Ulta Beauty’s marketplace is officially open for business, with 100 new brands on deck.

According to the Bolingbrook, Ill.-based retailer, UB Marketplace will expand Ulta’s e-commerce presence by offering shoppers a broader assortment across beauty, wellness and adjacent lifestyle categories. It is integrated into the Ulta Beauty shopping experience on ulta.com and the Ulta Beauty app, with unified search, cart and checkout, Ulta Beauty Rewards on eligible purchases, and in-store returns. 

“UB Marketplace allows us to deliver more newness, faster entry into emerging subcategories and trends, and deeper category authority — while keeping the guest experience unmistakably Ulta Beauty,” said Lauren Brindley, chief merchandising and digital officer at Ulta Beauty.

The platform is only open, by invitation, to brands and not third-party sellers. The reason why? “Invite only became the only way that we could stand behind the experience and make sure we had great brands with great products that take care of our great guests,” Josh Friedman, senior vice president of digital and e-commerce at Ulta, said. “You can obviously ask for an invitation, but you cannot just click a button, sign a form and start selling on ulta.com and that helps us control any risk of distributorship or reseller but also make sure that we’ve got the right product and sellers that we can trust.”

At launch, the marketplace will focus on wellness, grooming and personal care; luxury; pro tools and tech innovations, and global beauty. Brands include Manucurist, Apotheke, Atwater, Oars + Alps, Babe Lash, Nuxe A313, Ogee and Saturday Skin.

“For us, we think of it as what does the beauty enthusiast want to see?” said Muffy Clince, director, category management marketplace at Ulta.

While having success on the marketplace could lead to brands eventually being sold at Ulta Beauty, Friedman stressed that was not the whole point.

“While that’s a great goal, and I’m sure the aspiration for many of these brands, that’s not the only measure of success,” he said. “We are not here to test brands and say, ‘well, you’re not going to make it to the shelf, so we’re going to let you go.’ There’s a very successful marketplace only business.”

While starting with 100 brands, Ulta plans to quickly scale its UB Marketplace assortment over the next 12 to 18 months. 

Asked whether it’s important that consumers know they are shopping via a marketplace, Friedman responded: “We don’t think it’s terribly important that they know that, and we’ve tried to take a very integrated approach to the experience. The main way you’ll know that you’re shopping a marketplace item is on the product page. It will have a snippet in the middle page. It says, ‘fulfilled by a trusted UB marketplace supplier.’ That’s really the main designation. We don’t have a separate section, much less a separate storefront for marketplace. These are products that will show up in search results. These are products that will show up in our product recommendation algorithms, as if there are any other product in the assortment. And that’s on purpose. The big difference is these are new or newish categories, or at least new takes on those territories that you wouldn’t have found otherwise.”

Ulta is not the only beauty retailer with a marketplace as they respond to Amazon’s beauty push. Walmart began adding premium beauty to its online marketplace in August 2024, starting with 20 brands and more than 1,000 stock keeping units, with a heavy focus on skin care and hair care. As of March, it had 80-plus brands and more than 2,500 items in stock for premium beauty.