelling. Performance continues to build, driven by assortment and space expansion as well as guest engagement in key pillars, including nutrition and supplements and rest and reset.

In UB Media, we are on a journey of scaling this incremental margin driver, rolling out enhanced capabilities, features and products to support our brands. We recently launched a YouTube enhanced measurement product, which provides deeper insights and benefits to our brand. Clinique leveraged this new capability for a recent campaign that was executed with fresh talent and best-in-class practices. It was not only able to measure brand level sales, but they also saw meaningful higher returns on the ad spend and conversion compared to other video channels. And finally, our third strategic pillar, aligning our foundation for the future. As part of our supply optimization efforts, we advanced plans to expand our distribution network with the commitment to open a new regional distribution center in Salt Lake City, Utah. This new facility will leverage the latest in automation technology to improve speed, increase efficiency and simplify product flow.

In addition, we continue to leverage AI to optimize our business. From a guest-facing perspective, we introduced an online shopping agent, Ulta AI, to enhance discovery, personalization and shopping experiences. Initial results have been promising, and we are excited about the potential of this new feature. In addition, we are integrating with leading AI platforms like Google's Gemini to enable agentic commerce. We are still in the early days and are focused on leveraging the strengths of our partners to maximize the AI opportunity.

Finally, turning to our efforts to cultivate one of our most important competitive advantages, our culture. Last month, we brought together more than 1,500 general managers, along with corporate and DC leaders and brand partners in our annual field leadership conference. The strength of our model was on full display. Everything about the time we've spent together was aimed at growing our business, building enthusiasm and pushing ourselves to an even higher standard. The most exciting part was the alignment in the collaboration and the camaraderie across the entire business.

Importantly, there was also a unified focus on execution in stores and providing our guests with consistently great experiences. The energy I experienced, coupled with our current business performance reinforces my confidence in the direction we are heading and my optimism that the business will continue to deliver on our revenue, income and shareholder value creation goals.

Turning to the operating environment. As I shared in the beginning of my remarks, the beauty and wellness categories remain healthy and engagement is strong. At the same time, consumers continue to face macroeconomic uncertainty and inflationary measures and pressures from rising fuel prices, making value increasingly important as a consideration. We are operating from a position of strength in this environment and have multiple levers to satisfy guest value needs, including a diverse mass to luxury assortment that provides our guests with choices for every budget, omnichannel accessibility that allows our guests to browse, buy and fulfill purchases in the way that best compelling loyalty program and targeted promotional capabilities that enable guests to maximize value while strengthening engagement with our brand. We will continue to thoughtfully navigate the operating environment and respond with agility to deliver for our guests, drive sales and expand share over the long term.

Looking to the future, we're focused on expanding our U.S. business by strengthening our assortment and investing in stores and digital experiences and deepening customer engagement through personalization, AI and social commerce, including our new TikTok Shop partnership. In addition, we expect to drive incremental accretive growth as we continue to scale our new businesses, including international expansion, wellness and marketplace offerings and enhanced UB Media capabilities. We will continue to execute our plans to support long-term growth and efficiency through investments in supply chain automation, merchandising systems and AI-powered tools to enhance operational performance, guest experience and profitable growth.

And finally, I'm excited to share that we are beginning work on a new highly experiential Ulta Beauty location in Times Square, New York. Expected to open in late 2027, this flagship store will be a vibrant, dynamic destination where technology, entertainment, convenience and our differentiated assortment come together to deliver immersive guest experiences and brand activations. This store will showcase next level brand building and storytelling capabilities, unlock high-impact marketing through digital billboards and drive greater awareness and loyalty with guests from all over the United States and the world.

In closing, our Ulta Beauty Unleashed plan is delivering results, and we remain confident in the strength of the Ulta Beauty model, the resilience of our category and the passion of our guests and associates. We are investing with discipline in the areas that matter the most, a differentiated seamless assortment, a seamless omnichannel experience and deeper guest loyalty, all while staying agile in a dynamic environment. As always, we will stay focused on what we can control, keeping our guests and associates at the center of all we do to drive our business forward and create value.

With that, I'm going to turn it over to Chris to cover the financials.

Great. Thanks, Kecia, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll begin with a discussion of our first quarter results and then share our updated expectations for the year. Starting with the quarter, the Ulta Beauty team delivered profitable growth, reflecting benefits from strong revenue growth and gross margin expansion, driven by improvements in shrink and merchandise margin. I will express my sincere appreciation to our teams for staying disciplined and working together to deliver this strong performance.

Net sales for the quarter increased 11.1% to $3.2 billion compared to $2.8 billion last year. Total sales growth, excluding the impact of Space NK, was in the high single-digit range. During the quarter, we opened 16 net new Ulta Beauty stores and 1 new Space NK store. Other revenue increased $6 million to $62 million, primarily due to higher income from our credit card program and commissions from UB Marketplace. This growth was partially offset by lower royalty income from our partnership with Target Corporation.

Comparable sales for the period increased 5.3%, driven by a 3.7% increase in average ticket and a 1.6% increase in transactions. Looking at the cadence of sales through the quarter, the period played out largely as we expected. February delivered low double-digit comp growth as we lapped our weakest comp performance in fiscal 2025. Comp growth for both March and April was in the low single-digit range. From a channel perspective, both store and digital channels contributed to comp growth with e-commerce delivering mid-teen sales growth in comp stores delivering sales growth in the low single-digit range.

Turning now to sales by category. Fragrance was our strongest category again this quarter, delivering high-teen comp growth, an increase from 11% to 12% of total revenue. We continue to execute well and advance towards our goal of being the #1 destination for fragrance. We are playing to win and to support this ambition. We are investing in newness, enhancing our in-store experience, improving core in-stocks and leaning into key events like Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. For the quarter, growth was primarily driven by newness from core luxury brands, including YSL, Carolina Herrera, Valentino and an early lead of new brand, Balmain, as well as innovation, including the new milk scent format from exclusive brand, NOYZ.

The hair care category delivered high single-digit comp growth this quarter, driven primarily by strong performance in prestige hair care. New brands, Amika and Moroccanoil drove healthy growth, and exclusive brand, Cecred, continue to resonate with guests, driving robust results with core hero SKUs as well as exciting innovation. Hair treatments, including repair focused products and scalp regimens outperformed, while hair tools declined as the impact of lapping prior year launches and softness in traditional tools more than offset growth from innovative and accessible brands, Shark and T3.

Comp sales in the makeup category increased in the low single-digit range with growth driven primarily by prestige makeup, strong guest engagement with new brand, Rare Beauty as well as newness from existing brands, including MAC, Kylie Cosmetics and Estee Lauder helped deliver growth for prestige makeup. Mass makeup was relatively flat with compelling innovation from brands like Morphe and L'Oreal, offsetting limited innovation from other mass brands.

The skin care and wellness category delivered low single-digit comp growth this quarter. Prestige skin care continued to perform well as newer brands, including Medicube and Dermalogica, and newness from existing brands, including TATCHA, an exclusive brand, PEACH & LILLY, drove healthy guest engagement. Mass skin care delivered solid growth, supported by in-store expansion for ANUA, sustained virality for BYOMA and exclusivity from cocokind. In wellness, continued strength in supplements, including Lemme and MaryRuth, as well as self-care brands, including Therabody, Nodpod and Saje delivered strong growth. This growth was partially offset by pressure in body care as we lap meaningful expansion of key brands last year. Finally, services delivered mid-single-digit comp growth driven by strong member engagement in salon and specialty services, including ear piercing and makeup services.

Gross margin for the quarter increased 100 basis points to 40.1% of sales, primarily due to lower inventory shrink and higher merchandise margin. Our team's relentless focus on reducing inventory shrink continues to deliver meaningful benefits to profitability. In addition to our continued focus on process improvements and associate training across all stores, we have applied data insights to take deliberate targeted actions to improve performance in high-risk locations. As a result of these combined efforts, we saw shrink reductions across every category and every region this quarter. Merchandise margin increased this quarter, primarily due to improving inventory turns and the impact of favorable category mix from Space NK. Although elevated fuel prices resulted in higher-than-planned transportation costs, productivity and efficiency unlocks from our supply chain optimization investments enabled our teams to mitigate this pressure in the quarter.

Moving to expenses. SG&A increased 14.6% and to $815 million as planned, driven primarily by the impact of Space NK and investments made to support our Ulta Beauty Unleashed strategy including investments made in the second half of fiscal 2025, which have not yet anniversaried. Operating profit grew faster than net sales, increasing 11.6% and to $448 million or 14.2% of sales. Interest income was $0.7 million, inclusive of the impact from our increased share buybacks. The effective tax rate decreased 70 basis points to 23.9%, primarily due to the purchase of transferable federal tax credits, resulting in a onetime income tax benefit recorded during the quarter. Wrapping up the P&L. Net income increased 11.6% to $340 million and diluted earnings per share for the quarter increased 15.5% to $7.74 per share.

Moving to the balance sheet and our capital deployment strategies, our focus on cash management, including a disciplined approach to capital expenditures is driving greater cash efficiency. We ended the quarter with $221 million in cash and short-term investments and $145 million in short-term debt. Total inventory increased 12.5% to $2.4 billion, primarily reflecting additional inventory to support new brands, the acquisition of Space NK and the impact of 70 net new Ulta Beauty stores. On a per-store basis, inventory increased 1.4%. Capital expenditures were $58 million for the quarter, mostly driven by investments in new and existing stores. We executed against our increased share buyback plan and deployed cash and leveraged our revolver to support $555 million of stock repurchases during the quarter.

Turning now to our updated outlook. We remain focused on expanding market share and delivering profitable growth in fiscal 2026. The first quarter positioned us well against these goals with strong execution through our P&L. At the same time, we believe it is prudent to take a measured approach to our guidance given the uncertain macro landscape. For the year, we are maintaining our guidance for sales and continue to expect net sales will increase between 6% to 7%. We expect net sales growth will be stronger in the first half, reflecting our strong Q1 performance and the benefit from the acquisition of Space NK. Given our strong Q1 performance, we are maintaining our comp sales growth commitment and continue to expect comp growth for the full year will be between 2.5% and 3.5%. Based on this, we expect our 2-year stacked comp will be in the high single-digit range and relatively consistent across the balance of the quarters, including Q2, which was our highest comp performance last year.

Reflecting the strong performance execution in the first quarter, we have enhanced our expectations and now expect operating profit will increase between 6.5% and 9% for the year. For modeling purposes, we continue to expect gross margin will be roughly flat for the year, driven by higher inventory productivity, continued momentum in supply chain productivity and a modest improvement in inventory shrink, which is expected to offset pressure from higher fuel costs and help balance targeted investments to bring competitive offerings across our unique mass to luxury assortment to our value-focused guest. We delivered SG&A growth in the first quarter, consistent with our expectations and we have not changed our full year targets. We continue to plan SG&A growth in line to slightly below net sales growth and intend to invest in a disciplined way that supports and maximizes profitable growth. We continue to expect to generate strong operating cash flow, which will enable reinvestment to support future growth and also support our intent to return capital to shareholders through our stock repurchase program.

We see deploying capital towards increased share buybacks in the current environment as a compelling value creation opportunity. And in the first quarter, we announced an increase in our fiscal 2026 stock buyback target from $1 billion to $1.5 billion. Reflecting the impact of these assumptions, we have increased our EPS estimates. We now expect diluted EPS will be between $28.36 and $28.80 per share. Our new guidance represents growth between 10.6% and 12.3%, respectively, compared to previous growth expectations of 9.4% to 11.4%. Note, our updated estimates assume a weighted average share count of approximately 43 million shares and a tax rate of approximately 24.5%.

In closing, Ulta Beauty is well positioned to deliver compelling value to our shareholders. This is evidenced by our first quarter results, where our focused execution delivered strong performance consistent with our expectations. As we continue to navigate near-term uncertainty, we are focused on executing with excellence against our plans, maintaining financial discipline, including focused investments to increase market share and deliver strong, profitable growth for our shareholders.

And now I'll turn the call over to our operator to moderate the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from Adrienne Yih with Barclays.

Great. And let me add my -- let me state my congratulations for a fantastic start to the year. Along those lines, I wanted to just talk about sort of like the categories year-to-date that you're seeing sort of the greatest return on the investments that you're making in the marketing and some of the heavy SG&A that you've been doing? And then kind of along those same lines, Chris, can you talk about -- you raised the lower end of kind of the profit expectations and then the higher end certainly due to probably the buyback. But the top line remained the same. So within the SG&A leverage, where are you seeing kind of the most visibility for the back half?

I'll start, Adrienne, thank you for the question. Where we are seeing the investments really paying off is -- one of the strongest categories that we're seeing results in is really fragrance. When you look at Mother's Day, the Mother's Day promotion, how we've risen the fixtures up and been able to add assortment into our stores and then the marketing that we've done along with it, that's definitely come into play. We've also been investing in our Ignite brands and looking at ways that we can continue to lean into our brand building plans that are a 360 approach that are exclusive brands that we have here at Ulta Beauty, and we love what we're seeing there. We're focused on being very balanced in our portfolio and continuing to look at how we can continue to drive sales across the store and not just being focused in 1 area of the business.

21 Days of Beauty, we were pleased with the results there. We do think that the guest is continuing to look at value. And then we're also leveraging our tool of UB Media to really capture that guest to get them because we know where they're shopping in there. We know where they're at, and we can take those brand dollars to get them engaged into our store and online. So those are the places where we've been really seeing a nice return for the investment that we've been spending. And again, we're going to be continuing to focus on that in Q2. Chris?

Yes. Thanks for the question. I mean, one, it was pleased with the strong execution through the P&L in Q1, which gives us confidence to deliver against our full year goals, increase our operating profit commitments at the low end and the midpoint. And certainly, as you noted, raising EPS, both due to the operating profit increase and share buybacks.

I'll go back to the principles. Our goal is to maximize value creation through driving increases in operating profit. As we start the year, we'll have opportunities both on the leverage side and both on the invest-to-grow side, while maintaining discipline on margin and ensuring that based on the guidance we provided, our operating margin will not go backwards year-over-year and there's opportunities for leverage within that. So as I think of the balance of the year, I'll point to where we're seeing some strength, right? We're seeing some strength in supply chain. You saw shrink play out positively in the quarter. The supply chain team continues to do a great job in supply chain optimization.

I think you also saw very strong discipline and consistent performance on SG&A. So I would say there's some opportunities in there. But the balance of the year is going to be this, how do we thread the needle of trying to optimize growth while capitalizing on where those leverage opportunities and balancing those 2 to keep trying to deliver against and where we can drive operating profit up.

Your next question will come from Simeon Gutman with Morgan Stanley.

So 2 parts. First, the exit rate comp or what you did, I think, was it April, I guess, is that as good as it gets, given the compares step-up? Or was there something unique timing-wise end of the quarter that pushed it down maybe temporarily? And then, Chris, just following up to what you said, some of the language you used trying to optimize or managing both. Is it in the plan for SG&A to step down and that's a given or it's not a given, and it's going to take some maneuvering as you work through the back half of the year?

Yes. So maybe I'll take SG&A first. We're highly confident in the SG&A execution. The year is playing out as expected. Remember, we said we expected double-digit growth in the first half. That was largely attributable to Space NK and the anniversarying of Ulta Beauty Unleashed investments we made in the back half of 2025. That included wellness and marketplace as an example. We simply stepped down into low single-digit growth in the second half of the year because we're going to anniversary over those items. We are investing in the second half of the year. And we also have cost optimization that's helping actually further get ROI and benefit and put more back in the business. So you're going to see SG&A consistently play out.

What I was articulating is, each year as we have opportunities to either further accelerate top line, that balance of top line versus leverage while maintaining discipline in margin and constantly adjusting those 2 levers to capitalize on opportunities to drive operating profit up would be the goal as we progress through the year. And you saw us do that in Q1. Obviously, there's the macro environment and some uncertainty there. We think this is a prudent guidance with strong double-digit EPS growth. And our goal at the end of the day is to be a consistent compounder of EPS at double digits, and this guide provides that. And I think you should feel positive about the strong execution in Q1.

And then I'll take the comp trends. So Q1 played out largely as we expected. February was in the low double digits as we lapped our weakest comp from fiscal year 2025. And then comp growth in March and April was in the low single-digit range. As Chris shared, we continue to expect our comp sales growth for the year to be between 2.5% to 3.5%. And just as a quick reminder, second quarter '26 is our toughest comp comparison on a 1-year basis over the strong results that we had in 2025. The guide implies high single-digit comp growth on a 2-year stack basis. We're very confident in our ability to grow sales and to deliver our guidance, and we have great plans in place to fuel our performance. And I do think that this is where our unique model plays into that. We can have a consistent track record of delivering sales growth in many different kinds of economic time frames that are out there. So hopefully, that answers your question, Simeon.

Your next question will come from Dana Telsey with Telsey Group.

As you think about the sales growth, Kecia, which is very impressive with transactions and with traffic, as you exited the quarter, how is the exit rate looking forward? And just like Ulta Beauty World, what are the next events? And how do they break out by quarter going forward? And then, Chris, as you think about the margin comparisons going forward, either on SG&A or gross margin, whether merch margin or others, anything we should be mindful of? And how do you think of the investment spend going into the margin profile through the shaping of the year?

I'll start, and then I'll turn it over to Chris. Thanks for the question, Dana. Our ticket was up 3.7% in Q1. It was largely driven by product mix. Our transactions were up 1.6% and that was in a challenging macro environment, but we are really focused on how we can continue to drive traffic. We're very confident in our marketing and our merchandising plans to really support and to drive our business. And our teams are doubling down, particularly in stores to really drive traffic and the guest conversion through our guest service, eventing, which we did a lot of events in those last quarter, we're going to continue that trend, loyalty and personalized marketing efforts.

You asked a little bit about Ulta Beauty World. We are really focused on creating excitement and energy, both in our online platforms and in-store. And we build great plans around what activities we had last year and how do we continue to improve them even more for this next year. I'm pleased with what I see in the Q2 and the back half plans for taking our learnings and continuing to improve always. The teams from a marketing, merchandising, store operations and digital perspective are all working very, very closely together. And I feel great that the go-to-market team has good plans in place for Q2 and the rest of the year.

