Table of Contents
How Brands Use Brij to Win in Ulta and Sephora
- Ulta and Sephora are the two most important beauty retail channels, but brands selling through them receive no customer identity data, making every retail sale a retail data blind spot that blocks retargeting, CRM growth, and long-term LTV.
- Driving retail velocity at Ulta and Sephora requires more than securing shelf space. Brands that can't prove sell-through risk getting cut, making post-purchase engagement programs essential tools for staying on shelf.
- Sacheu Beauty drove 70,000+ consumer engagements during its Ulta launch using a Brij-powered rebate program that captured first-party data without eroding margins, while simultaneously pushing daily click volumes north of 370 through SMS rebate flows.
- When verified retail purchase data flows from Brij into Meta via Conversions API, brands can retarget Ulta and Sephora buyers, build lookalike audiences from their best customers, and drive down CAC, turning distribution into a compounding growth advantage.
Getting into Ulta or Sephora is still one of the most valuable things that can happen to a beauty brand. Combined, these two retailers reach tens of millions of shoppers across thousands of store doors. Ulta operates more than 1,400 locations across the US. Sephora has extended its US footprint to over 1,100 Kohl's shop-in-shops, alongside its own standalone store network.
But here's what brands don't talk about enough: getting on the shelf is only half the problem. The other half is staying there.
Retailers like Ulta and Sephora manage their assortments ruthlessly. They track sell-through, monitor velocity data by door, and cut what isn't performing. Brands that can't demonstrate consistent movement across their shelf placement, especially in the first few months, don't stay long. The pressure to perform starts on day one.
Then there's the data problem. Every purchase made at Ulta or Sephora belongs to the retailer. Ulta's loyalty program has grown to over 40 million active members who generate more than 95% of Ulta's total revenue [2]. The Beauty Insider program is one of the most sophisticated first-party data engines in all of retail. All of that data stays in-house. Brands get wholesale sell-in reports and occasional POS aggregates, but they have no idea who actually bought their product, where those customers live, or whether they ever came back either in store, on Amazon, or directly to the brands DTC site.
This is the retail black box. And for beauty brands operating in an environment where CAC keeps rising and repeat purchase is the only reliable path to profitability, it's an infrastructure gap that advertising alone can't fix.
Why Getting on Shelf Is Only the Beginning
Beauty brands that land Ulta or Sephora distribution typically spend months preparing for that moment: formulation reviews, packaging updates, logistics compliance, distribution agreements. The standards are real and the process is demanding.
But winning the shelf isn't the same as winning the customer.
A brand that lands 300 Ulta doors without a plan to drive traffic to those doors, generate trial, and convert first-time buyers into repeat purchasers is sitting on a distribution bet that may not pay off. Velocity matters to the retailer. If product isn't moving at a rate the category demands, it gets repositioned, reduced, or cut, often without much warning.
Traditional approaches to driving in-store performance work, but they're blunt. Broad discounting, in-store demos, and influencer shoutouts can spike velocity in the short term without building the customer relationship that sustains it. And they tell you nothing about who bought.
The brands that are holding and growing their shelf space at Ulta and Sephora are doing something different: they're treating every retail transaction as an opportunity to acquire a customer, not just complete a sale.
The Data Blind Spot That's Costing You More Than You Think
When a customer checks out at the Ulta register, Ulta captures their loyalty data. Purchase history, frequency, basket size, and product preferences all flow into a system that Ulta uses to personalize offers, power its retail media network UBMedia, and retain that customer for next time.
Your brand gets a line item in a wholesale report.
This creates a compounding disadvantage. You can't retarget the person who bought your serum at Sephora on Saturday. You can't build a lookalike audience from your Ulta buyers to run against in Meta Advantage+ campaigns. You can't email the customer who bought your treatment kit in November and nudge them toward a repurchase in January. Every retail sale that goes unidentified is a customer who could have been yours and isn't.
Across thousands of daily transactions at major beauty retail, that gap adds up fast. It's not just lost revenue; it's lost signal. Without signal, your ad platform is optimizing against a fraction of your actual customer base. Most beauty brands running Advantage+ or Google Performance Max are feeding those systems only their DTC data — that's often 10-15% of total business . The other 85–90% is invisible to the algorithm.
That's the real cost of the black box.
How Brands Use Brij at Sephora and Ulta
The most effective brands in beauty retail aren't waiting for retailers to hand over customer data. They're building their own capture layer directly on the product, inside the packaging, and through post-purchase experiences that give shoppers a reason to identify themselves.
Brij is the growth infrastructure that makes this possible. By embedding QR-powered experiences into packaging inserts, product cards, and post-purchase flows, brands can engage Ulta and Sephora buyers after the transaction and turn anonymous retail purchases into owned customer relationships and signal to map back to their retention and ad platforms to increase LTV and decrease CAC.
Rebates That Drive Trial and Capture Identity
Rebates are a common Brij activation at Ulta and Sephora, and extremely effective at driving velocity while building first-party data at the same time.
A post-purchase rebate gives the customer a concrete reason to scan after buying. In exchange for the rebate, the brand captures what it needs: email, phone, purchase verification, and receipt-level transaction data that confirms the retailer, SKU, and date of purchase. No retailer coordination required. No shelf-level disruption. No data sharing agreement to negotiate.
