Ulta Beauty Lays Off 'Meaningful' Share Of Staffers Amid Pandemic

BOLINGBROOK, IL — As financial adversity brought on by the coronavirus pandemic continues, a Bolingbrook-based beauty retailer had to lay off employees.

Eileen Ziesemer, spokesperson for Ulta Beauty, told Patch that the company laid off a "meaningful but relatively small" share of its corporate associates on Tuesday.

"To ensure Ulta Beauty can continue to lead in the new normal, we reevaluated work across every function to reshape our organization, our capabilities and our ways of working," Zeisemer said. "While incredibly difficult, these decisions were made thoughtfully with a focus on resetting our corporate cost structure to operate more effectively and efficiently in the short-term as well as optimizing our enterprise capabilities to thrive in the long-term."

The actions taken eliminated roles across all functions of the company, eliminated open roles, reorganized some teams and roles, expanded roles and introduced some new roles in key investment areas aligned to its strategic focuses.

These may have been the first lay-offs since the pandemic began, many store associates have been furloughed, and the company eliminated two of the management roles at stores to create a new, combined role in November.

On March 19, Ulta Beauty temporarily closed all stores in response to the spread of COVID-19. In May, it started a phased store reopening process. More than half the furloughed employees have been called back, the company said in a release last month. While nearly all stores are open, some services remain limited. Ulta Beauty has 1,262 stores in the U.S., including 55 in Illinois.

According to its recent annual report, the retailer had 18,000 full-time and 26,000 part-time employees as of Feb. 1. Like several other beauty retailers in the country, Ulta Beauty also saw a decrease in sales. Net sales decreased 7.8 percent to $1.6 billion during the 2020 third quarter, compared to $1.7 billion in the third quarter of fiscal 2019 due to the impact of COVID-19.

The company opened 17 stores during the third quarter of 2020 but closed 19. It is expected to open at least 30 during the 2021 fiscal year.

"We are immensely proud of how Team Ulta Beauty has weathered the challenges of 2020 and remain very encouraged by the resilience of the beauty category and the retail industry," Zeisemer said. "Knowing recovery will take considerable time and that the context we operate in has shifted meaningfully, accelerating the trends we had already been seeing, I can confirm Ulta Beauty took steps this week to reshape its corporate and field management teams."