Yes. As you think of the margin and call it, the profit profile as we progress through the year. So one, we actually have a very balanced first half, second half operating profit growth profile, which is positive. First half is modestly above the second half. Two primary factors there. Obviously, slightly higher sales. And then as you think of gross margin, higher benefits of shrink in the first half of the year is the big difference. And we had articulated that, right? We started getting shrink benefits more through the back end of last year. We'll start cycling through success.

As you move from first half to second half, first half, we'll have stronger gross margin performance. Remember, SG&A is going to have the increased cost because of Space NK and the anniversarying of prior year investments we made. When you move to the second half of the year, you have a slight flip where you see the gross margin moderate a bit as planned. And then you start seeing benefits of SG&A driving some margin improvement in the second half of the year with low single-digit growth. So it's playing out exactly as planned.

Remember, we made investments in 2025 that we're going to continue to benefit from marketplace, wellness, just to name a couple. But in '26, we're also making investments. We have agentic AI as a core strategy. We continue to invest there, ongoing brand building investments that we talked about in the prepared remarks, in the personalization initiatives to maximize incremental sales opportunity. So we feel good about both the investment profile, the actions we're taking to deliver a strong, profitable growth profile for the year and ultimately deliver double-digit earnings growth.

Your next question will come from Michael Binetti with Evercore.

Sorry to ask again about the near-term stuff. I think the stocks have been a little sensitive to it with the macro that you guys have commented on here. But I think it's a high single-digit stack with second quarter in the maybe 1.5% to 2.5% range. I think you expected the category last time we talked to grow 2% to 4% this year. Is there any change to that assumption we should think about rest of year or your ability to maintain share? And then on the gross margin, I guess it's implied to be down about 30 basis points after the first quarter being up 100. I'm curious what -- maybe a little bit more on what caused the merch margin to expand, why we don't flow that through the rest of the year? Or why some of those shrink tailwinds from first quarter can't continue even though you anniversary a little bit in the second half?

Thanks for the question, Michael. I'll start, and then I'll kick it over to you, Chris. In regards to the industry, what we're seeing is that last year, growth in beauty grew stronger each quarter as the year went. So we're going against stronger growth in the back half, and we expect that growth to really normalize as a whole. So that's really what we're seeing in the industry. We're still committed to share growth at Ulta Beauty, and we feel like that's implied in our guidance and our numbers that we've put in front of you guys today. The category is still competitive, and we know others are going to be continuing to level up the battle for share, which just means that we're going to have to be even better as we execute through the remainder of the year.

And we are confident in our plans, brand building exclusivity and wellness. And then just as a reminder, like if you look at our total sales, I mean, we came in at 11.1%. That's really strong when you're looking at the total market growth and where our growth came. That's nothing to be shy of. I'm really pleased with the low. So again, I would guess -- I just would close out by saying we're staying really close to the customer needs, and we're continuing to sharpen our operational focus. We're making the targeted investments that Chris and I both talked about to really strengthen our long-term competitive advantage. And we are playing our game and continuing to lean into the places where we can really continue to differentiate ourselves. Chris?

Yes. So one, I would just add one thing on sales. Obviously, our total guidance is 6% to 7%, which, of course, includes the onetime benefit from Space NK. But even taking that out, the total growth ex Space NK, strong mid-single digits, well within our long-term algorithm and to Kecia's point, competitive from a share standpoint. So we're going to continue to execute this. I think this is more of us cycling through success from the prior year and you have a strong 2-year double stack at high single digits through the balance of the year. So feel good about that.

Look, as you think of gross margin, it's about flat for the year. So I think we're managing gross margin nicely. To your point, we -- and this was planned. We expected larger shrink benefits early in the year. That was a conscious effort. We started realizing that benefit towards the back end of the year, and we're going to cycle through that success. So that's one of the drivers.

Obviously, with some moderating growth. There's a little bit of deleverage in there in gross margin, but it's not substantive. Supply chain continues to drive strong optimization, right? And they've been absorbing the fuel impact. That was something that wasn't fully planned. It's not significant for total Ulta, but it's actions that they're taking to own that. So we feel good about gross margin being flat for the year, and we're going to continue to execute against the P&L, be disciplined on SG&A, focus on that balance of finding leverage opportunities or investing to grow to deliver against our operating profit commitment.

Your next question will come from Mike Baker with D.A. Davidson.

I wanted to ask about TikTok Shop. Our tracking suggests that it's growing nicely, maybe even doubling its daily sales versus when it started, I don't know, about 6 weeks ago or so. When is this big enough to show up materially in the comps? And I remember last quarter, you were sort of still debating whether it's going to be included in the traffic numbers. I'm just wondering if it is in these traffic numbers?

Thanks for the question, Mike. I will just start and then maybe Chris can add. What we've done to date is we've really anchored in Only at Ulta exclusive. We've got 17 brands and 30 exclusive bundles. We do see that this -- it's not just an e-comm play. We also do see a halo impact for stores. Our next focus area on this because we're still in the early phases is that we're looking at increased exclusive bundles that are launching both single brand and multi-brand and also what I call first moments with the brand partners, which is like early access launches and select exclusives that creates a lot of excitement. We don't expect this to be cannibalization -- no cannibalization with our overall business. We think it's complementary of our e-comm business. And we do think it can bring a new guest in.

There's 2 things that we are really looking at. The first one is that we think this is a way that we can expand guest acquisition. A younger consumer is engaging with TikTok. So it's about new member acquisition. The members when they come through, of course, that comes into our loyalty program. And the second is when they're already shopping in this platform. And why would we not want to participate in this activity with Gen Z, millennials, Gen Xers. While there is some inherent sales opportunity to us, we really think it's more about acquisition and marketing getting that guest into our overall ecosystem.

So it's not -- the main focus is not necessarily to drive the e-commerce revenue. It's really to getting new guests into our database and to be front of mind and center where the guests are already shopping today, which is one of the new places on TikTok.

I was going to ask just as a follow-up, I was going to -- I guess, a follow-up, but ask about somewhere, you're -- there's something better in your operating profit dollars. You've maintained the sales and comps, you maintained the gross margin. You seem to have maintained the SG&A. I know it's small, but at the lower end, you did increase the operating income growth. So is that more -- I suppose it must be on the SG&A line, still up less than sales, but maybe up less than previously thought? Or where does that increase at the low end of the operating profit dollars come?

Yes. It's -- so the way I would frame it is when you look at how we executed Q1, we saw strong execution both in gross margin and SG&A. And that does create opportunities for us to drive operating profit. With that said, again, if you go back to the principle of maximizing value creation, what we want to do is make sure that where we have incremental growth opportunities, we're always balancing those trade-offs. So I think it's about seeing how the year plays out to continue to not only execute against what we just updated in terms of increased operating profit guidance at the low end and the midpoint but balancing that to capitalize on opportunities as they come while maintaining discipline in our operating margin profile. We will not go backwards in operating margin. And so we remain committed to that goal.

I would just maybe add like what we focused on last year and what we said we were going to do was drive top line growth and take share and we were committed to doing that all throughout the year. And this year, we said, all right, now it's time to take a step back and to drive profitable sales, which Chris was just talking about. It's applying good disciplines within the organization to maximize the value out of the investments that we've made to continue to return value to our shareholders and drive profitability for our business. That's the methodology that we're taking as a leadership team, and I'm really proud of what the team delivered in Q1, and that's what we're committed to looking at for the rest of the year.

Your next question will come from Ike Boruchow with Wells Fargo.

A question on the margin. Sorry if you mentioned this on the prepared call -- prepared remarks. The margin guide was flat to up 20 basis points. I didn't hear you reiterate that. You went with profit growth. I guess on the confirming that it is still flat to 20 basis points. And then the follow-up to that, Kecia, is you do have from the Analyst Day, and I know you weren't the CEO, but you have the 12% target that's still out there. Is that still something we should use? Or do you believe the business should scale from here? I'm just trying to think about how you think about market share gains and profit growth versus a margin rate.

Yes. Thanks for clarifying. Yes, in our prepared remarks, we did confirm that there's no change to the operating margin guidance. We expect flat to up 20 basis points, and we're committed to that. In Q1, we executed against -- exactly against our plan. Regarding the 12%, right, the long-term target for margin, was that the question? Just to clarify, sorry.

Yes, just because you're above it and you're calling for scale already. So I'm just kind of curious, should we not think about the 12% as a target anymore? Are you -- or is there still potential reinvestment due to competition down the road that you want to like give yourself little room on? I'm just kind of curious.

Yes. I mean, we haven't changed our long-term guidance. I mean, I would say this year, obviously, we're already ahead of 12%, and we've committed to flat to some leverage of up 20 basis points. So I think that's a strong signal. The goal is going to be to continue to deliver against our long-term value creation algorithm, which is mid-single-digit top line growth, strong mid-single-digit operating profit. You hear us talking about driving operating profit faster than sales and compounding double-digit earnings growth. So I think that's the framework that we're committed to. And so I think you see that discipline executing and what we said we would do in 2026 and how we've progressed this year.

Your next question will come from Sydney Wagner with Jefferies.

Can you just talk about what you view as the primary driver of loyalty within the Ulta ecosystem? And how does that differentiate you versus other beauty retailers? And then can you discuss what you guys can do to drive higher frequency of visits within the category or within your consumers? I understand there's some value sensitivity there, but what's driving the higher traffic or that consumer coming back more frequently?

Thanks, Sydney, for the question. What I would say around the loyalty program is that it's an easy-to-understand program that the engagement is really high, especially on the app. So we have a great relationship with our guests and they do understand what this -- what the return is for investment and a little bit of information from them. When you look at where we think that we can really gain value out of the loyalty program, it's really through personalization. When you look at all the tools and then you layer in AI capabilities into such a 47 million rich first-party data set that we can really maximize how we're communicating with that guest and offering them some guests like a GWP, somewhat increased value, somewhat percentage, somewhat price point discounts. You name it. I could list -- go on and on with the list in the different ways that you can communicate with them.

That's really where the power of this mechanism comes. And a lot of times, it's not even about discount, it's about education, it's about product recommendations. It's how you can continue to help them build the basket and then be predictive on what it is that they might need to be purchasing in the future. So when you look at what the value is of our loyalty program and why they want to stay with us, it's because we have that deep-rooted relationship with them, and they do see the value that they get by participating in the program in and of itself.

I think, Leila, I think we have time for one more question.

So our next question will come from -- yes, your next question will come from Michael Lasser with UBS.

So there's been a lot of comments and points made on the call, and it's really feeding into this idea that the beauty category is increasingly becoming more competitive, both from some traditional players like mass merchants as well as the online channel. And now you're guiding to what seems like a low single-digit comp for the rest of the year, coupled with gross margin degradation is further suggesting that you need more firepower in order to maintain your market share. So a, is that a fair interpretation of all this? And b, have you increased your promotional activity or your expected promotional activity in response to what you have seen lately? And then I have a quick follow-up.

Yes. Thanks, Michael, for the question. When you look at the 2-year stack on what we're looking at for the business for the rest of the year, we're in high single-digit range. So this is not a layup. And I would also say that we're focused on continuing to take share. And we did that this last quarter, and that's what this plan continues to look at us being able to do is to be a market share gainer. Beauty has always been a competitive category. And I think a lot of people want to play in it because it's attractive. It's got attractive profit margins. But I will say this is what we do, inside and out, beauty and wellness. And we're a trusted beauty category expertise. We've got a broad-based assortment with a wide range of prices. No one really does exactly what it is that we do. Newness and discovery drive a lot of the spend in even when I'm looking at this year, we've got an increased focus on exclusivity.

Exclusivity, I think, is what can continue to differentiate us. And it's not just exclusivity with big brands because a lot of the big brands we already have, there's really nothing out there that's really what I would call overly meaningful that we don't really have in our assortment today. So it's really about exclusivity with an existing brand or it's about this brand building, which I talked about in the prepared comments. So how do we find and curate and build a brand that could be serving a white space opportunity because, again, no one has the insights that we do because we have everything from mass to luxury and everything in between. So our plan that we've put in place or that we've shared in regards to our guidance, is assuming that we are going to continue to be a share gainer in the category. And again, you look at our 2-year stack, we're in the high single-digit range, which I think is still very compelling for growth here at Ulta Beauty.

And my follow-up is, can you help calibrate the market's expectations? Should we expect traffic to be down over the next few quarters in light of everything you're seeing? And would you think that, that's the case for the overall category that is just going to be driven by a rise in ticket more than anything else?

Yes. Yes. Just to clarify, again, we're committed to strong profit growth. As noted in our guidance way, we actually increased the operating profit growth on the bottom end and by definition, the midpoint of the guide. It's balanced first half, second half. So it's actually pretty evenly spread. We're making adequate investments to do what Kecia just talked about, which is drive compelling growth and make sure that we're focused on share gains. The 2-year stacks, again at high single digits for the balance of the remaining quarters is strong. And so we feel really good from a profit standpoint. And you saw that in our updated guidance, right, having the conviction to raise the bottom end. And obviously, we're going to continue to put our cash to work, right? So we increased EPS as well on the back of increased share buybacks by $0.5 billion for the year from $1 billion to $1.5 billion and have a very nice EPS growth profile of double-digit growth at about 11.5% at the midpoint.

Thanks, again, Michael. I would just say thank you, everyone, for joining us today. To wrap up, I'd like to thank our guests, our trusted brand partners and dedicated associates for their engagement and support. I remain confident that we are on the right path to drive sustainable long-term growth and value creation for all of our stakeholders. We look forward to updating you on our progress on our next earnings call on August 27. Thank you, and everyone, have a great evening. Thank you.

Thank you for joining. This concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.

Well, good morning, everyone, once again, and welcome to JPMorgan's 12th Annual Retail Round Up at JPMorgan's new global headquarters. It is our distinct pleasure to welcome the Ulta management team, including CEO, Kecia Steelman, and recently joined CFO, Chris DelOrefice. Like other fireside situations, I will have a list of questions. I'm going to go through. And then towards the end, we will open it up for investor Q&A.

For those of you in the room, please use the microphone if you decide to ask a question. So everyone in the room can hear it. So Kecia, you're 16 months into your leadership here at Ulta. Top line execution has turned strongly since you took over. I think last year, at this time, almost to the day was the start of the turn where the business really started to inflect -- and over that past year, share performance has improved. You acquired Space NK in the U.K.

You launched Rare Beauty, you launched Ulta Beauty on TikTok shop and you launched the marketplace. Just a few things in that 16-month time frame. So it's certainly been busy. And what's most impressive is that the broader industry's growth was pretty similar in '24 and '25. So it's really a share inflection story, which is all wonderful.

So I guess the big picture, very open-ended question is -- what do you think has been most instrumental in changing the momentum in the business? Do you think the prior leadership maybe which the senior leadership was maybe didn't focus on the details and focus on conversion, didn't focus on the stores and driving the culture. I know you're a store person and very big on culture. So open end, what's the top things that you -- that come to your mind in terms of what changed the momentum in the business?

Well, first off, thank you, Chris, for having both Chris and I here today at JPMorgan. We're excited for our conversation. But what I would say is it's not just one thing, it's many things. The first thing that I really focused on when stepping into the role as CEO was around the clarity of the strategy. I'm a big believer in that everyone in the organization from the associate in the back room of the store to the boardroom needs to really clearly understand what the strategy is and what it's about and the role that they play.

The second was around getting my leadership team in place. What got us at Ulta Beauty for the first successful 35, 36 years wasn't going to be what we needed to get us to the next phase of growth. And so I doubled down on my efforts to get the right talent in position like Chris here, who's joining me on the stage today. Those two things in combination, I think, really helped us improve our execution collectively together. Also, we really took the strategy of the Ulta Beauty Unleashed plan, which had three components, and I'm a big believer in simple language that everyone understands from driving our core business to driving margin-accretive business to realigning our foundation for the future.

There were some key unlocks within each of those that I really feel helped elevate us in 2025. Around driving our core business, it was around brand building and making sure that we had the right brands in our assortment. We had 100 new brands launched in 2025. Really being part of the cultural marketing relevance and being top of mind, we -- our Carter tour, we were at Lollapalooza, and Coachella. We were engaged in social aspects, and that was really big. And then really investing in our digital channels.

We added a lot of functionality to our e-com, which made that shopping much easier. Then around margin-accretive businesses, there were four key areas that we were really looking at. International, we started the year only as a U.S.-based company. Now we're in five countries. Across the world, we acquired Space NK, as you mentioned, Wellness, we were focused on Marketplace, UB Media. These are ways that all collectively together, they are continuing to drive the profitability of the business. And then the third is around realigning our foundation for the future.

When you look at our go-to-market team, the new leaders I put in place, the way that we are going to meet with brands, the way we bring our brands to life in our stores, I saw in my seat before as CEO -- COO, where there was opportunity to collectively move at much quicker speed and alignment within the organization. Time is money. And time and execution really does matter. And just those go-to-market leaders working collectively together with our brands really brought brands to life much better and much quicker in our stores. You combine all of that together, having the right team, the right plan, the right strategy in place, I feel that's what really contributed to our success in 2025.

Excellent. As you look ahead, into the second full year of your leadership, where do you see the biggest opportunities to enhance that momentum, whether it's the merchandising side, store execution, customer engagement. You said another way, what strategies are you really most excited for in 2026?

Yes, that's like asking me who are my favorite children. What I would say is -- well, what I'd say is that for me as a leader sitting in the CEO role and Chris here as the CFO, our commitment to the shareholders is this last year, what we said we were going to do was drive top line revenue growth and recover share erosion from 2024, and we did that.

In 2026, we want to continue that momentum, but we want to also react and respond to more profitable sales in the end. So things like getting our SG&A back in line, more moderated CapEx investment this next year. We've been investing a lot in the business over the last few years. We need to start harvesting some of those investments. And that's what we're committed to, and that's what we've given in our guidance to our plan.

