The beauty retail market is a rapidly growing industry, expected to generate approximately $580 billion by 2027.

Ulta Beauty Inc., one of the leading beauty retailers, boasts 43 million loyalty members, making up 95% of their sales. With such a loyal base of consumers, Ulta Beauty is developing a comprehensive approach to tailoring the digital and physical experience of consumers, combining the two into a seamless holistic customer experience. This follows on the heels of Ulta Beauty’s recent IT transformation, allowing the company to further embrace automation.

“[The app] becomes the shopping companion within the store,” said Jeff Hamm (pictured), vice president of digital experience and operations at Ulta Beauty Inc. “You walk into the store, you have your app, your loyalty status, you know your points, how many points you can redeem for products, how much you’re going to earn, activate different offers. So, you talk about touching and feeling, but there’s a holistic journey in that.”

Hamm spoke with theCUBE Research’s Shelly Kramer and Rebecca Knight at the commercetools Elevate event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed what a holistic customer experience looks like, how commercetool’s composable commerce platform enabled innovation and how businesses can create enjoyable and frictionless shopping experiences. (* Disclosure below.)

Beauty is in the app of the beholder

Ulta Beauty’s rewards points enable loyal customers to redeem free gifts and enjoy discounts, with the tech-savvy, politically-conscious Gen Z making up a majority of these customers, according to Hamm.

“We have a program called Conscious Beauty. It’s all about vegan, cruelty-free, sustainable packaging, and all that, and that’s important to this demographic,” he said. “We have to have the ability to use digital. It’s not just what I say, badging on a product, but it’s in the filters. It’s subtle, but it brings the products to that generation, and then you can run campaigns around it. You can get them to the products quicker.”

The company’s approach to a holistic customer experience expands beyond just loyalty rewards and an app. One of the many features the Ulta Beauty app provides is a virtual try-on service, Hamm explained, allowing consumers to virtually try on makeup, nail and hair products using augmented reality.

“Those lead to the services that we have in store as well,” he said. “We leverage our technology to then promote some of the things from products and services that we have, because you might try a brow shape and then be able to then go to the arch expert at the brow bar and then have that same thing done — but you’ve already had the ability digitally to see what different styles look like on you before you actually go and have the service perform.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the commercetools Elevate event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Elevate event. Neither commercetools GmbH, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE