Christopher Horvers
JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division
Well, good morning, everyone, once again, and welcome to JPMorgan’s 12th Annual Retail Round Up at JPMorgan’s new global headquarters. It is our distinct pleasure to welcome the Ulta management team, including CEO, Kecia Steelman, and recently joined CFO, Chris DelOrefice. Like other fireside situations, I will have a list of questions. I’m going to go through. And then towards the end, we will open it up for investor Q&A.
For those of you in the room, please use the microphone if you decide to ask a question. So everyone in the room can hear it. So Kecia, you’re 16 months into your leadership here at Ulta. Top line execution has turned strongly since you took over. I think last year, at this time, almost to the day was the start of the turn where the business really started to inflect — and over that past year, share performance has improved. You acquired Space NK in the U.K.
You launched Rare Beauty, you launched Ulta Beauty on TikTok shop and you launched the marketplace. Just a few things in that 16-month time frame. So it’s certainly been busy. And what’s most impressive is that the broader industry’s growth was pretty similar in ’24 and ’25. So it’s really a share inflection story, which is all wonderful.
So I guess the big picture, very open-ended question is — what do you think has been most instrumental in changing the momentum in the business? Do you think the prior leadership maybe