So we need to do both. We need to drive top line revenue growth, take share and also drive increased profitability for our shareholders. So that is my guiding principle for 2026. How we're going to do that is continuing to lean into the Ulta Beauty Unleashed plan. Our core business is the main focus of what Chris and I are looking at, how we continue to drive the business along with the executive team, how we improve our 4-wall productivity in our stores.

Our stores are our largest asset that we have today. So how can we continue to drive increased volume, profitable volume and improved turns out of our existing site locations. Newness and brand building, really important to us -- it's really important to this entire category. So really doubling down on that. And then leveraging our investments around personalization, our digital acceleration and personalization in communicating one-to-one with that rich 46.7 million loyalty member base that we have today is really important.

And then doubling down on our growth from an international perspective, we are in the top growing beauty markets right now with the acquisition of Space NK in the U.K. and we want to continue to grow Space NK. In Mexico, we've got nine stores open. We're going to continue to open more this next year. And then our launch in the Middle East, we now have three stores that are open, and we've got really great aggressive plans to continue to grow there.

Wellness, we're doubling down on wellness. Marketplace, we've continued to launch more brands. I'm very pleased with how the Marketplace is working with our ecosystem. And we're just going to continue to lean into our UB Media and how we can continue to leverage that loyalty member base with the dollars that we're able to take in front of brands and really drive the business collectively together.

And then in regards to realigning our growth for the future, it's around AI. How are we going to continue to leverage AI. We've seen some great successes in our guest services platforms and how we can really improve our efficiencies there. But also in supply chain, there's been some great wins. Agentic AI, we're very excited about what Agentic could really do to enhance our business.

And then just continuing to look for ways to take cost out and be efficient within our business as a whole. Those are the strategies that we're really working on. So I'd say it's focusing on what we did in 2025 and just taking that to the next level, I feel positions us for great successful 2026.

Excellent. If you look over the long arc of time, Ulta over the past 40 years has turned into sort of this balanced -- somewhat balanced prestige mass retailer. At the same -- as you've gained access to more and more prestige brands and have been able to take the customer to even the highest luxury price points in many stores. At the same time, it's become a much more hit-driven business because of social media and TikTok and the spikes are fast and maybe recede faster.

So as we think about the strategy to continue to get not only access to brands, but to get hit brands faster. So the question is, how have you partnered with your Chief Merchant to engage with the big brands, but also the developing brands to make sure that when they think about going national in the United States and now in the U.K. that Ulta is a partner that they want to get there faster versus maybe on a bit of a delay in the past.

Yes. One of the things that's kind of fundamentally changed is there used to be a long list of big brands that we wanted to bring into Ulta Beauty. And one of the strategic fundamentals that Lauren and I have discussed is that we want to look for [ white ] space opportunities, opportunities to bring brands in that complement our already existing assortment, not cannibalize the existing assortment that we have today.

There are not that many big brands that we don't have that we're going after, to be fully transparent. So there's really four ways that we're looking at how do we create newness and brand-building capabilities within Ulta Beauty. Number one, of course, is the big brands. There's a few out there that we still want to get. The second is these smaller, more independent brands. So think like brands like Cécred, which we launched and we were -- it was the largest specialty hair care launch in the company's history.

So how do we find more Cécred's out there? Polite Society is another one, where we've launched Polite Society. So those kind of brands we're continuing to look for. The third are more around emerging brands. So think like K-beauty brands. K-beauty to me is an emerging brand that we're continuing to go after. Lauren and I just recently were in Korea on the ground together, just meeting with the manufacturers, with the brands that are there.

That is an exciting growth opportunity, I think, for us at Ulta Beauty. And the fourth one is really around the strategics. We met with a group of strategics more recently in New York. We're going to have a similar meeting in California, where in the past, Ulta Beauty might have been looked at as the place that you would scale. We wouldn't be looked at as the place where you build, you scale, you launch and you globalize within Ulta Beauty.

And I really do believe that we no longer want to be viewed as the secondary place that you go. You need to be starting to think about us as the primary because with the different store prototypes, the different guests that we can bring into your brand and with the caliber of talent that we've been adding into our merchandising team, we're positioned better now than we ever have been before. We've been viewed as a very good partner with legacy brands, the brands that have had a shift in their momentum, we have proven that we will stay with you, and we'll get in the kitchen with you because we know this consumer better than anybody else out there.

So I think having that credibility within the marketplace, we want to be a place that you look to go to launch and build and grow with us for the long term. We want to be in a win-win relationship with our brands, whether it's an incubator brand that's just starting or if it's a legacy brand that wants to continue to grow.

Do you think those conversations was it not purposeful before? Was it not -- was it not -- you would think that this would have been a strategy to have that conversation with the merchants, whether it's a strategic brand that you're going to try to grow or a brand that's trying to go national. So is there a change in terms of how you approach these brands? Like what was different versus how it existed prior?

I think it's been a shift in where the priority and the time was spent because there were enough big brands that we felt like we still needed to get into our ecosystem. That was maybe where the top priority was at that time. That has now shifted because there are just not that many big brands that I necessarily feel that we are missing that we need to be bringing into our assortment that doesn't cannibalize our already existing assortment.

So I think that's a little bit of shift of the environment of where we are today from where we were in the past. But I also think it's just the maturity and the level of sophistication that we've got within our company right now today, where we're primed, positioned and ready to go to be able to offer this to our brands that maybe we weren't as strong with in the future -- in the past. So we're ready to go, and I look forward to being able to bring some of these brands to life in Ulta Beauty.

Awesome. And so as you wanted to go back to Space NK, 83 units, prestige luxury beauty retailer based in the U.K. What have you learned since the acquisition in July in terms of the growth potential of the business? And what are the sort of synergies with the existing business? And do you see this as an opportunity to scale in Europe?

Well, I would start with saying that I'm very pleased with the acquisition of Space NK. We've had it now for the holiday season, and I'm really pleased that we made this decision to bring them into the Ulta Beauty family. Two reasons. Number one, the U.K. is a fast and growing market. It made a lot of sense for us to be able to acquire versus trying to grow organically or have some kind of a partnership.

This was a great opportunity for us. The second is that the culture and the team is fantastic, and we were able to retain that team and bring them into the Ulta Beauty family also. What I would say that I've seen is it's one of those situations that it's a 1 plus 1 equals 3. We have scale. We have the buying power.

We have the operational efficiencies. We understand what it's like to grow and to scale and to operationalize. We bring that to Space NK. What they do really, really well is the storytelling inside their stores. They are fantastic at brand curation, especially in the prestige to luxury side of the business. They have brands that we currently don't have within our assortment.

We can learn a lot about those brands and would those brands work in Ulta Beauty. And then I just feel that there's this ability for them to be really successful in high street locations that are smaller footprints, and we had not quite cracked that code here in the United States. So we're learning from them. We're learning just as much from them as they are us, which I think is fantastic.

One of the things, the fundamental focuses that I shared with my leadership team is I've seen a lot of companies acquire other companies and then they try to force their fundamentals and their -- the ways of doing business that works for the larger company on to the smaller company. I want to really protect what makes Space NK really unique because they are very unique and they're very special, and I want to keep them authentically who they are.

But I think we can learn some of those aspects and bring them into the larger ecosystem of Ulta Beauty. So we've committed to that. It's been a great journey. I'm very pleased with the asset. I do think that it can continue to grow. There's still plenty of growth opportunity in the U.K. And I would say that, that's what our primary focus is right now is continuing to grow them in the U.K.

Do you find any appeal in having high street Space NK stores in the United States?

Yes. I think that there's an opportunity where because we're different enough, that we complement each other enough that there potentially could be a world in the future where they both coexist, but that's not what my top priority is right now today.

Understood. And then it's always helpful, particularly for me to talk about trends within the business. Obviously, there's been a lot of questions on prestige makeup, durability of growth in fragrance, K-beauty, skin care. So can you jump into what's going on from a trend perspective? And any sort of variance that you're seeing versus maybe what happened 6, 12 months ago?

Well, you hit on a couple of them in your question here. What I would say is that I'll start with K-beauty. K-beauty has been an emerging brand. We're the largest U.S. brick-and-mortar K-beauty retailer with some of the key brands that we -- and the merchants have done a fantastic job. They brought into the United States, brands like ANUA and medicube just have been home runs.

So it's been great to see these brands come to life. We're really focused on quality of brands because I think that that's also some noise that's out there and especially in the space as it can be viewed as a very fashion in and out. Our merchants do a fantastic job of making sure that these are really great products for the value and that they have longevity with them because if you're investing in bringing a brand into a store, it can get really expensive if you just continue to turn it. So K-beauty is a trend that I see staying with us. GLP-1s, I've been talking a lot about this recently.

GLP-1s, both from a skin elasticity and rapid weight loss can impact how your skin looks, which then impacts how your makeup looks. So moisture back into skin is a trend that I see really continuing to grow. Along with hair, hair loss is also something that is part of the GLP-1 phenomenon. So us leaning into hair and skin with GLP-1, I think, is here to stay. Also heavier makeup use GLAM or GLAM makeup, it was kind of this clean [ girl ] aesthetic look. It's getting back to a little bit more heavier makeup look, which is really good for us, yes, especially heavier eye, heavier lip, a little bit more back into the contouring again.

So we like what we're seeing with that. Those are just some of the trends that we're seeing that we're going to continue to lean into. And something that Lauren and I have talked a lot about is with us having such a great visibility with the 46.7 million loyalty members in our database, we also have the ability to set the trends. So instead of waiting for the trend to happen, Ulta Beauty working a little bit more proactively with some of our brands on, we seek how things are kind of going, but we should be also have a responsibility to create some of these trends that are out there in the environment. And I think you're going to see us starting to play a little bit more in that realm here in the future.

Contouring, that's 2015, 2016.

Absolutely. And actually, some of the looks are actually more in 1980s, 1990s, which back to my era of heavier makeup usage. So it's great to see.

Any concerns on fragrance? .

Yes. I'm glad you asked about fragrance. Fragrance has been an ongoing trend. What we're seeing in fragrance that is very unique is that it's a younger consumer in the -- that's male that's really coming into this category. That's a new member that's coming into our ecosystem, which is great. And it's like in the past, you used to buy your fragrance and then it would be your signature scent. Now we're seeing multiple scents worn throughout the day. Fragrance layering is continuing to grow. We've publicly gone out there and said that we want to be the #1 fragrance destination in the U.S. and we've got a good plan in place to be able to achieve that here in the near future.

So one of the questions that we're asking in all these meetings is obviously about the consumer. There's a lot of dynamics. Obviously, great news in the market today with oil prices pulling back. But it is an uncertain backdrop. In the past, we've seen when gas prices surge granted, we're at 4 and change, we're not 5 like we saw in 2022, where you saw a more distinct impact to the consumer and the consumer has got tax stimulus, which should be helping them right now.

So an open-ended question of what are you seeing from the consumer? Is there -- is the uncertainty of the war and energy prices having -- causing any concern or having an impact on your business? And to what extent do you think stimulus is helpful?

Well, we talk often that this category is a self-care category and that the consumer does tend to prioritize taking care of themselves front and center, whether you're talking about beauty or wellness. So I feel like we're well positioned, especially with having everything from mass to luxury and everything in between with all categories within our portfolio. So I do feel that we can weather any storm that could potentially come our way.

And it's totally unpredictable. I mean from one day to the next, I really encouraged my team to focus on controlling what we can control, make sure that we're getting great guest experiences. I did share on our earnings call that in February, we hadn't really seen the consumer impacts yet. We're not prepared to share any intercompany or inter-quarter data yet. We'll be sharing in June like what we've seen in the first quarter. But this is a great category to be in, again, because it's prioritized.

What we've heard from our community is because we have a very rich dialogue with our consumer base. Is that what they say is that they're going to continue to prioritize the regimens. They're not going to trade down in their regimens because it's something that's important to them. Now what they say they're going to do and what they do aren't always the same, but all of the insights that we have is that we should be able to continue to weather whatever is going to come our way. This is going to be a category that they're going to continue to prioritize, and we'll just continue to stay close to it.

I think Walmart has said in the past that the consumer, when you ask them, they're like, "Oh, we're like worried and we're not going to spend and then -- but the reality is like give them a little stimulus and they're happy to continue to spend."

Well, I feel like I've been saying it's an unpredictable environment since I've stepped into the role as CEO. And actually, even when I was in the COO role, it's been unpredictable for many years for many different reasons, whether you're talking tariffs or wars or that's -- I think that's part of being in retail. After being in retail for over 30 years, good retailers figure out how to navigate any type of storm. I feel like we're well positioned to be able to do that here at Ulta Beauty.

Excellent. I guess the one question that I do have as a follow-up there is, you did assume some moderation in the category backdrop. I mean I think from our side, [ Kylie ] and I and [ Mary Kate ] talk about this all the time. It looked like the category grew close to 5 -- pretty close to 5% last year. You're assuming a slower -- you are assuming a slower growth rate. So I guess to what extent was that just taking a prudent outlook?

The category growth for 2026 has been communicated it's between 2% to 4%. Our guidance at 2.5% to 3% or 3.5%, the midrange of that is 3%. What I've said is that we want to continue to grow our top line revenue, and we want to continue to take share. So that's what my goal and objective is to be a share gainer, not a share donator. And that we've got plans in place that I feel that will enable us to continue to do that in 2026.

Fantastic. So Chris, I don't want to leave you alone too long over there. So you joined Ulta in December. I would love to hear your high-level thoughts of how you think about financial stewardship, whether it's a greater focus on disciplines around return on invested capital or perhaps creating a funding mechanism where the future investments because this is a category that you continue to invest in, become self-funded.

Yes. No, I appreciate the question. Thanks for having me. One, it's super exciting to be part of Ulta. Obviously, I think it's a strategic positioning, the category it plays in. There's a great financial -- the strength of the financial core is there and just the people-focused culture is amazing and working with Kecia. So super exciting.

When I think coming in new, I'd point to maybe two things that go hand in hand that I'm focused on as you think of my time, one in Kecia's setup, obviously, we're focused on core beauty, right? But there's all these other opportunities that are complementary and are very early innings, right? And we've kind of set the table and set the foundation of new growth vectors that we can unlock that can contribute to sustained growth profile and momentum in the future.

So think of that as kind of we've got this great foundation and an opportunity pipeline. And I want to make sure that we unlock that in a thoughtful way and helping the team stay focused on the core, but at the same time, unlock the new growth. I think where I'm spending a lot of my time is, okay, how do you do that? And the financial discipline of a strong growth profile, but a more maturing growth profile, right?

A lot of the history here has been sort of stacking as you expand. And now you have to be much more disciplined in that approach. So there's principles that I bring to the team of one zero-based budgeting and really, you have to sort of rebid for the investments that you had last year. And so it starts with that. The second thing is everyone understanding how do we get more leverage out of what's already been put in place from an investment profile.

What are those natural leverage points in your portfolio? And third, a productivity agenda. And so it's almost like a balance sheet, right? I've got the invest side. I've got the growth side of the equation and pulling that together, to your point, in like a truly integrated planning process that optimizes profit growth at the end of the day. And so I've been super focused on that. I know 2025 was a year of investing in some key capabilities.

To your point, we're won in the marketplace, driving market share, had nice top line growth. We did what we said. When you look at our guidance in 2026, it sets up very nicely against our long-term value creation algorithm and being able to compound earnings at double-digit growth. So spending a lot of my time bringing that to life within the guide that you see that I think sets up nicely for Ulta.

So it was interesting to look back. So in 2012, you had $2 billion of sales and SG&A was 22.0% of sales. And in 2025, you had $12 billion of sales, and it was 26.6%. That's sort of not the way us that live in the Excel world think about how businesses should scale.

So -- how much of the -- and I remember when Mary Dillon joined, there was a lot of investment that the company had that CRM and loyalty and supply chain and technology and so forth. So how much of that was just catch-up in investment? And then as you sit here today and think about potential for big projects in the future, is there any further catch-up that you see out there?

Yes. I mean, look, we've had multiple years of kind of investment, to your point. I think heading up into 2024, there was a few years of core foundational investments, in particular, tech enablement, whether it be our ERP systems, point-of-sale systems, digital data, that set a great foundation that sets us up in the future.

Following that, since we've been so focused on the foundation, it was, okay, go-to-market, what are we doing from digital capabilities, setting up some of these new growth vectors such as marketplace, wellness, a lot across omnichannel to make sure that we have a very competitive omnichannel experience, which I think is actually an advantage of Ulta. So we just cycled through that in 2025.

The way you should think of investment going forward is more normalized investment. We're going to continue to invest in this business. I'm all about consistency and making choices within a given year. You saw in our guide, we're going to invest SG&A while at moderated levels in terms of growth from last year. We're basically setting up in line with sales growth to slightly below. So there's some leverage in plan.

You're getting nice profitable growth. I think the key is to make choices. An organization can only digest so much, and you want to make sure you're maximizing that potential. I think one of the other things that I bring is making sure we're not just investing, activating something in market, but are we holding ourselves accountable to get utility out of it over the time frame. And then you have your next phase of investment of new things that you want to do. And so that consistency of investing, driving profitable growth, either in line to just ahead of top line is the rhythm that you can expect and is what's set up in our guidance.

Yes. What we've committed to is getting SG&A back in line with revenue growth. And when we do this, that will be the first time since 2017 that we've been able to do that. So we are committed to building that muscle here within the organization because, again, when you've got heavy growth rates, that's what you're focused on. We've got to bring that financial discipline within Ulta Beauty, and we're committed to doing that.

So trying to think about the other side of that, it is such a dynamic category. And I was talking in the last session, a different industry where it's just -- it seems like the structural expense rate is just higher because there's more advertising in this category. There's more change from a trend perspective. There's more changes that need to happen in the store. There's more conversion needs. You need help in that store. And so how do you think about what then is the right leverage point? Like most retailers who don't grow and grant you guys do have growth, leverage, start leveraging at 2-ish kind of comp, you have a little bit of growth and it is a more dynamic category. So is there a way to think about the leverage point being sort of 3% to 4%.

