If you sell beauty product and you want it on Ulta Beauty shelves, the first thing to understand is what Ulta is not. It is not a company with a "supplier diversity portal" where you fill in a form, attach your MBE certificate, and wait for a buyer to call. People go looking for that page and never find it, because it mostly does not exist. Ulta buys the way most large beauty retailers buy: through product discovery, category buyers, and a small set of programs that decide who gets a real look.
So the honest version of the question is two questions. How does a brand get discovered by an Ulta merchant? And where, if anywhere, does being a diverse-owned business actually change the odds?
What Ulta Beauty actually buysUlta is a beauty specialty retailer, roughly 1,400 stores plus a large e-commerce business, carrying prestige and mass cosmetics, skincare, haircare, fragrance, tools, and the in-store salon supply chain behind its services. That last category matters more than people assume. Ulta buys finished consumer product for the shelf, and it also buys the operational stuff every retailer needs: store fixtures, packaging, logistics, marketing services, professional salon goods, and corporate services. The path is different for each.
If you make a finished beauty product, your route is merchandising. If you sell goods or services to the company (packaging, freight, fixtures, agencies, IT), that is indirect procurement and runs through a different set of internal buyers. This guide focuses on the product path, because that is where most "how do I sell to Ulta" searches are headed.
How product submission actually works: RangeMeUlta's own merchandising page routes new-product submissions through RangeMe, the same online discovery platform several major retailers use to screen inbound brands. You build a product profile, upload the information a buyer needs (formulation basics, claims, pricing, supply readiness, brand story), and RangeMe surfaces your product to the relevant category buyer at Ulta. The buyer reviews and decides whether to reach out.
A few things follow from that design. There is no Ulta login that says "apply to be a vendor." RangeMe is the front door, and the bar is a complete, retail-ready profile, not a pitch email. Buyers are filtering for products that already look shelf-ready: real packaging, defensible claims, a price point that fits Ulta's assortment, and enough manufacturing capacity to actually fill orders. A half-finished RangeMe profile reads as a half-finished business.
Before you submit anything, read Ulta's published vendor standards (the code-of-conduct document on ulta.com). It covers sourcing, labor, product safety, and compliance expectations. Buyers assume you have read it. Showing up already aligned to it signals you are someone they can onboard without a fight.
The diversity-certification angle (and where it stops short)Here is the part people most want clarity on. Ulta has real, public commitments to diverse founders, but it does not run a classic "certified-diverse-supplier set-aside" the way a government buyer or a manufacturing prime does. Two things are true at once.
First, Ulta signed the Fifteen Percent Pledge in 2021, committing to dedicate 15% of shelf space to Black-owned brands. That is a merchandising commitment, and it shapes which brands buyers go looking for. Second, Ulta has partnered with SpotzCity, a diversity-focused technology company, to support diverse suppliers through the certification process so they can pursue contracts, grants, and partnerships. So certification is encouraged. It is not the gate.
For corporate-side beauty retail, formal certifications like NMSDC's MBE, WBENC's WBE, or NGLCC's LGBTBE function as credibility signals and reporting hooks rather than application requirements. They help when Ulta needs to count and report diverse spend, and they help your brand story land with a buyer who is actively trying to diversify the assortment. If you are early and uncertified, certification is still worth pursuing, because it travels with you to every other retailer and corporate buyer too. Our NMSDC certification guide walks through what the MBE process actually involves, and if you would rather hand off the paperwork across multiple agencies at once, that is what CertifyAll is for.
The real side door: the MUSE AcceleratorIf you are an early-stage BIPOC beauty founder, the program worth knowing about is the MUSE Accelerator. Ulta launched it in 2022 to magnify, uplift, support, and empower emerging Black, Indigenous, and people-of-color beauty brands. It is competitive and small: it takes roughly eight founders per cohort and drew more than 500 applications in 2025.
What you get is substantial. Recent cohorts received a 10-week retail-readiness curriculum, direct mentorship from beauty founders and Ulta merchandising partners, and about $50,000 in funding per brand, with the Fifteen Percent Pledge selecting one cohort member for an additional award. The strategic value is the mentorship-to-merchant pipeline. Ulta has moved MUSE brands into actual distribution, including Pound Cake, Octavia Morgan Los Angeles, Scarlet by RedDrop, and Ocoa. For a brand that is not yet retail-ready, this is the most direct line to an Ulta buyer that exists, and it is built specifically around diverse founders.
The catch is timing and fit. MUSE is for early-stage brands that need readiness support, not for established brands that already have shelf-ready product. If you are further along, RangeMe and a clean vendor-standards story is your lane.
Practical sequenceTreat it as a stack, not a single application. Get your product genuinely retail-ready. Build a complete RangeMe profile aimed at the right category buyer. Read and align to Ulta's vendor standards before a buyer ever opens a conversation. If you are an early-stage diverse founder, watch for the MUSE Accelerator application window. And pursue certification in parallel, because it compounds across every buyer you will ever approach, not just this one.
One realistic expectation: beauty retail moves on assortment cycles and buyer relationships, so "no response yet" usually means "not this season," not "never." Keep the profile current and keep building distribution elsewhere. Shelf traction at other retailers is one of the strongest signals an Ulta buyer can see.
If you are mapping which corporate beauty and retail programs are worth your certification dollars and which run open versus invite-only, our corporate program directory lays out the active programs and what each one actually accepts, so you can spend your effort where there is a real door.
Sources: ulta.com/company/merchandising, ulta.com/company/dei/muse/muse-accelerator, ulta.com/ultavendorstandards, ulta.com/company/dei, Ulta launches MUSE accelerator (Ulta investor news), Beauty Independent: MUSE cohort + Fifteen Percent Pledge, Ulta + SpotzCity partnership (PR Newswire).
