There’s a common adage when it comes to sales: Go where the people are.
It seems that’s what Ulta Beauty’s doing after its March 17 launch on TikTok Shop, becoming the first specialty beauty retailer in the country to launch on the platform where scrolling and discovering new products is encouraged. Now, if you’ve ever scrolled through a TikTok video and wondered what foundation that person is using, you can scroll through Ulta in app and purchase it for yourself.
Ulta’s move onto the platform comes as retailers reconsider what truly is the front door of retail. It also comes as TikTok’s commercial future in America was stabilized following a landmark deal with the Trump administration.
The backdrop to Ulta’s launch is as much political as it is commercial. Earlier this month, the Trump administration finalized a deal allowing TikTok to continue operating in the U.S. in exchange for a reported $10 billion brokerage fee paid to the U.S. government, according to The New York Times. Investors including Oracle, Emirati investment firm MGX, and Silver Lake (which each own 15% of the company) will pay the U.S. government $10 billion for brokering the deal, $2.5 billion of which was already paid in January. The deal comes as a resolution to years of national security concerns over the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, and effectively resolved the uncertainty that hung over TikTok since 2020, giving brands and retailers a clearer runway to invest in the platform’s commerce capabilities. Ulta announced its expanded TikTok integration just days after the deal’s terms were finalized.
Go where the audience is
TikTok isn’t a place brands are trying to build an audience—it’s where an audience of historic scale is already shopping. It’s also where new possibilities in the consumer space are emerging, including the ability to enhance shopping with AI.
“We are excited about the opportunities, both on social and AI-enhanced commerce platforms, to bring our undeniably Ulta Beauty experience and assortment to life,” Ulta Beauty CEO Kecia Steelman said during the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call. “We will initially launch with a thoughtfully curated assortment of only-at-Ulta brands, which will add another exciting tool to our brand-building playbook.”
It’s uncertain how the AI-enhanced commerce platforms will work. However, Ulta’s approach to TikTok is part of an overarching recognition by the beauty retailer that sees “firsthand how discovery is happening everywhere today–and social platforms play an increasingly influential role in how guests engage with brands,” Lauren Brindley, chief merchandising and digital officer at Ulta Beauty told Fortune in a statement.
“Partnering with TikTok Shop is a strategic and complementary extension of our discovery ecosystem,” she added. “It allows us to meet guests in the moments that inspire them, reduce friction between content and commerce, and drive incremental growth by welcoming new-to-Ulta Beauty shoppers into our community.”
Steelman made similar comments in the earnings call, adding it’s meeting users where they are. TikTok Shop is “where guests can purchase immediately as they engage with content from Ulta Beauty and our brands on the platform.”
The data backs her up. TikTok Shop logged more than 103 billion U.S. searches with e-commerce intent in 2025, and total transaction volume on the platform rose nearly 80% year-over-year, according to data shared directly from TikTok to ModernRetail. There are now 71.4 million active social shoppers on TikTok in the U.S. alone, up 24.5% from 2024, and 45.5% of all U.S. TikTok users made at least one social commerce
The company has been expanding its use of generative AI, including agentic AI tools and an internal AI Center of Excellence, to personalize marketing across its 46 million loyalty members. The TikTok Shop launch, in that context, is the consumer-facing result of a back-end transformation years in the making.
It also arrives alongside one of Ulta’s strongest recent quarters: $3.9 billion in Q4 2025 sales, an 11.8% year-over-year gain, with comparable sales rising 5.8%. Steelman, who took the CEO role in January 2025 after 11 years at the company, has been clear about the turnaround.
“We had to get our swagger back,” she said. “I felt like we lost our swagger just a little bit, and I feel like we’ve got our swagger back.”
However, some are cautious to laud the partnership out of fear of what has happened time and again with self-conscious users (who are primarily underage) on social media platforms. Yale Medicine dermatologist Dr. Kathleen Suozzi, who has researched the skincare routines and purchases of kids and teens as influenced thanks to social media, questioned if “this strategy is capitalizing on the impulsivity” of a younger cohort, especially given her work while “looking at behavioral patterns in teens and tweens around skincare.”
“I think this really targets teens and tweens in a major way,” Suozzi told Fortune, adding that because TikTok Shop all occurs in app, it’s just that much easier for all users, regardless of age, to impulse buy.
“We see really everything related to social media and kids, it’s that chasing of this idea, this false idea of perfectionism, this representation of what skin should look like, and chasing these beauty ideals that are not realistic or appropriate,” she added. “That’s really what this is feeding into.”
Suozzi mentioned how less sophisticated users might not be able to discern between what is a sponsored ad as compared to a regular user on the app not touching up their appearance. This “comparing your skin to these influencers that have filters and lighting, and the pressure to follow multi-step routines—this is contributing to increased anxiety about your appearance and compulsive product use. And that’s also what this integrated platform is going to feed even more. You see something, you immediately want it, you buy it.”
Beauty’s broader bet on TikTok
Ulta is not alone in recognizing TikTok’s pull on the beauty industry. Although it does not have an official store on TikTok Shop, Sephora previously partnered with the platform to pioneer a creator program connecting emerging brands from its Accelerate incubator with content creators.
Ulta’s TikTok Shop launch takes that conviction further, turning discovery into a direct purchase moment rather than a brand-building exercise. TikTok Shop’s Head of Beauty, Ajay Salpekar, framed the partnership as additive rather than disruptive:
“TikTok is where culture, commerce, and discovery come together in a seamless way, so it makes sense for retailers and brands to be part of our ecosystem,” Salpekar told Fortune in a statement. “For Ulta Beauty, TikTok Shop offers the power of discovery, helping to reach new shoppers for the release of exclusive launches and to support the scale and growth of new-to-market brands.”
