This story was originally part of the 2024 Glossy 50 feature. Click here to see all of this year’s honorees.
Accelerator and incubator programs are a dime a dozen in the beauty industry, but Ulta Beauty’s MUSE program is different.
“We want this [program] to be the beginning of a groundswell movement,” Jessica Phillips, vp of merchandising at Ulta Beauty, told Glossy. “For me, what’s important right now is not resting on our laurels.”
The retailer’s MUSE program began as an idea in 2020, and by 2021, Phillips had secured internal funding to launch the program in 2022 with its first cohort of eight indie, BIPOC-founded brands. The goal was simple: Give early-stage BIPOC-founded brands — which receive only a tiny sliver of VC funding each year — the resources, insights and opportunity to successfully launch into retail, whether that’s at Ulta or elsewhere.
The 10-week program features intensive coursework around supply chains, brand strategy and positioning, product development, and finance management. The program pairs each brand with two mentors — one founder whose brand is currently in-store and an Ulta buyer overseeing the brand’s category — and provides $50,000 grants to each brand founder.
It’s part of a $50 million investment made by Ulta Beauty in 2022 to improve its diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives. The retailer has already brought one brand from the first cohort onto Ulta shelves — it’s called Pound Cake cosmetics. Several more are hitting shelves next year.
Whereas many retailers offer similar programs, none have doubled down on their diversity focus like Ulta Beauty. Even against politically orchestrated backlash against corporate and venture DEI programs, which have caused a chilling effect across retail, Ulta Beauty has stood by its values to promote equity and representation in beauty and has maintained the BIPOC-founded requirement to be accepted into MUSE.
So far, Ulta Beauty has provided 100 hours of coaching and given away $1 million in grants across its 24 mentees. What’s more, it has impacted many departments within Ulta, helping to shape the retailer’s offerings in ways that better serve its multicultural shoppers, Phillips said.
“The point of all of this is to fuel our business and fuel innovation in the category,” Phillips said. “There are so many tentacles [from MUSE] going into the other pieces of our business right now.”
One recent addition of note is called “virtual days of learning,” where the retailer passes along some of the program’s learnings to its current brand partners through one-off educational Zooms. The retailer’s merchant buyers have also become armed with more knowledge, Phillips said, and more than two dozen founders from existing brands have served as mentors.
“It’s the community that gets me excited,” Phillips told Glossy. “This exchange of ideas, learning from others, peer learning, … It is so powerful.”
