Ulta Beauty Rebrand

Who Ulta is today

Before drawing anything I studied the brand as it is: the stores, the packaging, the app, the logo, and the six brands on the same shelf. Mapping every competitor’s colour showed the problem fast: everyone owns a colour, and Ulta shares red-orange with Target.

A price-access versus experience map placed Ulta between the discount stores and Sephora. The opportunity was clear: move it from discount to destination without leaving anyone behind.

One sentence to design against

I wrote the goal, three brand drivers, the mission and values, a personality, and three people who would walk into the same store: Maya, 19, Denise, 42, and Jordan, 27. Then the positioning, in one line I could test every drawing against.

Hand first, then fifty wordmarks

Every territory started on paper. I sketched playful, bold and elegant versions by hand in Procreate, then drew fifty digital wordmarks across six territories and set ULTA in eight typefaces, to hear each voice.

One shape kept coming back: a U whose right stem curls over. I called it the hook.

Four months under the red pen

These are the real screens from my Illustrator files, in date order. Drag the slider to watch the logo change: heavy blocks, lipstick-shaped letters, the first hook, the critique marks, and finally the hairline Enduring Edge.

One family, four uses

The hero wordmark became a family: hero, hero with “beauty”, stacked, and the shortform hook. Each got an inverted version, clear space and a minimum size, one solid colour at a time, and a short list of things never to do.

The wordmark at mixed scales

The pattern is the logo itself, at many sizes and turned upside down, so a bag or a box still reads as Ulta from across the store. Try it: every press makes a new arrangement, in the four moods of the system.

A classic voice and a clear one

Didot echoes the hairlines of the logo and speaks in headlines; Inter does everything practical. Then the voice: confident, warm, never pushy. One line, “Get hooked on ___”, changes one word for every service. Tap it.

70 · 20 · 10

Seventy per cent Porcelain and Ink, twenty per cent soft support colours taken from skin and packaging, and ten per cent accent. Glow keeps Ulta’s orange alive, but as a highlight instead of a shout. Click a colour to copy it.

The Hook

The hook crops, frames and underlines. Oversized, it bleeds off a poster; small, it signs a salon card. Photography follows one rule: real skin, soft light, one bold detail.

Four seconds: draw the hook, set the word

I storyboarded the logo before animating it: the U rises, the L slides in, the T drops, the A climbs, and the swash flicks on last. It is the same animation that opens this page.

Every Kind of Beautiful × Get Hooked

Two campaigns, one system. Every Kind of Beautiful speaks for the whole brand; Get Hooked sells the salon. I tested six poster directions at 24 × 36 before the final series of three, then took them outside: a billboard and a bus shelter.

Everything people touch

Shopping bags in three moods, product packaging, a Get Hooked kit and shipper, gift and Ultamate Rewards cards, the storefront, uniforms and name badges, and a tri-fold salon menu. And the pattern in the wild: my own merch mockups.

ulta.com, the app, and the feed

The landing page leads with the campaign, then three doors: skin, salon, points. The app turns the hook into its icon. On social, posts and 9:16 stories use the same one-word game as the posters.

The show

Everything on one wall: the ID System board, the revised logo poster, and three tall show posters, each with the logo band on top and a grid of mockups below.