Yes, it's a great question. I mean so again, if you look at the guide that we gave in '26, right, the midpoint of our comp growth is 3%. If you look at our plan, there is leverage in our plan, and it's even actually a little bit more in the core, right? Keep in mind, we're still digesting Space NK, right? So when you look at, again, growing SG&A in line with sales to slightly below, it translates to margin flat to up 20 basis points. But if you look at that organically, there's even some leverage at the bottom end of that, right?

The flat goes up. So we are getting -- we are getting leverage at around that 3%. I think importantly, just one thing to think of it, and I know there's been a lot of focus on SG&A and how much SG&A has been growing. But I think that's because you haven't seen necessarily the profitable growth come with it. SG&A growth in and of itself is not bad as long as it's not at the expense of margin. So when you think of the guide we set up for this year, we all win if we can maximize profit growth at the end of the day, right? And so once we start a year, if I see upside opportunity, if I see an opportunity to reinvest back in the business, drive top line growth that fuels kind of future momentum as well, increases operating profit, not at the expense of margin, and I'm still within my margin guide. That's a win for everyone, and that's how we'll approach the year. So we think we set up the year nicely with some leverage. And then we'll see what we can do to continue to maximize operating profit is the principle we'll drive in a disciplined way.

And so a bit more tactical on the SG&A front because you do have -- there's just a lot of noise in there with Space NK and some incentive and investment timing as you look at what happened over the course of '25 and how it influences 2026. So in our model, we have SG&A dollars up 16% in the first quarter, going down to sort of high single digits in the second quarter and then 2-ish in the back half in light of investments in NK and incentives. So is that the right -- I know you didn't comment specifically. You talked about double digit in the first half of the year, but the numbers are a bit all over the place in the consensus. So is that the right path.

Yes, I appreciate the question. I think directionally, let me give some color here. So to your point on earnings, we said double-digit first half. It implies low single digit in the second half. I think it's important for everyone to understand, there's no heroics needed to sort of drive and get to that leverage.

This is very much natural based on certain things and a natural rhythm that happens through the year. So in the first half, you do have absorbing Space NK. You also have the full annualization of the investments that largely started more in the second half of 2025. So you get that annualization impact in the front half, plus Q1 in and of itself actually has the lowest investment comp going back to 2025.

So you actually get a double impact in Q1. That will translate, if I think of Q1, you're going to be kind of in the mid-teens level, which is basically exactly what you said. From there, it will step down. Again, it will still be about double digits in the first half, the back half, low single digits. And you will see investment in every single quarter, including Q4. So we are investing behind the business. I'd also say, as you think of investment, -- as we get to leverage, my goal is also to optimize the productivity of the investment, right?

So I want to get more utility out of every dollar because we do need to be competitive in the category. So hopefully, that helps give you the color you need as you think of kind of how this plays out throughout the year.

Got it. Understood. So to reiterate, we said sort of 16 -- mid-teens, 15%, 16% right in the first quarter, stays still double digit, but steps down in 2Q and...

The first half is actually still double digits. So the second quarter would step down to, call it, high single digits.

Nice [indiscernible] model is right. So with that, I have a few more questions I definitely want to cover, but I wanted to open it up to the audience for questions. If you have a question, please grab the microphone, raise your hand and ask your question. I'm doing such a great job that no one wants to ask any questions.

Maybe just staying on the topic of SG&A. I guess the question would be, is it the right time to bring down SG&A growth given competition in the space, given Amazon obviously growing nicely in beauty, given one of our partners, Target is now to probably become a competitor. You got Walmart also talking about beauty. Like is this the right time to actually step down SG&A growth?

Yes, it's a good question. So again, we're investing in the business. This is not starving the business by any chance. Some of these investments that we made pre -2025 and certainly in 2025, all have carryover effect. And we said we would harvest those. And so a lot of those were in early innings. They were launched in the back half of the year.

So you certainly get carryover benefit from them. Again, there is an underlying productivity agenda, and we're just being much more disciplined around what our leverage points are versus stacking investments. So I think our plan has much higher ROI as you think of how we're going to market with those investments. So we feel we're nicely positioned when you look at how we're competing. We're prioritizing key areas to make sure that we're capitalizing on where the guest is, right, objected commerce.

You see -- you saw us launch in TikTok. We continue to drive merchandise transformation and focus. Kecia talked about our newness pipeline. So we're hitting the key areas to enable growth. We do need to continue to drive healthy growth to kind of have this all pull through, right, in terms of a flywheel. And so we feel good about the plans that we have. And actually, I would argue that focus makes you sharper and allows you to execute well. So.

Yes. We've been in a heavy investment cycle for many years. And letting things settle in the summer actually could be very good for our organization, too, to really maximize those investments that we've made to get the real true value out of it. Focusing on the basic fundamentals of running the business, also, you get a benefit from that, too. So I think the organization is primed that this is the right time to -- we've made the right investments. Part of it was we were so focused on foundational investments that we had a lot of catch-up to do in 2025 still too because we were so focused on foundational that we fell a little bit behind in go-to-market. We fixed that. We took share. We drove the business top line revenue. Now is the time to continue to, as Chris mentioned, harvest those investments and get back to some basic fundamentals in 2026.

I wanted to ask you about the strategy on TikTok. I think you guys have previously talked about moving away from the idea of being on TikTok. And now obviously, the landscape has changed. Users are going on TikTok like never before. And so just curious how you think about the strategy of the loyalty app with your 46.7 million members and TikTok. How do you view the strategy as complementary? How do you think about opportunities to grow spend per customer, and make sure that customer is loyal and grow that e-commerce strategy that has.

Yes. I'm very excited about TikTok Shop. We announced that on March 12 -- or 17 that we were launching on TikTok Shop. And to me, this is about as much of being front and center and top of mind from a guest acquisition perspective. You want to be where the consumer is shopping and where they're engaging with the brands.

And I think the timing is perfect for us as the first specialty beauty retailer to join TikTok Shop. And I'm very excited by what we're already seeing. A couple of things that -- the way that I'm looking at this business as a whole is that it's not just about guest acquisition. It's about creating that excitement of buying in real time and having that energy and that excitement of what's happening in the moment.

You think about the old QVC, HSN, where you'd watch TV and you'd buy immediately. It's that instant gratification that you can see brought to life in that experience. Other things that we're looking at is when things would go viral on TikTok Shop, it wasn't just hitting social media channels and e-commerce channels, we would sell out in our stores. So the more that we can be engaged in a 360 perspective, and we can maybe even help create some of those viral moments is really important. TikTok Shop, especially in beauty when it was very first launched was all about discounting. You saw heavy, heavy discounts. You see the ones that are doing it really well, and I call this brand ANUA. It's a K-beauty brand, has done it very, very well, and we've learned a lot from them. They really have gone at it with bundles and with having like a value in the bundle. So it helps your AOV, your average transaction as being much higher without doing as much discounting.

We will be one of the first retailers that could be able to have cross-branded bundles. That's how the beauty consumer is shopping today. So that is really, really exciting to me. What we've heard early on, we like what we're seeing with the algorithms, first and foremost. And secondly, the creators are coming out in drugs, thousands and thousands of creators have been reaching out to us because they want to come and represent Ulta Beauty.

The more you can get your brand out there in the conversation, that's a huge win for us at Ulta Beauty. And the second is that more and more brands, traditional brands even are coming to us saying that they want to participate now in TikTok shop because we're not coming at it from a discounting perspective, we're coming at it from a unique bundling perspective. So like I said, while it's still early innings on this, we're excited by what we see. We just think it's another tool that we can add to our ecosystem that will continue to differentiate us from others that are out there.

You got a very interesting industry and the pricing of skin care is going up in many cases, dramatically. But I'd like to hear your feeling on that, whether it's Suntan lotion. I mean, I can buy a tiny tube for $40. It used to be $3 or there's other in skin care, some of cosmetic companies for getting rid of your wrinkles. I mean I see my wife bill to be $1,000. This is unbelievable.

Well, we need to make sure your wife is in our loyalty program, number one. The second, platinum. But what I would say is that what's beautiful about our business is that we do have something for everyone. We have fantastic products for skin care that are at entry-level price points also, but we do go all the way to the higher dollar regimens within our assortment. So we want to be able to offer something for everyone across all generations, too. That's also something that's very important to me is that I want to be a place, especially in skin, a younger consumer is coming into this category more and more. And we have the right and the authority and the responsibility to have something that is good for that consumer to be able to use on their skin, and we have those products in our assortment. So I love the fact that we can offer something for everyone today.

So part of the increase in the volume is obviously then due to the price points that you carry and the raising point.

It's a blend of both. It's a blend of both. It's not just one or the other.

So I have a question, jumping back to margins. So you achieved a 12.4% operating margin last year. You have this roughly 12% out there from the last Analyst Day, but you also see this transitioning of how you think about financial guidance and focused on operating profit dollar growth. So the question is, -- is that right? Or should we start to think about the algorithm, yes, low double-digit earnings growth, but focus on growing operating profit dollars such that we should just all delete that 12% number?

Yes. It's a great question. I kind of shared this a little bit earlier. First of all, I think the beauty of Ulta being able to compound earnings growth double digits, right? And there's multiple components of that. It starts with investing and competing in the top line, driving share, et cetera. So we do need to have healthy investment in the business.

And with that said, we're going to be disciplined about profitable growth, all the mechanisms that I shared before, right? We'll start a plan year with -- just take '26 as an example. We're going to grow SG&A to invest in the business either at sales or slightly below. That implies some leverage.

So there will be leverage opportunity. And then as the year advances and as we deliver against our plan, the goal is to just drive operating profit as high as we can go, but not at the expense of margin, right? So it requires discipline, but that may mean that we do increase SG&A, but that would go up proportionately with sales.

We get higher operating profit. We don't dilute margin. So it's a very disciplined approach, and I think we should try and move away from SG&A growth is bad as long as it's disciplined. I think importantly, when you think of kind of our capital allocation and our cash, right, we have really strong ROIC. We have strong cash flow.

You heard me talk about being very focused on driving inventory optimization. You saw us leverage CapEx this year when you think of sales growth keeping CapEx in line. So our capital priorities are unchanged. We want to continue to invest in growth through CapEx in a competitive way. The balance we want to drop to help drive that double-digit EPS compounding.

This year, our initial guide, we had $1 billion of share buybacks to drive that. We're actually in a position now when we sit here and we think of kind of where the market is and comparing that to what we view as our intrinsic value and seeing a gap there. We're actually going to increase our share buybacks by almost 50% to about $1.5 billion this year.

So we see that as a nice value creation opportunity. And again, this principle of compounding earnings growth at double digits is pretty powerful consistently. And I also think that cash power helps kind of ride some of these economic cycles as well and still return strong value to shareholders.

I honestly think Kylie and I were talking about the cash flow -- the cash generative nature of Ulta is really incredible, like people focus on these auto parts retailers for a decade, they bought back 5%, 6%, 7% of their shares per year. I mean that sort of -- that's what's going on inside your algorithm. And so you can grow and you can invest, but still return a lot of capital to shareholder.

Absolutely.

Awesome. Well, with that, I think that's a great endpoint. We really appreciate your time. Thank you for coming again this year. Chris thanks for joining.

Yes. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Looking forward to the future.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Leila, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to Ulta Beauty's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2025 Earnings Call. This conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Ms. Kiley Rawlins, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Rawlins, please proceed.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for a discussion of Ulta Beauty's results for the fourth quarter and fiscal 2025. Hosting our call today are Kecia Steelman, Chief Executive Officer; and Chris DelOrefice, Chief Financial Officer. During today's webcast, a presentation is being displayed live and will be posted to our website at ulta.com/investor shortly after the webcast concludes.

As a reminder, today's earnings release and the comments made by management during this call include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, factors identified in the earnings release and in our most recent 10-K and 10-Q filings. The company undertakes no obligation to revise any forward-looking statements.

To allow us to accommodate as many questions as possible during the hour scheduled for this call, we respectfully ask that you limit your time to one question with no more than one follow-up question. And as always, the IR team will be available for any follow-up questions after the call.

Now I'll turn the call over to Kecia. Kecia?

Thank you, Kiley, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm excited today to be joined by Ulta Beauty's new CFO, Chris DelOrefice. Welcome, Chris. We're so thrilled to have you as a part of the team.

As I reflect on the past 12 months, I'm incredibly proud of the Ulta Beauty team and all we have accomplished. We closed the year strong, delivering full year financial performance ahead of our plans while making important guest-facing investments to position our business for future growth. For the year, we grew net sales by nearly 10% to $12.4 billion. delivered operating income of $1.5 billion or 12.4% of sales and EPS of $25.64.

Today, I will start by briefly highlighting our fourth quarter and holiday performance and then discuss our full year performance and the progress we made against our Ulta Beauty Unleashed strategy before sharing more details on our plans and priorities for fiscal 2026. Our team stayed focused on executing and caring for our guests, delivering stronger-than-expected fourth quarter sales and continued market share gains in mass and prestige beauty. Successful events fueled our performance, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday, along with key post-holiday events like our fan favorite Love Your Skin and Jumbo Love promotions. Holiday served as a culmination of our efforts to advance the business throughout 2025. We developed a thoughtful cross-functional holiday strategy supported by outstanding in-store and digital execution, bold and relevant marketing campaigns and activations and compelling holiday assortment and gift sets.

Guest engagement was high and many guests leaned into convenience of our omnichannel buy anywhere, fill anywhere capabilities during the busy holiday season. Our store and digital teams executed with excellence, delivering record-breaking holiday performance. We introduced a fun holiday marketing campaign focused on the 12 Days of Giftmas featuring celebrity brand founders, which drove meaningful gains in awareness and brand love scores. We drove comp growth across all categories and made gifting easy with a curated and powerful holiday assortment, impactful newness and leading fragrance offering. Our relentless commitment to operational excellence had store teams quickly restocking after high-volume holidays to serve guests and maximize selling opportunities, while our supply chain teams leveraged recent distribution center upgrades to increase our delivery speed to guests.

Turning to our full year performance. Fiscal 2025 was a year of strategic investment and deliberate transformative change for Ulta Beauty, change that challenged us to sharpen our focus, strengthen our capabilities and position our business for sustainable, profitable growth in the rapidly evolving beauty market. We began the year with a clear vision on how we intend to unleash the power of our model, build on our foundational advantages and reassert our leadership position in beauty through the execution of our Ulta Beauty Unleashed strategy with a clear focus on three priorities: driving core business growth, scaling new businesses and realigning our foundation for the future. Paired with the collective commitment and agility of our teams, we turned vision into reality and made exceptional progress across each pillar of our strategy, reigniting our growth, strengthening our core and delivering better-than-planned financial performance.

Let me briefly highlight the advancements we made during the quarter. We elevated our execution and more consistently delivered a differentiated omnichannel guest experience, further solidifying Ulta Beauty as the unmatched beauty destination for all guests. This came to life through a recommitment to the best-in-class execution and stronger merchandise in stock, incremental investments in payroll hours to support the guest experience, more than 100,000 in-store events, which included brand launches, brand education and celebrity appearances, and highlighted our differentiated in-store experience.

Ongoing digital upgrades, which added guest-friendly features like replenish and save and wish list and expanded convenience through features like split cart and increased personalization through the power of AI and our automated marketing engine that delivered relevant, dynamic and timely content across the customer journey.

We strengthened and modernized our assortment and merchandising strategy, accelerating pipeline momentum and delivering a powerful wave of newness that included more than 100 new brands this year, including Moroccanoil, amika, medicube, isima, Drake's Better World Fragrance and TIRTIR among many more. Key elements that supported our merchandising evolution included thoughtful, purposeful collaboration with our brand partners to fuel the innovation pipeline with new products like Fenty's Diamond collection and Morphe eyeshadow palettes, a new elevated go-to-market approach that established tighter collaboration between our merchandising, marketing and store teams and helped drive operational excellence, marketing leadership and compelling merchandising innovation.

A bold new marketing strategy with reimagined events like our Only at Ulta event, which highlighted our differentiated exclusive assortment and powerful cultural activations like our sponsorship of the Cowboy Carter Tour in conjunction with Beyonce's Cecred haircare launch and elevating our brand-building capabilities, enabling us to build stronger portfolios of exclusive brands and products that drive meaningful differentiation and new member acquisition. Noteworthy successes in 2025 include Cecred, which became our largest prestige hair care launch in history, prestige skincare K-Beauty brand, Peach & Lily, influencer-founded makeup brand DIBS, and Gen Z's most loved fragrance brand, NOYZ.

We built and expanded into new growth channels through our international expansion beyond the U.S. with nearly 100 stores in five countries. This included our acquisition of Space NK, a luxury beauty retailer operating more than 80 stores in the U.K. and Ireland, the opening of nine stores in Mexico via our joint venture partner, Grupo Axo, and the opening of two stores in the Middle East through our franchise partner, Alshaya. Our newly launched Marketplace, a curated online assortment that allows guests to explore a complementary array of beauty, wellness and lifestyle products on ulta.com and our app. The assortment includes more than 200 established and emerging brands and 5,000 SKUs.

Our wellness initiative, which included the addition of nearly 30 new brands in our core wellness assortment and nearly 40 new brands in our marketplace assortment, along with an expanded store presence in more than 400 stores and new UB Media capabilities like the addition of connected TV and streaming audio products that drove engagement and incremental ad revenue.

We made notable progress aligning our foundation to support future growth through important leadership changes to ensure our team was positioned to meet the needs of our evolving business and ongoing cost optimization efforts, including investment in AI and automation, like the testing a new conversational AI capabilities for our guest services team, which streamlined and increased resolution efficiency and quality as well as the implementation of an AI-powered order management system to optimize fulfillment across our network, enabling our expansion of ship from store and reducing out of stocks and markdown rest.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we reignited our culture and reinvigorated our brand, and our guests, associates and brand partners took notice. We did this through decisive organizational changes that accelerated decision-making and aligned teams and resources around guest-centric goals. Adopting a winning mindset as we stacked key successes and build momentum throughout the year, we steadily reignited our collective spirit or as I like to say, we got our swagger back. And a new marketing brand equity campaign, Beauty happens here in bold and fresh marketing activations, which placed Ulta Beauty at the center of exciting cultural moments like Lollapalooza and Coachella and a renewed enthusiasm for the magic of our mission to bring the power of beauty to life for all ages and all life stages.