Rebates work well because they're retailer-friendly. They don't disrupt pricing on the shelf, and they can be structured to reward exactly the behavior you want: buying a specific SKU, buying multiple units, making a first purchase in a new category. They're also easy to promote via paid media and social without requiring any in-store activation. Even if a consumer signs up for a rebate, but doesn't end up purchasing immediately, it's still a win for the brand, as they get marketing consent and have the ability to keep talking to that potential consumer.
Sacheu Beauty's Ulta launch is one of the clearest examples of what this looks like in practice. The brand launched into Ulta and immediately deployed a Brij-powered rebate campaign (buy any 3 products, get $10 cash back) promoted across paid media and influencer channels. The campaign generated over 70,000 consumer engagements during the launch period. A parallel sweepstakes activation ran simultaneously, delivering 200+ daily scans from packaging inserts with a 98% submission rate. A separate SMS rebate flow drove another 370 daily scans on its own.
The rebate didn't just move product. It moved product while building an owned subscriber list, with every completed submission flowing directly into Klaviyo for nurturing, education, and future repurchase campaigns.
Cross-Channel Rebates That Bridge Retail and Beyond
Rebates don't have to stop at purchase verification. Davines, the professional haircare brand sold through Sephora, uses Brij to run a program that bridges a Sephora purchase with a downstream salon service.
Customers who buy a Davines kit at Sephora receive a rebate certificate in the packaging. To redeem it, they visit a local Davines salon for a treatment or color service, then upload their salon receipt via Brij's receipt verification flow to claim the rebate. The result is a cross-channel conversion the brand couldn't engineer any other way: a Sephora retail buyer becomes a verified salon client, and Davines captures first-party data from a transaction that would otherwise have been completely invisible to them.
This is the retail black box problem solved at the product level. Sephora keeps its customer data. Davines builds its own.
The program also gives Davines something no retailer report can provide: channel-level segmentation. Brij tracks which customers came through Sephora versus the brand's own DTC site, letting the team tailor follow-up content and offers based on where and how a customer first engaged.
From Shelf to Signal: Sending Retail Data to Your Ad Platforms
Identifying retail buyers is only the first step. The brands getting the most out of their Ulta and Sephora presence are taking that identity data and pushing it downstream into their ad platforms, their CRM, and their analytics infrastructure.
When Brij purchase events flow into Meta, Google, or TikTok ad accounts, those verified retail buyers become usable signals for your paid campaigns. A customer who bought your Sephora kit can be suppressed from prospecting (saving spend), added to a retargeting sequence, or used to build lookalike audiences that find high-intent buyers who match your proven retail customer profile.
This is the shelf-to-signal loop: Acquire → Identify → Signal → Optimize → Retain. Brands running this loop are watching CAC come down as the algorithm learns from real purchase behavior, not just DTC click data. Every verified retail purchase event improves Meta's match quality, tightens targeting, and makes each campaign smarter than the last.
For a beauty brand in the Ulta and Sephora ecosystem, this is how distribution becomes a compounding advantage. You're not just on the shelf; you're building a flywheel where every retail sale makes your next acquisition cheaper and your next retention campaign more precise.
Proving Velocity and Earning a Longer Shelf Life
There's one more benefit that often gets overlooked: what your activation signals to the retailer.
Ulta and Sephora make assortment decisions based on sell-through data. Brands that actively drive traffic to their shelf space, through media, promotions, and post-purchase programs, are signaling investment in retail performance. That posture matters in buyer conversations and in the data the retailer sees. When Sacheu Beauty promoted its Ulta rebate across paid media and influencer channels, it wasn't just capturing customer data. It was actively driving consumers into Ulta stores, creating measurable sell-through the retailer could observe.
That's the kind of retail marketing behavior that keeps brands on shelf, earns better placement in future resets, and opens the door to deeper joint planning with the retailer down the line.
Brij also gives brands SKU-level retail analytics that aren't dependent on what the retailer reports back: visibility into which products are driving the most post-purchase engagement, which retail channels are most active, and where to invest next.
The Bottom Line
Ulta and Sephora are the most powerful distribution channels in beauty. But distribution without data is a floor that keeps getting lower: rising ad costs, declining margins, and no way to compound the customer relationships that retail is generating every day.
The brands holding and growing shelf space at Ulta and Sephora over the next few years are the ones treating retail as the first touch in a relationship, not the only one. They're using rebates and sweepstakes to turn anonymous buyers into owned contacts. They're pushing purchase signals into their ad platforms to lower CAC. And they're using every retail transaction as an input into a system that makes the next campaign smarter.
Getting on the shelf is the achievement. Staying on it, and building a customer base while you do, is the work.
If you're selling through Ulta or Sephora and want to see how this looks for a brand at your stage, book a demo with Brij.
Sources
- Economy Insights: The Sephora–Ulta Duopoly (2025)
- BeautyMatter: Unlocking Growth at Sephora and Ulta Beauty with Retail Media
- BeautyMatter: Ulta vs. Sephora (2025)
