Key takeaways:
See how Ulta Beauty went from dozens of manual updates for a single change to just one.
Learn how business teams were able to take control of content from IT.
Discover how they now manage omnichannel content and personalization at scale.
Imagine needing to update dozens of different touchpoints just to make a single change to your login page. That was the reality for Ulta Beauty. As the largest specialty beauty retailer in the United States, this operational friction was a critical business challenge. Their old monolithic platform created a bottleneck that made it impossible to keep pace with the market.
At Amplify25, Joe Rago, Senior Director, Digital Product at Ulta Beauty, detailed their journey from a restrictive legacy platform to an agile, composable future.
The challenge: A content bottleneck
For years, Ulta Beauty has operated on a classic monolithic solution. As Joe explained, “We might be able to change an image in a hero banner, but we couldn’t say, ’hey, today we want a hero banner, tomorrow we want a content carousel.’... We definitely couldn’t move at the speed of beauty.“
This friction, where business ideas were blocked by technology, created significant challenges:
Campaign paralysis: With content changes tied to bi-weekly or monthly IT release cycles, marketing teams couldn’t react to trends. A new campaign idea meant a long wait, making real-time response to the market impossible.
Missed revenue windows: The speed of beauty is fast. The inability to change a hero banner to a content carousel without developer intervention meant missed opportunities to promote trending products or launch new brand stories during peak demand.
Stifled innovation: The business teams were full of ideas, but the technology couldn’t support them. Their digital merchants had almost no control, limiting their role to simple image swaps and stifling the brand’s creative potential.
The solution: Building the ‘Digital Store of the Future’
Ulta Beauty’s “Digital Store of the Future“ initiative was a strategic move to a composable architecture, with Amplience’s cohesive platform at its core. This transformation was designed to directly solve their business challenges.
Enabling self-service for marketers: By building a component-based system with Dynamic Content, our headless CMS, Ulta Beauty empowered their digital merchants. Business teams can now rapidly assemble and launch new experiences, dramatically reducing reliance on developers.
Powering personalization at scale: Ulta Beauty now leverages Dynamic Content to connect its in-house AI engine’s logic to the right creative assets. This allows them to match content to the right personalization groups, all managed by the business.
Optimizing the customer experience: To ensure a fast, flawless experience, Ulta Beauty implemented Dynamic Media. This optimized their entire library of images and videos, leading to a distinct, measurable improvement in site performance.
The results: Agility, control, and speed
At Amplify25, Joe Rago shared several early successes from their transformation:
Accelerated updates: A login page update that would have previously required changing dozens of different touchpoints was completed by updating one component, one time.
Peak season agility: The platform has enabled three consecutive holiday seasons of increasing smoothness, allowing teams to schedule content and react to changes at a moment’s notice.
Strategic omnichannel control: The team can now choose to be “intentionally inconsistent,“ delivering custom, relevant content to their iOS app vs. their Android app without duplicating effort.
Looking ahead, Ulta Beauty is using this agile foundation to expand its distributed commerce ecosystem to marketplaces like DoorDash and Instacart.
From bottleneck to strategic advantage
Ulta Beauty’s transition to a composable architecture proves its commitment to innovation and customer-centricity. By overcoming legacy constraints, they’ve unlocked true agility, empowered their business teams, and built a foundation to power any channel, present or future. Their content supply chain is no longer a bottleneck; it’s a strategic advantage.
To see how Amplience can help you reimagine your content supply chain, book a demo today.