By nearly all measures of success, our team delivered against our plans. During fiscal 2025, we drove 5.4% comparable sales growth and positive comp growth across all categories. We strengthened conversion in stores, increased transactions and drove improving NPS scores. We grew our loyalty program by 5% to a record 46.7 million active members, driven by strong growth in reactivated members and strong retention of existing members. We gained market share in both mass and prestige beauty. We delivered greater app engagement with approximately 60% of online sales made through the app and drove active app users up 15% year-over-year. And we drove significant EMV and reached record levels of unaided awareness.

While the guest-facing investments we made this year pressured profitability, the steady progress and results driven in fiscal 2025 reinforce our expectations that these investments position us to return sustainable profitable growth and to deliver against our long-term financial targets in fiscal 2026 and beyond.

Before I turn to our plans and priorities for 2026, let me first touch on our view of the consumer, the current beauty landscape and our expectations going forward. Throughout 2025, we closely monitored consumer behavior and observed continued resilience, a strong focus on value and affordability and increasing discernment in spending decisions. At the same time, engagement with the beauty category remained healthy and the landscape remained competitive. We expect these themes to continue into fiscal 2026, though we are increasingly mindful of rising global conflicts that could impact economic conditions. Absent increased broader macro disruption for the year, our expectation for the beauty category growth is in line with the average historical growth rate with expected growth in the 2% to 4% range. As we turn to fiscal 2026, our Ulta Beauty Unleashed strategy will continue to guide our priorities as we build on the successes of fiscal 2025.

Chris will highlight our financial outlook, but let me touch on our priorities and plans for 2026. First, our core business in the U.S., which now includes more than 1,500 stores and robust digital offering is our top priority, and we continue to see significant opportunity to unlock further growth. In 2026, we will continue to enhance our brand-building efforts to further elevate and differentiate our assortment and strengthen our position as the retailer of choice to launch, build, scale and globalize across the full low- to luxury portfolio.

We will continue to strengthen our appeal to meet guests' evolving beauty needs with innovative and relevant newness, like the record-breaking launch of Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez and the exclusive launch of Balmain's new scent, Destin De Balmain. We will continue to invest in the heart of our experience, our stores to extend our competitive advantage and capture key growth opportunities. We will build on our progress across our digital platforms with new capabilities and stronger guest engagement through personalization as we leverage greater automation and real-time content to tailor the guest experience and provide even more value to our loyal members.

And we are pleased to announce today an expanded strategic integration with TikTok. Next week, we will launch Ulta Beauty on TikTok Shop, where guests can purchase immediately as they engage with content from Ulta Beauty and our brands on the platform. We are excited about the opportunities both social and AI-enhanced commerce platforms are providing us to bring our undeniably Ulta Beauty experience and assortment to life. We will initially launch with a thoughtfully curated assortment of only at Ulta brands, which will add another exciting tool to our brand-building playbook.

Next, in order to maximize key incremental growth opportunities and remain resilient in a rapidly changing world, we will work to scale our new businesses. We intend to continue our international expansion in the U.K., in Mexico and the Middle East through our existing partners. We will thoughtfully expand our wellness and marketplace assortment to drive new member acquisition and spend per member and add new UB Media capabilities to collectively fuel incremental profit growth.

Finally, turning to our third area of focus, aligning our foundation for the future by optimizing our ways of working and streamlining our cost structure. In 2026, we plan to continue our supply chain transformation efforts with the rollout of increased automation in existing facilities and started construction of a new regional distribution center in the Northwest later this year that will expand network capacity and increase fulfillment speed. We plan to invest in systems and processes to drive sales and inventory productivity through new merchandising transformation efforts. And we will continue to further our mission to support human possibility by expanding our AI capabilities to support the guest experience, drive associate productivity, empower smarter decision-making.

Beauty is deeply personal, and we believe leveraging new AI capabilities will enable us to deliver relevance, inspiration and expertise seamlessly across the guest beauty journey. Powered by our loyalty ecosystem, rich first-party data and convenient omnichannel footprint, we are engaging with industry leaders to explore how we can further leverage AI to amplify what makes Ulta Beauty distinct. All of these efforts will support our ongoing cost optimization efforts to fuel investment and support profitable growth.

As we close out a strong fourth quarter and a transformative year, I want to thank our associates, guests, brand partners and shareholders for their continued trust and partnership. As I reflect on my first year as CEO, I am proud of the progress that we made to deliver on our commitments, strengthen our strategic position and invest in capabilities that will drive our next phase of growth. We are optimistic about the opportunities ahead while remaining mindful and cautious as we navigate an environment with ongoing global uncertainty and potential economic volatility. Looking forward, we will control what we can control, put our prior strategic investments to work as we focus on strong execution, innovation that creates real value for our guests and disciplined results return-driven capital allocation.

I'm excited about what the future holds for Ulta Beauty. We have ambitious plans, and I'm confident that we have the right team, the right model, the right strategy and the swagger to continue to win in the beauty category and create value for our shareholders.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Chris to cover some of the specific financial results and our 2026 outlook. Chris?

Thanks, Kecia, and good afternoon, everyone. Before I discuss our recent financial results and our outlook for fiscal 2026, let me first say how excited I am to join Ulta Beauty. Over the last three months, I've enjoyed getting to know the Ulta Beauty team and gaining a deeper appreciation for the company's strategic positioning, financial strengths and its strong people-focused culture.

Ulta Beauty is a beloved brand operating in an attractive and resilient category. Our Ulta Beauty Unleashed strategy is fueling market share growth, driving guest engagement and furthering our differentiation in a competitive category. We have more than 60,000 talented associates who bring our brand to life and serve our guests with passion and commitment every day. We have strengthened our foundation, invested in key capabilities and maintained a solid financial foundation with strong operating cash flow that enables value creation and also provides us with financial flexibility to pursue growth opportunities and weather dynamic macro environments.

I'm excited and optimistic about the future of Ulta Beauty, and I am energized to serve as a strategic partner to Kecia and the rest of the executive team to ensure we build on our momentum with a strong focus on driving long-term sustainable growth and maximizing value creation.

So, with that, let's get into our results. Starting with the quarter, net sales for the quarter increased 11.8% to $3.9 billion compared to $3.5 billion last year. During the quarter, we opened five new and remodeled 18 Ulta Beauty stores. We also opened two new and relocated one Space NK store. For the year, we opened a total of 63 net new stores, relocated 6 stores and remodeled 42 stores, in line with our previously provided guidance. We ended the year with 1,505 Ulta Beauty stores and 86 Space NK stores.

Comparable sales for the period increased 5.8%, driven by a 4.2% increase in average ticket and a 1.6% increase in transactions. Looking at the cadence of sales through the quarter, comp sales were fairly consistent, reflecting both the strong holiday season and the lapping of softness in January last year. I would note that we did see some impact from the weather at the end of January this year. From a channel perspective, both store and digital channels contributed to comp growth with e-commerce sales delivering mid-teen growth and comp stores increasing sales in the low single-digit range.

Turning now to sales by category. The skin care and wellness category increased to 24% of sales, and the makeup category decreased to 35% of sales, primarily reflecting the impact of Space NK, which has a higher mix of skin care sales than our Ulta Beauty business. Fragrance was the strongest performing category again this quarter, delivering double-digit comp growth fueled by newness from established brands, including YSL and Prada as well as exclusive brands such as NOYZ, Snif, and Summer Mink by Drake, coupled with strong performance of holiday gift sets. New co-branded TV campaigns, expanded space in stores and better in-stocks successfully positioned Ulta Beauty as the fragrance destination this holiday season. The hair care category delivered its best comp performance this year with comp growth for the quarter in the high single-digit range, primarily driven by strong performance from new brands, including amika and Moroccanoil and exclusive Cecred, which continued to build sales momentum after a fantastic launch in April. The skin care and Wellness category delivered mid-single-digit comp growth driven by prestige, skin care and wellness. K-Beauty brands, medicube, ANUA, and Peach & Lily, and new brands, DRMTLGY and Personal Day drove strong guest engagement, while highly giftable launches from Therabody, Nodpod and Saje, which is exclusive to Ulta Beauty, delivered strong growth in wellness. We took market share in the makeup category with low single-digit growth in total, supported by positive comps in both mass and prestige makeup. Mass makeup growth was driven by compelling newness from brands like L'Oreal, Morphe and Ulta Beauty Collection, while Prestige Beauty benefited from newness from Kylie Cosmetics and MAC. Finally, services delivered mid-single-digit comp growth, driven by increases in salon and specialty services, including ear piercing and makeup services.

Gross margin for the quarter decreased 10 basis points to 38.1% of sales. The decrease was primarily due to channel mix and deleverage of store fixed costs and other revenue. These headwinds were mostly offset by lower inventory shrink and leverage of supply chain fixed costs, reflecting efficiencies from our supply chain optimization efforts. Our team's relentless focus on reducing inventory shrink has delivered meaningful benefits every quarter this year. Our investments in fixtures and process improvements, targeted efforts in high-risk markets and focused associate training have resulted in shrink reductions across every category.

Moving to expenses. SG&A increased 23% to $1 billion. SG&A growth was primarily driven by higher incentive compensation, including rewarding our frontline and field associates, reflecting strong financial performance versus our targets this year compared to lower incentive comp in fiscal 2024. The impact of Space NK and investments we made to support our Ulta Beauty Unleash strategy also contributed to SG&A growth. Excluding the impact of incentive compensation and Space NK, SG&A growth for the quarter was about 17%. As a percentage of sales, SG&A increased 230 basis points to 25.7%. Consistent with our investment strategy, expenses deleveraged across most components of SG&A with the exception of store payroll and benefits, which were approximately flat as a percentage of sales. Operating profit was $477 million or 12.2% of sales and diluted earnings per share for the quarter was $8.01 per share.

Now to recap fiscal 2025 on a full year basis, net sales increased 9.7% or $1.1 billion to $12.4 billion. Comp sales increased 5.4%, driven by a 3.3% increase in average ticket and a 2% increase in transactions. Gross margin increased 30 basis points to 39.1% of sales. The increase was primarily due to lower inventory shrink and higher merchandise margin, which were partially offset by channel mix and the deleverage of other revenue. SG&A expense increased 17.4% to $3.3 billion. The growth was primarily driven by higher incentive compensation, the impact of Space NK and investments we made to support our Ulta Beauty Unleashed strategy. Excluding the impact of incentive compensation and Space NK, SG&A growth for the year was about 13%. Operating profit was $1.5 billion or 12.4% of sales, and diluted EPS increased 1.2% to $25.64 per share, above our previously provided guidance.

Moving to the balance sheet and our capital deployment strategies. We ended the year with $494 million in cash and short-term investments and $62 million in short-term debt, primarily related to Space NK. Total inventory increased 10.8% to $2.2 billion, primarily reflecting additional inventory to support new brands, the acquisition of Space NK and the impact of 60 net new Ulta Beauty stores. The increase also reflects inventory investments in key categories to improve in-stock levels and support strategic growth opportunities. Our business generated more than $1.5 billion in cash from operations for the year, which supported reinvestment of $435 million in capital expenditures and $890 million in share repurchases.

To summarize our fiscal 2025 performance, the strategic investments and actions taken as part of the Ulta Beauty Unleashed strategy enabled us to accelerate top line growth, capture market share faster than expected and ultimately exceed the commitments we made at the start of the year. I want to express my sincere gratitude to our teams for delivering this outperformance and positioning us well as we enter fiscal 2026.

As we look to fiscal 2026, we are focused on expanding our market share, driving returns from the investments we've made over the last few years and importantly, returning to profitable growth. Our 2026 plan is aligned to our long-term targets and reflects several key financial goals anchored in our value creation principles, including disciplined cost management, which helps fuel investment to support a strong growth profile. For the year, we anticipate net sales will increase between 6% to 7% with comp sales growth between 2.5% and 3.5%. We are planning on operating profit to grow in line or faster than net sales, and we expect diluted EPS will increase more than operating profit. For modeling purposes, we expect net sales will be between $13.1 billion and $13.2 billion, primarily driven by comp sales growth and the impact of 50 to 60 net new company-operated stores. Overall, we are planning stronger sales growth in the first half of the year as we benefit from the acquisition of Space NK and lap easier comp growth comparisons in the first quarter.

We expect gross margin will be approximately flat as benefits from higher merchandise margin, driven primarily by greater inventory productivity will likely be offset by deleverage of store fixed costs and other revenue. We will continue to invest in growth opportunities, but we are planning SG&A growth to be in line with to slightly below net sales growth and significantly lower than fiscal 2025, enabled by productivity programs and disciplined investment prioritization. Keep in mind, we expect to realize double-digit SG&A growth in the first half of fiscal 2026 as we won't lap the acquisition of Space NK and the annualization of investments until the second half of fiscal 2026.

We expect operating profit will increase between 6% and 9%, resulting in operating margin being flat to up 20 basis points, primarily reflecting the anticipated pace of SG&A growth, we expect operating profit growth will be stronger in the second half of the year. We expect these plans, combined with the ongoing efforts to enhance inventory productivity, will continue to generate strong operating cash flow, which will enable reinvestment to support future growth and also support our intent to return approximately $1 billion of capital to shareholders through our stock repurchase program.

We expect capital expenditures for the year will be between $400 million and $450 million, primarily to expand and refresh our store portfolio as well as investments in digital and information technology capabilities and supply chain optimization to support the guest experience and drive further operational productivity. Reflecting these assumptions, we anticipate diluted EPS will be between $28.05 and $28.55 per share, representing growth between 9.4% and 11.4%, respectively, including the impact of share repurchases and an assumed tax rate between 24.2% and 24.4%.

In closing, the execution of our Ulta Beauty Unleash strategy in 2025 enabled us to accelerate top line growth and deliver stronger performance than planned. Building on this foundation, we have developed a plan for fiscal 2026 that delivers against our long-term financial targets, including market share expansion, profitable growth and strong cash generation, which support attractive EPS growth and compelling value creation.

And now I'll turn the call over to our operator to moderate the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question will come from Krisztina Katai with Deutsche Bank.

I wanted to start by asking on the composition of the comp. Can you talk about pricing and what you're seeing from the brands? Because the 4.2% ticket was very strong. But on the other hand, transactions decelerated, especially when looking on a two-year stack. Maybe can you touch on the dynamics there and just how you're thinking about it in 2026 as it unfolds?

Krisztina, thanks for the question. We see pricing increases every year. They typically impact about 10% to 15% of the overall assortment. And we're really planning for normalized pricing environment in fiscal 2026. We'll continue to work with our brand partners and navigate potential pricing increases, but we're not seeing or hearing anything that's outside of the normal territory.

Okay. And then just a question on SG&A, which came in a little bit higher. Can you maybe touch on how much of that was incremental marketing and how you're thinking about the wraparound effect of that in '26? And then as we think about the -- if you could touch on the promotional backdrop in beauty across the industry, just what are you seeing with the cost of customer acquisition? Would love to get your thoughts there.

Chris, why don't you start?

Yes. So regarding SG&A, obviously, we were pleased with the performance in Q4 and the ability to overdeliver both sales and EPS above the high end of our guidance. We also delivered our operating margin at the high end of our guidance. So if you think about it, we overdelivered sales above the high end of our guidance by about $85 million, and we had flow-through of EPS upside similar to our margin rate. So we did make some investments in SG&A in between there.

A few things I would point to. One, we had to absorb higher incentive comp on the overperformance. The second thing to note is, of course, there are some variable costs that are attributed to the increased sales, for example, increased tasking in stores. In addition to that, we did make some investments to support the outperformance in growth, most notably marketing, some media investments that not only helped 2025, but positions us nicely as we look into 2026. So we're definitely pleased with how we finished 2025, and we think that positions us nicely as we move into 2026, as you can see from the guidance we provided.

Yes. And then just a little bit on promotionality. We don't have any plans to accelerate promotion, but we recognize that the environment is competitive, it's dynamic, and there is an increased focus right now out there on value. But it's one of the levers that we can pull into. And with us having such a strong loyalty base, our investments that we've made in personalization, along with other ways that we've invested to really be relevant and top of mind for that guest, we currently don't have any elevated promotionality built into the current plan or in the guidance.

Your next question will come from Chris Horvers with JPMorgan.

So I just want to jump back on your comments earlier about the backdrop, Kecia, 2.5% to 2% to 4% industry growth, is that a deceleration versus 2025? And then to what extent are you baking in the geopolitical backdrop? Obviously, a lot has changed in the past two weeks. Did you take that into account when you were thinking about the sales outlook for the year, including your own share gains?

Yes. Let me. Thanks, Chris, for the question. It's very close to 2025. We -- the comp guidance really reflects a normalization and the fact that we're going to be increasingly having some challenging comps as we move through the year. We've adjusted for dynamic operating environment. We're staying really focused on controlling what we can control.

Just a little color on how we looked at when we were building the 2.5% to 3.5%. There were really 4 areas that we looked at. The first was really on consumer demand. We're cautious about how the consumer demand could evolve given the macro pressures and rising conflicts. But beauty has been a resilient category. to these macro pressures. So we see that the beauty engagement is going to continue to be healthy in 2026.

The second, I touched on this just earlier about the promotional environment. There's no plans for us to accelerate promotion, but it's going to be competitive out there. And I want to be continuing to focus on driving share and growth, and we're going to stay close to it, but we always want to look at market share and top line healthy growth is a measure to our success.

And then pricing, I touched on that. We don't see anything that's going to be out of the ordinary within pricing. And then the growth of the category is between that 2% to 4%. But just as a quick reminder, we're going against some easier comps in the first half versus the second half of this year. And we're just continuing to focus on controlling what we can control and making sure that we have a plan that gives us the ability to continue to take share. and to build a strategy around numbers that we feel like regardless of the economic environment that we can continue to hit.

