Kecia Steelman knows how a good store ends

A shopping trip can go beautifully until its final minute. The product is right. The customer is pleased. Then the checkout is slow, confusing or unfriendly, and the memory changes. Kecia Steelman pays attention to that ending. After decades in retail, the president and CEO of Ulta Beauty talks about the cashier as someone with unusual power over the whole experience. The executive has the title; the person at the register gets the last word.

That is a revealing place to begin with Steelman. Beauty lends itself to famous faces, launches and promises about transformation. Her career has involved the less photogenic questions: how stores work, how teams learn and what happens when a plan encounters a Saturday afternoon. She came up through operations. Even with the CEO job, she keeps going back to the floor.

A shop in the basement

Steelman grew up in Mediapolis, Iowa, a farming community far from the beauty industry’s usual scenery. As a child, she made a pretend store in the basement. Her mother ran a business. Retail, in her telling, had an early place in the family imagination. The miniature shop is an appealing beginning, although adulthood would give the subject rather more urgency.

At 20, she was a single mother living in government housing. She has recalled looking into a bathroom mirror, with her daughter nearby, and deciding that she needed an opportunity to change her circumstances. She wanted a company that would let her learn and grow. The practical question was finding a job. The possibility of running a major retailer lay well beyond the immediate horizon.

Target supplied the opportunity. Her hourly pay was $8. The role brought responsibility, and the business became a place to learn management as well as earn a living. In a career often described through its eventual destination, it is useful to linger here: a young employee discovering that she liked leading people, inside a company willing to invest in teaching her how.

Her mother remains central to the story. Steelman has described watching her rebuild her working life and establish a business in interior painting and woodworking. Skill and personal relationships brought customers. The daughter absorbed a lesson in reinvention from somebody doing it close enough for her to see the effort. Independence had a daily routine long before it became a career theme.

The long apprenticeship

Steelman’s route through retail took her across markedly different businesses. She spent 12 years at Target, then held leadership jobs at Home Depot and Family Dollar. The merchandise changed. So did the customers’ reasons for coming through the door. A home project, a household purchase and a beauty discovery present different selling problems, even when each ends at a register.

That range matters because retail expertise can sound abstract when reduced to a biography. Stores are physical systems occupied by people with limited time. Decisions about staffing, space, stock and instructions collide in them. Having worked across formats gives an operator several versions of the same basic problem: make the business understandable enough for employees to deliver what the customer expects.

She joined Ulta in 2014 as senior vice president of store operations. Chief store operations officer followed in 2015, chief operating officer in 2021, and president and COO in 2023. Those promotions expanded the field of view. Stores connected to distribution, technology and strategy. By the time she became CEO, she had spent years inside the mechanisms that would have to deliver her decisions.

During her operations leadership, she oversaw more than 700 store openings. There is an entire education inside that figure. Opening a store requires more than finding a location and turning on the lights. The repeated work of expansion tests whether a company can teach its habits to new teams without losing the things that made customers return.

Ten stores, three days, plenty to notice

One of Steelman’s more useful public dispatches begins with a number small enough to picture: ten stores in three days. She described visiting locations with a group of leaders from different functions, looking at the experience through customers’ eyes. Amiee Bayer-Thomas led the effort. The group listened to store teams describe their successes and what they needed to serve guests better.

The detail gives substance to an overused corporate activity, the executive visit. Bring different departments to the same shop and they can compare interpretations while the evidence is in front of them. The employee who lives with a process sees something different from the person who designed it. A good visit gives those two people a chance to understand each other.

There is an earlier, rather charming version of this habit. In 2020, Steelman thanked a Mooresville, North Carolina, team for helping host a virtual analyst walk. A district manager named Missy held an iPhone for an hour while Steelman walked through the store answering questions. Investor communication depended on a colleague’s steady arm. Corporate sophistication occasionally looks exactly like that.

The colleague who sees you coming

Steelman became president and CEO on January 6, 2025, succeeding Dave Kimbell and joining Ulta’s board. It was an internal succession, giving her the responsibility to lead a company whose operating habits she already knew. Familiarity is useful in that situation, but it comes with a question: which familiar things need changing?

Her answer includes making leadership intelligible to the people expected to carry it out. She likes language that travels from a store’s back room to the boardroom. That is a demanding editorial standard for a corporate strategy. If the explanation only works in the meeting where it was invented, the company still has work to do.

“I like simple language that everyone can understand from the back room to the boardroom.”Kecia Steelman

In a March 2026 reflection, she wrote about an early manager who saw potential she had not fully seen herself. Being able to offer that recognition to another woman now gives her particular satisfaction. The memory connects her start to her present responsibilities without requiring a tidy theory of success. Someone took her seriously. She remembers what that made possible.

Her family is part of the public account, too. In 2025, she received an Outstanding Mother Award and spoke of being a mother and stepmother to five children. She praised parents and caretakers balancing responsibilities at home and at work. The recognition placed her alongside other business leaders, while her own response directed attention toward the ordinary labor behind professional lives.

A bigger map, several ways across it

The company she leads is becoming geographically more complicated. In July 2025, Ulta acquired Space NK, entering the British market through an established beauty retailer. Space NK continued as a standalone subsidiary with its existing management, including CEO Andy Lightfoot. Keeping an experienced local team was part of the structure of the deal.

Mexico and the Middle East involved different arrangements. Ulta’s Mexican expansion uses a joint venture with Grupo Axo. Its Middle Eastern stores operate through a franchise relationship with Alshaya Group. These distinctions matter. International growth is a collection of operating decisions, and a familiar logo does not make every location the same kind of business.

Her remit also extends beyond Ulta. In February 2026, she joined Pinterest’s board, including its Talent Development and Compensation Committee. Pinterest’s announcement emphasized her experience connecting consumers and brands. A store operator on a visual discovery company’s board makes sense at the point where browsing becomes buying: both businesses must help someone turn interest into a decision.

Back at Ulta, the financial record supplies a dated measure of progress. For the second quarter of fiscal 2026, ended August 1, net sales reached roughly $3.04 billion, up 8.9%. Comparable sales rose 3.8%, and the company raised its annual guidance. Those figures describe a period of performance; the harder job remains repeating it while the organization changes.

The spare outfit in the bag

There are smaller clues to how Steelman manages that working life. She packs an airport outfit, allowing her to change after a day dressed for business. A retailer who spends time traveling between locations has found a sensible limit to the usefulness of heels. The beauty business can tolerate comfortable shoes on the way home.

She has also described reading A CEO for All Seasons on vacation as she considered her second year in the job. The choice fits a career with a long apprenticeship and a short tolerance for assuming the learning is finished. Even a promotion this large leaves the next working day to be figured out.

That brings the story back to the checkout. For all the acquisitions, committees and strategy, a retailer asks its employees to make thousands of small encounters work. Steelman has occupied enough roles to know how much can depend on them. Her next chapter will be measured in financial results and new markets. Some of the explanations will still be waiting at the register.