Got it. And then I guess you launched Rare Beauty to start the year. And so can you talk about what the early response is to Rare Beauty? How should we size it in terms of an analog? Is this something like Kylie? Is this something like when you launched Fenty, typically, you talked about 25% to 30% of sales growth is newness. How should we think about Rare relative to that number and relative to other analogs when you launch some significant brands?

Absolutely. So just to maybe start with your last point. When you look at 2025, you're right, 20% to 30% of our growth is coming from newness. We were a little on that higher end of the scale in 2025. So we're closer to that 30%. Rare, while it came out of the gates very strong, and we're thrilled because makeup having this halo impact in makeup is fantastic for us. It's one brand, and we carry 600 brands in the assortment.

What we are -- what I can share about quarter-to-date trends so far is that we were pleased with February. We're still early in the quarter. And we do have easier compares, as I mentioned earlier in Q&A that we're going against easier numbers in the first half comp. But we have this embedded already in our guidance of the 2.5% to 3%. But yes, we were thrilled with what we saw with Rare coming out of the gate strong. Lauren and team had done a great job with newness and the cadence of newness in 2025. We like what we see with the cadence of newness in 2026. But one brand doesn't change the entire course of our business at the same time. Hopefully, that answered your question.

Your next question will come from Sydney Wagner with Jefferies.

Can you just give us a little bit more of an update on what you're seeing in terms of the competitive environment? We've seen some pushing from mass retailers into prestige. So I'm just curious what you think about are the most important elements of the business to maintain your competitive moat in the category? And what helps you continue to win new brands?

Thanks for the question, Sydney. Beauty has always been a competitive category, but I would say that this is what we do. This is what Ulta Beauty is about. We cover everything from low to lux and everything in between. And when you add wellness into this mix, we're a trusted location with expertise that's broad in a curated assortment with our leading loyalty program with this omnichannel activation that we're continuing to invest in.

We just announced today about our TikTok, which I think is going to be another quiver for us to continue to engage with new guests. We just are leaning into what makes us different, which, again, I do believe it's that low to luxe with services and wellness all captured into it. We've been talking a little bit more about leaning into our brand-building capabilities. We're bringing an elevated focus on how do we continue to engage with newness and exclusivity, which continues to separate us from everyone else.

But again, a lot of people want to get into beauty because it's an attractive category because of the margins, et cetera. But this is what we do, and we're just going to double down on the strength and the power of this model. The Ulta Beauty Unleashed plan, I could not be more pleased with how we were performing against the plan in 2025. We're just going to continue to double down and really start to reap the reward of the investments that we made in 2025 and harvest that in 2026.

And I would just say, stay tuned. We are pleased with the progress we've made, and I feel like we are focused on the right strategies for us to continue to be a share gainer in the future.

Your next question will come from Oliver Chen with TD Cowen.

As we think about makeup in next year, what do you see happening relative to mass and prestige? And is the comp going to be pretty modest in the makeup and outperform in fragrance that related product question is K-Beauty and Wellness. I know you have a lot of really good talent in wellness and you're thinking about that category more dramatically. Does that -- when you put that space in, how does it interplay with the categories that currently exist? And K-Beauty might be a massive megatrend. So would love your take.

And Chris, a follow-up. On the comp store sales guidance, what do you need to leverage your fixed costs? Historically, it's been higher than mid-single digits. But what should we know in terms of deleverage on the 2% to 5% to 3% to 5%?

And on your promotional question on guidance, were you saying promos this year ahead will be flat to last year? Are you giving yourself some breathing room to have higher promos than last year? Although I know you're working on many efficiencies around simplified better promotions.

All right. Well, thanks, Oliver. I'll start. Yes, we're focused on everything from low to lux and everything in between. I think it gives us a strategic advantage that we do carry across all price points, especially if there could be potential pressures on the consumer's wallet in the future.

In regards to K-Beauty and Wellness, one of the things that I'm very pleased with is that Lauren and team are working on SKU rationalization and making sure that unproductive SKUs that we are really leveraging and bringing in both wellness and K-Beauty. One of the things that we're really focused on is this authenticity and quality of the brands. You see a lot of K-Beauty in and out, and it's almost like fashion that you see. We're really leaning into at Ulta Beauty, the efficacy of the products and making sure that the products really give the results. We want to do all of the research for the guests. So when they come in, they buy K-Beauty products that -- they're known and trusted that they actually work, and that's been working really well for us.

And I would say that same philosophy is true for Wellness. One of the things that I'm very excited about is in regards to our marketplace. And if you think about marketplace, you think about it as a mezzanine into our existing store. So it's a complementary assortment that doesn't take away from what you could buy in store today, but it's another item that you could add to your basket. So we're taking that approach really from end-to-end with K-Beauty, with wellness, with marketplace and everything from low to lux and everything in between.

Maybe Chris?

Yes. On the store fixed cost and the deleverage, maybe what I would share is, one, as you heard, we're planning gross margin flat year-over-year. So we have multiple levers that we do to try and manage that. So we see opportunity in merch margin. We're continuing to drive supply chain optimization as well. And we'll still continue to benefit from shrink.

I think the other thing I'd point to is the new stores is obviously still an important component to driving growth. And what we're also doing is we're rolling out new store formats, a smaller format this past year, about 25% of our stores with that new format. 2026, we expect more like 15% to be the small store format. So it's not just about driving top line. It's also about how we execute, putting new stores in market, and we think that will be an opportunity that helps us. The deleverage there is really modest and manageable, and we'll manage things holistically across gross margin.

Your next question will come from Susan Anderson with Canaccord Genuity.

I was wondering maybe if you could talk about the timing of the new DC in the Northwest. And I guess, how should we think about the cost there? And then I don't know if I missed this or not, but maybe if you could talk about just the drivers of the op margin being better in the back half. Is that just when the efficiencies start to roll in, I guess? And then are you guys assuming like gross margins pretty flattish throughout the quarters?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Susan. I'll start and then I'll kick it over to Chris. When we talked about the new DC, it won't be up and functioning until 2027, but these things take a while to, of course, get out of the ground, especially when you're building from ground level up. We have that -- those dollars are built into our CapEx plan. So they are both in the long-term algorithm and we are expected to spend is already in this year's guidance, too, with the cost to get that building started.

And then, Chris, I'll turn it over to you.

Yes. So on the progression of operating margin, the primary driver is really SG&A. There's two key factors. First of all, in the first half of the year all the way up until Q3, right, we're absorbing Space NK. So you have that impact. The second one is the annualization of the investments we made in the back half of 2025. So then as you move into the second half, you cycle over those. And in addition, especially with Space NK, right, in the holiday season, it tends to be higher sales and you get the leverage from the SG&A there. So those are the key drivers.

Our productivity was active in 2025 and will progress throughout the year. I would more point to those 2 factors as the big factors that impact the timing of operating margin first half versus second half.

Our next question will come from Kate McShane with Goldman Sachs.

So our question is centered around SG&A as well. Totally understand the different lapse that we are encountering here in 2026. But if we were just to focus on how you are spending around marketing, I know that was part of the unleashed plan to spend more on marketing. Could you maybe just talk a little bit more about plans for that, just how the dollars look maybe versus what you spent in 2025 and what that could look like going forward?

Yes. So we wouldn't share that level of detail. But what I could share is a couple of things. One is our SG&A growth profile, right, that we outlined was either in line with sales to slightly below sales. Again, that does include us absorbing Space NK and the annualization of investments. We have been very targeted with our investment priorities. And so one of the top areas that we've continued to prioritize is personalization, which will certainly be a core part of our marketing investment. So we're still investing to grow within that plan in addition to having the carryover investment that we put into place in 2025.

I'll also point to, you heard me say in Q4, we did invest on the upside sales performance. That did include some marketing and media that we expected to have some benefit as we rolled into the first half of 2026. So we feel really good that we actually have a very disciplined approach on SG&A. We're prioritizing growth investments in key areas and making intentional choices of where not to invest. And certainly, marketing and personalization remains our high priority.

Your next question will come from Mark Altschwager with Baird.

First, just following up on the comp guide, the 2.5% to 3.5%. That is a touch below the long-term framework. So I was hoping you could just give us a little bit more detail on the factors driving that, just conservatism to begin of the year or just anything you're seeing in the environment that's leading you to take a more cautious approach to that today?

Well, I will say that our initial plan is -- and I shared this in the comments, Mark, that we want to be a market share gainer. So we are looking at that as we -- our plan -- we built this plan is that we do not want to see market share. So I think that this plan, we feel is a thoughtful plan that is one that we can continue to build the expense portfolio around. If there's potential upside, I'm going to love that. We've had -- this last year, we had a strategy that was working. It was laid out well. We outperformed our initial guidance that we shared in 2025, and we beat and raise throughout the year, and we exceeded on all metrics.

I'm confident that we've got a plan for 2026 that allows us to hit our targets and continue to invest in the business. It will allow us to continue to be a share gainer. And b, I'd say, fiscally responsible in our investments. Some of the numbers that Chris shared, we're getting some of our expense rates in line. We've been in this heavy, heavy investment cycle for many years. And it's time for us to start to reap some of the rewards of those investments, and that's what this plan is allowing us to do.

That makes a lot of sense. And then Kecia, just a follow-up. Wondering if you could share any more learnings you've had so far on Space and K. And any update to how you're thinking about unit growth there and geographic expansion to new markets.

Yes. Thanks, Mark. Well, what I will say is that we're pleased with the performance. They have a nice growth in sales. We feel great about the growth strategy. I don't want to give -- I'm not going to give specifics on where we see the growth, but we view this asset as additive to our core business. We see opportunities to really leverage each other's strengths, access to new brands, clienteling strategies, loyalty programs, and there is the ability for us to continue to grow in a nice market of the U.K. for us.

So it's still a little early to say like how we feel like we can totally unlock the entire -- all the value in Space NK, but we like what we're seeing so far, and we're really pleased with the acquisition.

Your next question will come from Olivia Tong with Raymond James.

You've talked in the past about leveraging investments. So can you talk about the level of investment spend for 2026, the initiatives that you have planned this year versus last year, where that leverage is coming from? And then as you look at the margin improvement, what do you think is the right level longer term now that the business is on a better track? What is the right investment level to get back to sort of a steady-state comp growth more in line with the long-term algo? That's my first question.

And then the second one is just around the consumer environment being as challenging -- new challenges to the consumer environment that we perhaps didn't have a couple of weeks ago. And can you talk about your flexibility and the flexibility in the model to make potential pivots adjustments if necessary. You've obviously done a lot to improve promotional cadence, but it seems like the state of the consumer is evolving. Just wanted to get a little bit more detail on that.

So maybe I'll start with the second part of your first question on how we think of margin. Look, what I would share is the way we think of this is we're looking to deliver consistent profitable growth. To maximize value creation, what we want to do is maximize profit growth. Margin is a part of that, of course, but I can do that driving incremental top line or through margin leverage. So every year, and this is what's reflected in our current guide, we'll have a plan that has a strong productivity goal that's going to fuel targeted and high ROI investments in a disciplined way. So it won't be at the expense of margin.

If I see investment opportunities throughout the year, as Kecia said, if we have upside and can increase our operating profit in the current year while continuing to also support future growth momentum, you get a double benefit and can do that preserving margin. That's what I'll do. And that will support kind of consistency of growth and then a flywheel of value creation.

With that said, again, every year, we'll have an element of leverage that we're building into our plan. And we can -- as we move throughout the year, figure out how to best optimize profit growth within that while maintaining discipline on margin. So that's what you see embedded in our plan this year. I did talk about -- you asked about how much investment. It's hard to answer because we have -- we said we would grow SG&A in line with sales to slightly below. But the productivity of the investments in there is actually more than that because we do have productivity initiatives.

Supply chain optimization, in particular, has been positive for us. We're focused on inventory productivity, among other things. So -- we feel really good about the areas that we're investing in this year and the guide that we set up within that framework that is in line with our long-term value creation algorithm and basically being a compounder of double-digit earnings growth.

I would just add that we have the leadership and the team in place that can and will pivot as needed. The fact that we do carry low to lux, it gives us the ability to also flex as the consumer flexes with us. And we have better insights into this category and can leverage AI to make really good strategic business decisions to help us drive this business. While it's a competitive environment, we're playing to win and to continue to take share.

Great. If I could follow up on some of the newer categories, health and wellness, marketplace, international. How do you think about further expansion in year two on those and adjustments that you need to make in year two and the level of investment in those initiatives going forward?

Well, on international expansion, we are planning on continuing to open stores in our partnership with Grupo Axo and with Alshaya. Right now, we are looking at -- this is more of an asset-light approach on how we can continue to grow globally. And it's an important category for us because we do want to be a global beauty retailer.

We are making smart decisions on investment categories like wellness -- and there is the opportunity for us to continue to leverage SKU rationalization to have more productive items that are in our store. Four-wall productivity is something that Chris and I are really leaning into. We want to make sure that we're leveraging that fixed cost base of our 1,500 stores out there to continue to drive profit through the stores and through our P&L. So we're making good business decisions with a strategic lens that have both short-term and long-term implications on how we can really optimize this model.

All right. Well, with that, I think that, that would be the last question that we had. I just want to thank everyone for joining us today. And I want to thank our associates once again for delivering against our ambitious plans for 2025 and for their dedication in representing the Ulta Beauty brand to our guests each and every day.

We're confident in our strategy. We're focused on operational excellence and committed to delivering sustainable growth even in this dynamic environment. We look forward to updating you on our progress on the next earnings call on June 2. And I want to thank you all, and have a great evening. Thank you.

Thank you for joining. This concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Leila, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to Ulta Beauty's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. This conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Ms. Kiley Rawlins, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Ms. Rawlins, please proceed.

Thank you, Leila. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for a discussion of Ulta Beauty's results for the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Hosting our call today are Kecia Steelman, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Chris Lialios, Interim Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, today's earnings release and the comments made by management during this call include forward-looking statements.

These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, factors identified in the earnings release and in our most recent 10-K's and 10-Q filings. The company undertakes no obligation to revise any forward-looking statements. And as always, the IR team will be available for any follow-up questions after the call.

Now I'll turn the call over to Kecia. Kecia?

Thank you, Kiley, and good afternoon, everyone. The Ulta Beauty team delivered another quarter that exceeded our expectations. For the third quarter, net sales increased 12.9% to $2.9 billion. Operating profit was 10.8% of sales and diluted EPS was $5.14 per share. These results highlight the expanding relevance of the Ulta Beauty brand for our guests, the favorable impact of investments that we're making to support our long-term strategy and the continued commitment of our teams.

Today, I'll take a few minutes to outline the key drivers that fueled our outperformance, update you on our progress against the Ulta Beauty Unleashed Strategy and discuss our outlook for the upcoming holiday. As I reflect over the past 11 months in my role as CEO, I'm incredibly proud of the steps our teams have taken to accelerate our top line growth and increase our market share and how these actions continue to resonate with our guests and drive our results.

The third quarter highlights are a clear result of these actions and include comparable sales growth of 6.3%, positive comps across all categories and channels with notable double-digit strength in our e-commerce results. Continued market share gains in Mass and Prestige Beauty, including Prestige market share gains in both brick-and-mortar and digital channels.

Loyalty member growth of 4% year-over-year to a record 46.3 million members and ongoing improvement across several key performance indicators, including brand engagement, earned media value and app engagement. The investments to support our Ulta Beauty Unleash Strategy are fueling our strong top line results. At the same time, we know we have opportunities to tighten SG&A spend and optimize resources to drive long-term profitable growth, which will be a key area of focus as we turn to fiscal 2026.

Before I dive into the drivers of our performance, let me touch on the beauty landscape more broadly. Despite a softening in overall consumer confidence in Q3, beauty engagement remained healthy. During the third quarter, both Mass and Prestige Beauty markets delivered mid-single-digit growth according to Circana. Turning now to the key drivers of our performance, which center around our 3 strategic priorities: strengthening our core U.S. business, scaling new businesses, including expanding internationally to capitalize on key growth opportunities and realigning our foundation for the future by streamlining our cost structure, optimizing our ways of working and reenergizing our culture.

Let me begin with our actions to strengthen our core U.S. business, which continues to power our overall results. We have been focused on the fundamentals and elevating our go-to-market approach through operational excellence, marketing leadership and compelling merchandising innovation. Our enhanced go-to-market collaboration between our merchandising, marketing and store teams has been a key unlock to improving our performance, and we're leveraging this new approach to accelerate our brand building, digital and personalization efforts.

In stores, our team's dedication to disciplined execution continues to underpin our performance. Stores are elevating and energizing the guest experience with improved in-stocks, well-staffed stores, friendly service and engaging events, all translating into improving guest satisfaction results for the quarter. We drove solid in-store traffic and sales growth with successful execution of key moments and events, including Back-to-School, 21 Days of Beauty and Fall Haul.

In addition, we hosted nearly 33,000 in-store events across our fleet during the quarter. These unique activations included celebrity appearances, brand launches, brand education and highlighted our differentiated in-store experience, which truly makes Ulta Beauty an unmatched beauty destination for our guests.

From a category perspective, all major categories exceeded our expectations and delivered positive comp growth against the third quarter last year. Fragrance sustained its position as our strongest growing category, delivering double-digit comp sales growth in Q3. Newness from luxury brands like Valentino and Dolce & Gabbana alongside compelling new-to-market brand launches from Miu Miu and Prestige and Squishmallows in mass resonated with the guest.

This quarter demonstrated the power of our unique low- to luxury brand assortment. In October, we also rolled out incremental shelf space for fragrance in more than 60% of our U.S. stores, which we believe positions us to capture holiday demand and beyond for this important and growing category. Skincare, our second fastest-growing category, delivered solid high single-digit comp growth, driven primarily by the strength of Prestige skincare and solid growth of Mass skincare.

Our unmatched K-beauty assortment continues to resonate and drive skincare sales. In addition, Prestige skincare also benefited from the highly successful launch of Fenty Skin Body exclusive to Ulta Beauty and strengths in brands like Tatcha and Dermalogica. Mass skincare benefited from newness and social media virality in key brands like BIOMA and Starface. In addition, our newly expanded wellness assortment also contributed positively to skincare performance.

Makeup delivered another quarter of mid-single-digit comparable sales growth, supported by growth in both Mass and Prestige makeup. Mass makeup growth was driven by compelling newness from brands like NYX, Morphe and L'Oreal as well as the benefit from market-wide price increases from select brands. Prestige makeup growth in the quarter was supported by a highly successful 21 Days of Beauty event with notable brand standouts being Estée Lauder and MAC within the event.

Across the quarter, we also delivered strong growth across a number of our Prestige brands, including HOURGLASS and NARS and in our only at Ulta brand portfolio with newness and DIBS. Our new K-beauty assortment in makeup is also driving strong growth. The haircare category delivered mid-single-digit comps, fueled primarily by strong performance in prestige hair. Mass hair, hair color and accessories also contributed positively.

This growth was partially offset by sales declines in personal styling tools, which continues to navigate pressures from tariff-related price increases. From a brand perspective, major new prestige launches from Moroccanoil and Nutrafol along with guest favorites, Redken and Matrix resonated with guests and delivered strong growth. Our exclusive brand Cécred continued to drive guests into the haircare category and performed ahead of expectations.

Finally, services delivered mid-single-digit comp growth in Q3, driven by strength in cut and color services, expanded brow services and ongoing improvement in stylist productivity. During the quarter, we began offering benefit brow services in our salon, expanding capacity and convenience for our guests. Execution of our salon workshop strategy featuring events like Back-to-School Blowout drove sales and member trial.

Moving to our long-term strategy to enhance our assortment and brand-building capabilities. Overall, we are intensely focused on strengthening and modernizing our full low- to luxury assortment. And during the quarter, we launched more than 35 new brands, many of which were exclusive. Our new brands are thoughtfully selected to drive incrementality and complement our balanced portfolio of the best brands across all categories, all life stages and all price points.

Strengthening our brand-building capability is key to this strategy, and we are focused on leveraging our unique advantages to be the retail partner of choice to launch, build, scale and globalize brands. Our enhanced focus and capabilities are already delivering with Beyonce's haircare line Cécred only available at Ulta being a great example of how we can uniquely unlock the power of 46 million loyalty members to launch and scale a new retail to brand successfully in just a few months.

Based on its first 6 months of performance, Cécred is the most successful Prestige haircare launch in Ulta Beauty's history. Our K-beauty assortment is another example of our holistic brand building strategy. With an already established stronghold in K-beauty skincare with long-standing exclusive brands like Peach and Lily, we saw space for growing K-beauty trends in both skincare and makeup.

We moved with agility to build a complementary and largely exclusive pipeline, including a portfolio of new and many exclusive brands throughout 2025, like ANUA, medicube, TIRTIR, fwee and Unleashia. We have leveraged all of the Ulta Beauty go-to-market levers to drive excitement and awareness of these new brands, attracting the next generation of beauty guests.

Our core assortment is now being complemented with the recent launch of UB Marketplace, which I will give you more details on in a moment. Shifting to marketing. We are elevating our marketing efforts to spark excitement and awareness, drive engagement and attract and retain loyalty members. During the third quarter, we debuted our new brand equity campaign, Beauty Happens Here on social and across traditional and connected TV.

The new campaign aims to inspire and reinforce that Ulta Beauty is where beauty lives and is the destination for all ages in all life stages. The campaign is already driving significant awareness gains broadly and with key cohorts and is also driving strong brand health gains. In addition, we continue to leverage our integrated marketing efforts to support key events and strategies, including high-impact merchandising campaigns like 21 Days of Beauty and Fall Haul designed to drive engagement and conversion against priority categories.

Our exclusive only at Ulta brand launches and category plans, reinforcing our leadership in a differentiated way and culturally relevant activations like hosting Ulta Beauty's first-ever multi-market experiential activation, the College Glow Up Tour in collaboration with her campus. The tour delivered product sampling and education for various exclusive brands like Polite Society, isima and Snif.

Moving to our digital platforms. Our investments to accelerate digital engagement and personalization are delivering results, and we continue to add capabilities that drive app engagement, enhance the guest shopping experience and remove friction. From new features like Replenish & Save and Wishlist to new payment choices like Venmo to doubling ship-from-store locations to more than 1,000 stores. We are steadily improving the guest experience and fueling our momentum.

Our app engagement continues to grow and accounted for 65% of our online member sales in Q3, up from 63% in Q2. In addition, strong buy online, pickup in store contribution highlights how guests value the powerful combination of our digital shop experience and the convenience of our stores. Next, turning to our second strategic priority, scale new businesses to capitalize on key growth opportunities and ensure that we remain relevant in a rapidly changing world.

Our international expansion efforts are building momentum, and we are steadily growing our international presence. During the third quarter, we opened 7 stores in Mexico through our joint venture partnership with Grupo Axo. I had the privilege of attending the unforgettable grand opening of our first store in Mexico City. The energy was palpable, and we had many key brand founders on site, including isima founder and Grammy-winning musician, Shakira to celebrate this important milestone for our business.

In addition, the first Ulta Beauty store opened in the Middle East in Kuwait last month through our franchise partnership with Alshaya. Similar to Mexico, the guest response to our arrival in the Middle East has been very positive, and our grand opening celebration, which featured Ôrebella Founder, Bella Hadid, was an exciting way to introduce Ulta Beauty to this new market.

We are excited about the uniquely Ulta Beauty experiences and curated assortments that we are bringing to these markets, which feature a mix of local brand favorites, exciting new-to-market brands and only at Ulta exclusives. We are encouraged by the strong positive guest responses that we're seeing and excited to expand our presence over time.

Finally, in the U.K., Space NK continues to perform well, and our teams are making important progress in integrating Space NK with the rest of our business. I had the pleasure of spending time visiting stores in the U.K. with the incredibly talented Space NK leadership team during the quarter. I remain excited about the opportunity to transfer learnings across markets to elevate our business globally and capture even greater growth opportunities in the future.

Turning to marketplace. We reached a key milestone with the successful launch of UB Marketplace in the third quarter. Through our marketplace initiative, we are expanding our assortment for our guests, offering a broader and complementary array of beauty, wellness and lifestyle products from both established and emerging brands on ulta.com with minimal inventory risk to our business.

We launched the platform in late Q3, curating the addition of more than 120 brands and over 3,500 SKUs to our online assortment. We are pleased with the initial performance and optimistic about how this new capability can help us strengthen our existing category authority, attract new guests and capitalize on incremental growth opportunities in new subcategories like luxury, professional and wellness.

In wellness, we're focused on leveraging our position as a trusted guide to expand more meaningfully into the vast and growing wellness category. We believe we are uniquely positioned to meet guests' wellness needs in approachable, welcoming ways that celebrate a guest individual journey. In the third quarter, we continued to add new brands to our assortment like Therabody, Bird&Be and Hatch sleep products and continued our in-store expansion efforts with the introduction of elevated fixtures in about 50 stores.

These investments will enable us to learn more about guest engagement and help us tailor the assortment as we continue to build upon our approach to maximize this key growth initiative. Turning to our third strategic priority, realigning our foundation for the future. During the third quarter, our supply chain and IT teams successfully completed the retrofit of our Dallas distribution center, introducing advanced automation and robotics, an upgraded warehouse management system and a new warehouse execution system.

We incorporated key learnings from prior retrofits and executed this upgrade flawlessly. We expect these upgrades to strengthen our foundation, further enhancing inventory flow and increasing capacity. As I've shared previously, one of my top priorities has to make sure that I have the right leadership team in place to drive our future growth. And I couldn't be more pleased than to welcome Chris DelOrefice to Ulta Beauty as he assumes the role of Chief Financial Officer tomorrow.

He joins us from Becton Dickinson, where he serves as CFO for the last 4 years and brings more than 30 years of diverse corporate finance experience. I want to express my gratitude to Chris Lialios, our Interim CFO, for his partnership and leadership during this important time of our business. And thankfully, he's not going anywhere. He will continue his role as SVP and Corporate Controller and help ensure that we have a smooth transition.

In addition to shaping our leadership team, I've been keenly focused on reenergizing our culture. Over the past several months, I've had the opportunity to spend time across our broader organization from store visits in key regions to walking the floor of our distribution centers and engaging with our international teams and partners. I've been truly inspired by the energy, pride and purpose that our teams bring to their work.

These visits strengthen my belief that our success is built on people, their commitment to our values, their relentless focus on the customer and their ability to adapt. Finally, to our plans and expectations for the upcoming holiday. Our teams have been hard at work to ensure that we're well positioned to deliver a strong 2025 holiday season, hiring and onboarding seasonal associates, developing compelling holiday assortments and merchandising strategies, creating bold celebrity glam-filled marketing plans, all offered in festive, fun and easy-to-shop stores and digital channels and our supply chain is ready and ready to deliver with speed.

The holiday season is in full flight, and we're pleased with our Black Friday and Cyber Monday performance. At the same time, we know the biggest selling weeks are still ahead of us, and we are mindful of the challenging macro backdrop. Our insights suggest beauty consumers' budgets are tight and they are focused on value. Despite this, beauty enthusiasts tell us that they intend to spend on beauty for seasonal needs, affordable splurges and gifts for loved ones.

They are focused on replenishing their essentials and strategically making smart purchases around strong value, holiday limited editions and deals and early gift set drops. We will leverage these key insights to ensure that we're staying relevant and delivering for our guests during this important holiday season. We are confident in our plans and the improvements that we've made, and our teams are ready to go and make holiday happen here at Ulta Beauty, driving excitement and delivering for our guests and their loved ones.

I want to close by expressing my gratitude to our teams and partners across the globe. Their efforts are driving meaningful progress and positioning us well for the long-term value creation. And with that, I'll turn it over to Chris to cover the financial results for the third quarter and our updated financial outlook before we take your questions. Chris?

Thanks, Kecia, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll begin with a discussion of our consolidated third quarter results and then share our expectations for the fourth quarter and full year. As a reminder, our results for the third quarter of fiscal 2025 include financial results for Space NK, which was acquired in July and is not material to our consolidated financial statements.

The Ulta Beauty team delivered strong performance again this quarter, reflecting better-than-expected growth from comparable sales, favorable shrink results and stronger merchandise margin. Consolidated net sales for the quarter increased 12.9% to $2.9 billion compared to $2.5 billion last year. During the quarter, we opened 28 new Ulta Beauty stores, remodeled 15 stores and closed 1 store.

We also opened 2 new Space NK stores, relocated 1 store and closed 1 store. We ended the period with 1,500 Ulta Beauty stores and 84 Space NK stores. Comparable sales increased 6.3%, driven by a 3.8% increase in average ticket and a 2.4% increase in transactions. Other revenue increased approximately $8 million versus the third quarter last year. Looking at the cadence of comp sales through the quarter, growth was fairly consistent across all periods. From a channel perspective, both store and digital channels contributed to comp growth with e-commerce sales increasing in the mid-teen range and comp stores delivering mid-single-digit growth.

Consolidated gross margin for the quarter increased 70 basis points to 40.4% of sales compared to 39.7% last year. The increase was primarily due to lower inventory shrink and higher merchandise margin, which was partially offset by adverse channel mix, reflecting strong growth from our digital platforms. Our team's focus on reducing inventory shrink while also delivering great guest experiences continues to produce meaningful results.

Our investments in fixtures and process improvements as well as focused associate training and store-specific action plans have delivered shrink reductions across every category in almost every region. Merchandise margin increased this quarter, primarily due to the timing of market-wide price actions from select brands and more effective promotion strategies. These benefits were partially offset by unfavorable category mix.

While many of our brand partners continue to be cautious about passing through tariff-related price changes, we saw more brand-driven price increases in Q3 as compared to Q2. Reflecting on our average cost inventory valuation methodology, we often see a short-term benefit to cost of goods as we move through the lower cost inventory after the retail price changes executed. Merchandise margin in the quarter also benefited from greater promotional effectiveness.

We delivered strong performance from key events, including 21 Days of Beauty and Fall Haul and eliminated unproductive offers. As a result, the impact to merchandise margin from promotional activity was lower than last year. Moving to expenses. Consolidated SG&A increased 23.3% to $841 million. SG&A growth was elevated this quarter, primarily reflecting higher incentive compensation, the impact of Space NK and the timing of investments we're making to support our Ulta Beauty Unleash Strategy.

Excluding the impact of incentive compensation in Space NK, SG&A growth for the quarter was about 14%. As a percentage of sales, SG&A increased 240 basis points to 29.4% compared to 27% last year, largely due to higher incentive compensation, reflecting our better-than-planned performance as well as the lapping of a benefit from lower incentive compensation in the third quarter last year.

Higher store payroll and benefit expense, store expenses and amortization of cloud-based software investments also deleveraged as a percent of sales. Store payroll and benefit expenses increased primarily due to additional selling hours to support the guest experience and higher healthcare costs. The deleverage of store expenses largely reflects higher supplies to support key merchandising initiatives and inflationary pressures.

The growth of cloud investment amortization reflects the impact of technology investments we are making to support our long-term growth. Over the last several years, we've upgraded key elements of our technology infrastructure, including our ERP system, digital store platform, POS systems, data infrastructure and critical supply chain systems.

With this foundation in place, this year, we've invested in new go-to-market capabilities, including marketplace, personalization and other digital enhancements to support the guest and associate experience. Many of these investments are cloud-based arrangements. And as we launch and operationalize these capabilities, we are experiencing higher operating expense.

While these investments are driving near-term expense pressure, we expect they will support long-term revenue and market share growth. Operating profit was $309 million compared to $319 million last year. As a percent of sales, operating margin was 10.8% of sales compared to 12.6% last year. Wrapping up the P&L, diluted earnings per share was $5.14 per share or flat to last year.

Moving to highlights from the balance sheet and cash flow statement. We ended the quarter with $205 million in cash and cash equivalents and $552 million in short-term debt. Similar to the third quarter in past years, we leveraged our revolving credit facility during the quarter to support working capital needs and ongoing capital allocation priorities, including share repurchases and capital expenditures.

As a reminder, we funded the Space NK acquisition in Q2 with cash on hand and borrowings under our existing credit facility. Total inventory increased 16% to $2.7 billion compared to $2.4 billion last year, primarily reflecting additional inventory to support new brand launches, Space NK and the impact of 63 net new Ulta Beauty stores.

Capital expenditures were $87 million for the quarter, mostly driven by investments in new and existing stores and IT systems. Depreciation increased 13% to $76 million compared to $67 million last year, largely reflecting store investments. In the quarter, we repurchased 427,000 shares, bringing the year-to-date total for our share buyback program to 1.7 million shares or $693 million.

At the end of the quarter, we had $2 billion remaining under our current $3 billion repurchase authorization. Turning now to our updated outlook for the year. We have increased our fiscal 2025 guidance to reflect our third quarter results as well as our updated expectations for the fourth quarter. For the year, we now expect net sales will be approximately $12.3 billion with comp sales growth between 4.4% and 4.7%.

We now expect operating margin will be between 12.3% and 12.4% of net sales, with the deleverage driven primarily by SG&A. We expect gross margin will be roughly flat for the year. Reflecting these assumptions, we expect diluted EPS for the year will be between $25.20 and $25.50. With 1 quarter left in the year, I want to share how we are thinking about Q4.

We have increased our outlook for revenue growth, but believe it is prudent to continue to take a cautious view of consumer spending this holiday season, given the dynamic macroeconomic and operating environment. Reflecting our performance through Cyber Monday, we now expect Q4 comp growth will be between 2.5% and 3.5%. For Q4 modeling purposes, we expect operating margin will be between 12% and 12.3%, driven by gross margin and SG&A deleverage. And we expect EPS for the quarter will be between $7.61 and $7.90.

And now I'll turn the call over to our operator to moderate the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from Lorraine Hutchinson with Bank of America.

Can you talk about what you're hearing from brands about pricing? The 3.8% ticket comp was very impressive. Do you think this might build in the coming quarters?

Lorraine, thanks for the question. I would say that we generally have pricing increases quarter-to-quarter as brands come through. And we had -- there were plenty of publicly traded companies that announced that they were taking price increases, e.l.f., Coty and Helen of Troy, just to name a few, that we were seeing some price increases with this quarter.

Chris, maybe I'll let you give a little bit more color around what the pricing increases look like for the quarter. But pricing increases are not new in this part of the business, and I don't think that we saw anything that was like extraordinary by any means. Chris?

Yes. Lorraine, thank you for the question. As we mentioned, we are starting to see more market-wide price increases come through with select brands versus Q2. But we continue to work with our brand partners to understand how they're thinking about tariff mitigation going forward and price increases.

And they are being very thoughtful considering the consumer wallet pressures and making sure that we continue to provide value to our guests. As far as how the price increases flow through the P&L, as I had mentioned, there is a short-term benefit to cost of goods as we sell through the product. But eventually, that catches up as we sell through the older product and we replenish with newer product.

Your next question will come from Steve Forbes with Guggenheim Securities.

Kecia, you mentioned solid app engagement and also app online sales penetration. So I was curious if you can maybe just give us more color around what you're seeing from the consumer standpoint and whether consumers are actually migrating to purchasing across channels as you think about the mix of customers that are maybe dual channel purchasers versus single-channel purchasers.

And the reason I ask, right, as you think about that 15% or mid-teens e-commerce growth profile, it's sort of indicative of really strong wallet share and market share performance. So just trying to gain conviction around what's driving that.

Well, thanks, Steve, for the question. What I would like to highlight first is that we've had strength in both categories because stores are continuing to grow, too. And if you look at the percentage of our business, 80% of our business is still coming from stores. Our app engagement, we're really pleased with what we're seeing. It grew 65% from 63% last quarter.

And we are building on our momentum in e-com. We've had 3 consecutive quarters of double-digit comp. I think that there's a couple of things that are playing into that. We've introduced new capabilities in 2025 that are really helping us strengthen our momentum in e-com. In Q1, we had Split Card launching, which made you could pick it up in the store, you could have something you sent to your home. That was a new technology that we didn't previously have.

In Q2, we launched Replenish & Save. Q3 Wishlist and Venmo just in time for the holiday season. And then as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we've added -- we have 1,000 stores now for ship from stores. So speed is really important. As our investments are continuing to elevate our digital experience and this whole acceleration around personalization is fueling our performance, it's really driving both channels up.

And we're really pleased with what we're seeing across both stores and e-com. What I will say is I'll just finish by saying that there's no finish line in our technology and our advancements and the investments that we're making. And it's just great to see that our Ulta Beauty unleash plans and what we're investing in is really starting to come through and show on the top line sales.

Your next question will come from Anthony Chukumba with Loop Capital.

Congrats on a really strong quarter. I guess my first question is, I look at your comp performance on a 2-year stack basis. This is the second quarter where the comp accelerated on a 2-year stack basis. And I guess -- and I know it's probably hard to parse this out super finitely, but I was just wondering how much of that do you think is the product newness versus the better execution in store versus the better promotions? Maybe it's a mix of all of that. And it does sound like the industry is continuing to grow. So how do you just sort of think about that?

Well, I think it's all -- thanks, Anthony, for the question. I'll start by saying that, but I would say it's all of that really playing in together. And what I'm seeing is that the company is really hitting on all cylinders. We have a very clear plan, and everyone is working on the Ulta Beauty Unleashed plan and understands the role that they play. I couldn't be more pleased with what I'm seeing also from our frontline associates all the way to the senior executive team and really raising to the occasion and really driving the business.

I'd say that there's 4 areas that we're really leaning into. It's merchandising, especially this time of year, we're really focused on gifting. Fragrance, we called out was really strong. We've got a lot of holiday exclusives and newness that's driving the business. In digital, our capabilities, which I just shared in the last question, they're really driving that e-commerce channel. Marketing, we're amplifying the ways that we're communicating. We've launched our new brand equity campaign.

And then it's all underpinned by operations and just delivering on a great guest experience from in-stocks to guest satisfaction and the speed in which we're delivering products to our stores. So it's the game plan working together collectively along with the team supporting it that I think is where you're seeing the momentum come. And we're going against the Super Bowl of the season here in fourth quarter, and we're just going to continue to lean into our operational excellence and continuing to deliver the best results that we can have for the rest of this year.

Your next question will come from Anna Andreeva with Piper Sandler.

Great. Let me add my congrats. Great quarter. We had a follow-up on SG&A. How much of that growth was the incremental brand campaign that you guys did during the quarter? And you've talked about '25 being more of a catch-up year in terms of investments. Can you talk about if we should expect '26 SG&A to be managed closer to sales? What areas are you guys still investing in? And not sure if you can comment how we should think about Space NK contribution to sales and as we think about SG&A for next year?

Thank you for the question, Anna. I'll start off with the SG&A increase. As you know, we deleveraged about 240 basis points primarily due to higher incentive comp, store payroll and benefit expense and store expenses and the amortization of cloud-based software. As far as breaking out the advertising piece, we leveraged our advertising as a result of the higher top line revenue. And as far as the growth of store payroll expense, we -- again, it's primarily due to additional selling hours to support the guest experience.

And then we're going to share more about our SG&A plans in March when we're going to talk about our 2026 plans. But we understand and I shared in the comments, this is an investment year, and we knew that. And this was what the plan was, and we look like we're going to be hitting what our forecast has been that we've shared earlier. But we'll be able to share more about what the plans around SG&A in March.

Your next question will come from Rupesh Parikh with Oppenheimer.

Also congrats on a really nice quarter. So Kecia, just on the brand -- or I guess, the innovation pipeline, the exclusive brands. I know last year your team was very upbeat in terms of innovation for this year. So just curious, based on your current visibility into next year, just how do you feel about the pipeline out there?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Rupesh. Our merchandising vision is to really curate and inspire guests with the best beauty and wellness assortment for all life stages. And Lauren has come in and really brought some great thought leadership and is really helping us refine the merchandising vision and brand building strategy.

What I will say is that our merchants have been hard at work in developing their plans for fiscal 2026. We have an exciting pipeline of newness, and I'm pleased with what I see right now. And it's balanced across the portfolio, very similar to how this year was. So while we're in the midst of our planning, and I'll share more specifics in March, the team has done a really nice job, and they have really prioritized newness and innovation because we know how important it is to really drive this business overall. So I feel bottom line, really great about what I'm seeing for 2026.

Your next question will come from Kelly Crago with Citi.

Congrats on the great quarter. Kecia, I was hoping you will elaborate on your philosophy around your EBIT margin, long-term EBIT margin of 12%. You're running ahead of that this year despite significant SG&A deleverage. Should we still anchor to the 12% as we think about F '26? And with that, you talked about SG&A maybe finding some efficiencies, is SG&A a source of leverage as we look forward? Or will you still sort of try to drive the gross margin and maybe invest against that?

Yes. Thanks, Kelly, for the question. I will say this is a great position to be in because we're outperforming what the original plan was. And while our guidance for '25 now is between 12.3% and 12.4%. As we're looking at 2026, we're focused on building a plan that really positions us to deliver against our long-term targets.

We're still in the planning process, and we need to see where 2025 lands because we still have the rest of this quarter to go. But reflecting on our commitment that 2026 will not be another big heavy investment year. We would not expect EBIT margin next year to deteriorate from 2025 levels. Now you asked also about the long-term plan. While our performance is better than what we had planned, it's still premature to change our long-term growth targets at this time.

We're confident that we can deliver our targets over time, but there are so much nuances that can happen from year-to-year. My focus as a leader is to make sure that we're building a plan that we can continue to invest in this business, remain relevant and take share. And as you know, we have a brand-new CFO starting tomorrow.

And as he gets into the operations, I'm sure he's going to have a perspective, too. He and I are going to work together along with the Board to make sure that we have a long-term plan that really supports our business and taking market share and being a profitable business over time. So bottom line, I would say that you should not look for EBIT margins to deteriorate from fiscal year 2025 levels.

Your next question will come from Michael Lasser with UBS.

Kecia, there's been some debate around the start of the holiday season. Ulta has carried a lot of momentum over the last 6 months. Are you finding that some of the momentum is starting to fade where consumers are shopping more around events and in between those periods, they're a little quieter. And does that give you pause about the need to continue to make investments in order to drive the business?

Thanks, Michael, for the question. What I would say is that comp growth during the quarter was really consistent across all periods. And as I shared, we were pleased with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Beauty is still a very important category for the consumer in their lives and also for shopping for their holiday needs. And Ulta Beauty is also very important to them.

I'm confident in our plans and staying really focused on execution. And we're having a lot of fun. We're working really hard on this plan. The team is having a good time doing it. We've got momentum on our side. I like what I'm seeing in the newness pipeline. I just -- I think we're going to continue to play our game and continue to stay focused at keeping the consumer at the center of everything that we're doing. And I just don't necessarily see that momentum changing anytime soon.

Your next question will come from Ike Boruchow with Wells Fargo.

Just I wanted to ask about the shrink benefits that you guys have seen all year. Any chance you could quantify it for the third quarter? Are you expecting benefits into the fourth quarter? And then I guess, is that -- is there more tailwind to that? Or is this -- was this a big kind of catch-up year for you guys? I know 2 years ago, there were some issues, you've clearly worked through. So just kind of looking for more clarity there.

Thanks for the question, Ike. We are pleased with the progress, obviously, as we stated in our prepared remarks that we've made to reduce shrink. In Q3, there was a modest improvement. And in Q4, we expect another modest improvement in shrink. And we do expect for the full year '25 that shrink will be lower than '24. We believe there's still some opportunity to reduce shrink further, but the teams are working very hard, and we're very pleased with all the initiatives that we've put in place.

Your next question will come from Mike Baker with D.A. Davidson.

Could you discuss the competitive situation? Amazon Premium Beauty still seems to be grown a lot. I think Sephora at Kohl's actually comped negative, yet LVMH's selective retail was positive. A lot of different moving parts from your competitors. How do you see the competitive situation today versus 3 months ago or earlier in the year?

Thank you for the question, Mike. Beauty has always been a competitive category. And there's been consistent growth, and it's been combined with attractive profit margins, there is a -- it's attracted a variety of players into the category. But that's what our Ulta Beauty Unleashed plan is designed to do is to really accelerate and amplify our differentiation and what makes us unique.

I will just say that we're doubling down on the drivers that we know with us having 46.3 million loyalty members, we know what our consumers are purchasing, how they're purchasing. We have, like I said, the pipeline of newness. Our merchants are doing a fantastic job of listening to the consumer and what it is that they're looking for. We are the only one that really offers everything from low to lux and everything in between, underpinned with the services and activations and the investments that we're making in our eventing.

So the experiential shopping makes us different. When you look at our e-commerce business, and you see like one of the big drivers in e-com is BOPIS. It further substantiates that our e-com business strength is there, but they still like coming into the store. So I do think that while, yes, it's a very competitive environment, we are uniquely positioned to continue to win and take share in the industry. So like I said, I feel really great about our plans. The plans are working. We're still in the early phases of them, and they're just going to continue to -- the momentum is going to continue to be on our side.

Your next question will come from Dana Telsey with Telsey Group.

Congratulations on the nice results. Kecia, as you think of top line and you think of the categories and prestige and mass, what are you seeing on prestige and mass? Is there a difference? And as you go forward through this holiday season, is the newness at all different this holiday season than it was last year or any way you're triangulating it? And lastly, you mentioned on Space NK bringing things here. What are you bringing? Has it been tested? How is it reacting? How do you see that moving forward?

Thank you, Dana. I think that might have been a 3-part question. I'll try to make sure I cover all of the points. But in regard to market share, prestige beauty, the industry grew in mid-single digits, and we gained share primarily driven by our strength in skin and fragrance, but makeup also increased. We're seeing steady improvements in prestige haircare in our trends.

And what's great about prestige is that we gained share in both brick-and-mortar and digital channels with elevated competition even out there. And then in mass, mass grew as an industry mid-single digits in Q3, and we gained share primarily driven by strength in mass makeup. So what I'd say is that I'm really encouraged to see that our plans are working to improve our performance and really drive market share. And we're -- our efforts are gaining traction. We're confident in our go-forward plans.

And market share is a battle, but we're staying focused on building on our successes to continue to drive sustained market share improvements over the long haul. You asked a little bit about Space NK. And what I would say is that with Space NK, it's still early. We're in the early innings. But one of the things that was really attractive to us is the nuance of their ability to really have clienteling and really have close relationships with their consumer, be really agile.

They've just now launched their app themselves. It's just -- like I said, I think this is a situation where 1 plus 1 can equal 3. They've figured out how to do High Street really well in smaller box locations and be really efficient with their space. I think what we can bring to them is back-office operations and how do you continue to leverage the size and the scale and the operational efficiencies that we have.

So it's really early, still in the innings is what I would say. But we have the ability to really learn a lot from each other. I want to protect what makes Space NK unique. I do not want to turn Space NK into a mini Ulta Beauty. I think that's what's made Space NK so special. But I think like I said, there's learnings that we can share from them and to us and us and to them that will help us both be better in the long run.

Your next question will come from Michael Binetti with Evercore.

Let me add my congrats. Great quarter. I'm still trying to get my head around the SG&A and how we got from 13% to 14% growth for the year on the last call to 23% in the third quarter. And I think if grosses are flat, backs into 15% to 16% growth for the year now. I know you called out a couple of items within the 23% growth in the third quarter, but I don't understand if those were included in the 13% to 14% for the year previously or not.

Just maybe help us understand the bridge there. And then I know you have talked a lot about SG&A a lot and the 12% margin, EBITDA margin. But the gross margin flat for the year on a 4% to 5% comp, I was trying to think through that a little bit and think what the comp leverage point is that you guys are comfortable with there. I think the last publicly available documents, we saw Space NK had a gross margin profile closer to 43% for a couple of years in a row, pretty stable, so 3 or 4 points higher than where you're at. Does that kind of a comp in the model lever SG&A in a normalized environment once we get past some of the Space NK impact?

Thanks for the question, Michael. It seems like there was one question there. So we'll try to tackle them here. As far as Space NK, so Space NK does not become comp until Q3 of next year. So you will have some Space NK impact year-over-year in the first half of 2026. As far as the deleverage, FY '25, we expect gross margin will be roughly flat, again, driven by lower shrink and higher merchandise margin, offset by the deleverage of other revenue and store occupancy costs as well as the adverse channel mix that we talked about.

For the fourth quarter, we expect GM deleverage driven primarily by store fixed and other revenue as well, largely reflecting our fourth quarter comp expectation and the adverse channel mix, again, still plays into effect there in Q4, offset by -- we will see some leverage in our supply chain costs.

Your next question will come from Adrienne Yih with Barclays.

Let me add my congratulations. The stores look fantastic, I have seen one this afternoon. Kecia, can you talk about the Target 1,800 number of stores. At the Analyst Day, it was a couple of hundred more from the October 24 kind of anchor. And your top line is 2x the sale, the rate of category growth.

Next year, we're going to shed over 600 of the Target ex Ulta. So I'm just wondering, is there -- how do you feel about the pace? And has anything changed there? And then for Chris, a question just on kind of the modeling of the kind of pricing with the price benefit that you had and the tariff inventory hitting the income statement, should we expect more of a parity, a matching effect on the pricing actions versus the tariff impact actions starting in maybe 1Q or 2Q?

Thanks, Adrienne, for the question. And I'm happy that you are in our stores and hopefully, you're shopping. I would say that we -- our long-term algorithm of what we've shared for new stores is we've said 1,800, and we're still confident with that 1,800 store count going forward. And then, Chris, I'll kick it over to you.

So on the pricing impact, obviously, we'll talk more about the impact of price increases in Q1 and Q2 next year in March. But as far as the price increase in Q4, we do expect to see price increases, modest price increases like we've seen in other years.

And the tariff, the inventory will not yet fully be expressed with the pressure. Is that correct? So it's similar to the third quarter in terms of a net benefit?

Yes. As you know, it's based on our inventory valuation method, the average cost. So it's going to take a while for it to reach the new cost level. But most likely, it takes about 1 or 2 quarters for it to flush through.

Your next question will come from Simeon Gutman with Morgan Stanley.

Can I take your temperature on newness? I think it's been a theme for '25. What are you seeing as it wraps into next year? And if you're able to separate this year has been a lot of improvement. Some of it's newness, some of it's marketing. And then you've talked a lot about early innings of some things sound like basic things that you brought like the payment thing. So can you talk about how much internal improvement you would chalk this year up to and how much more is to go in the future?

Yes. Thanks, Simeon, for the question. I feel really good about the newness pipeline that I'm seeing for 2026. The merchants have been hard at work developing plans, and that's one of the rigors that Lauren has really brought, I think, into the company is taking a look at the current year and building a plan like how we're going to combat newness that's going to be flowing next year and being really balanced across the portfolio.

So in regard to newness, I feel good about what next year looks like. The second part of your question was, I mentioned early innings and that there's some things that I think can continue to come play. What I mean by that is this has been a heavy, heavy investment year in a lot of our technology, investments in our teams. And there's benefits to letting things marinate a bit. And we've been coming off of 2, what I call really high -- or a few high years of investment in our foundation.

So for the last 3 years before this last year, we were investing in our ERP, our POS, supply chain, back-end operations, digital, I mean, all -- pretty much all aspects of the business. And then we had fallen behind in our go-to-market. So that's what happened this year as we shifted more into the go-to-market type strategies. And so we've been -- it's been a heavy up investment year in more guest-facing, sales driving, market-driving initiatives.

There is going to be benefit to being, I would say, hyper prioritized next year. We always are going to want to invest in the business, but we're going to be more prioritized next year. There's going to be less investments next year, very thoughtfully done. And we need to see the benefits from some of these investments that we've made over the last few years, really kind of settle in, marinate and get the benefit from them. So that's why I'm saying that I feel like we're still in the early innings is that there's major opportunity for us to continue to see these things come to play.

I think we have time for one more question.

Your final question will come from Olivia Tong with Raymond James.

Congrats on the quarter. Your early read from Black Friday through Cyber Monday sounded promising. So just wondering if you could unpack the expectations for a deceleration to 2.5% to 3.5% comp. Was there any impact from the government shutdown? Any change in consumer habits with pricing? And if you could, what quarter-to-date looked like?

And then just thinking about the initiatives going forward, you're going into next year with a ton of momentum, it seems. But curious how you think about some of these initiatives for next year to come some pretty amazing top line growth this year. You already talked about the newness. But what about next 12 months versus last 12 months in international wellness marketplace, other new initiatives and the ability to continue to build those so that the contribution continues to get bigger as you comp these numbers?

Yes. As I mentioned -- thanks, Olivia, for the question. As I mentioned, Black Friday and Cyber Monday performance, we were really pleased with. And what I'm excited about is that we came out of a really strong business with even stronger in-stocks than we've seen ever coming into out of a holiday -- peak holiday weekend. While this is a challenging, this is also a very fun time, but these next 9 weeks are big weeks.

And there's just so much volatility that can happen. You can have bad weather that happens on a key critical weekend. Who knows what could happen between now and the end of the quarter. So I think we're just being very prudent in our guidance and making sure that I kind of like the plan of not missing a quarter as a new CFO, first year in position. So I'm wanting to put something out there that I feel like is an achievable plan and one that the team can continue to work towards.

In regard to your question around long term and how confident am I in that we can continue to sustain momentum. I believe that we are a company that can continue to grow share, and that's what our plan that we've built is built to do. I look forward to sharing more with you in March after we finish the year, and we can share what our plans are for next year. But the team has been working really hard along with myself to build a good game plan for what 2026 looks like. Like I said, we're in the early phases of that. We're looking forward to being able to share that with you all.

But we've got good fundamentals in place. I grew up through operations. I understand the levers that it takes to really drive a profitable retail business, and I'm committed to doing that. All right. Well, thank you all for joining us today and discussing our third quarter results.

We're excited about the progress we're making against our Ulta Beauty Unleashed Strategy and focus on closing out the year strong. We appreciate your continued interest in Ulta Beauty and hope you all have a safe and happy holiday season. We look forward to speaking to you all again in March when we report our fourth quarter and full year results. Have a great evening, everyone.

Thank you for joining. This concludes today's call, and you may now disconnect.