Ulta Beauty Expands Its Supplement Selection With The Launch Of Ora Organic

A year and a half after launching in around 800 The Vitamin Shoppe locations across the country, plant-based ingestible specialist Ora Organic is bringing a six-product edit to Ulta Beauty. The partnership is part of the retailer’s Sparked program, its platform for emerging brands that debuted last summer.

Four products will be sold in 600 of Ulta Beauty’s 1,200-plus brick-and-mortar stores. In addition to the four in-store products—vegan collagen booster Aloe Gorgeous; hair, skin and nail supplement Beyoutiful; sun-damaged skin support supplement Sun-Kissed; and sleep and stress support supplement You’re A Knockout—Ora’s Trust Your Gut probiotic and prebiotic powder, and capsule products will be sold online only. The collection went live on Ulta Beauty’s website on Feb. 23. 

The Ulta Beauty “team is really about quality, that’s something they care a lot about,” says Erica Bryers, co-founder and CMO at Ora. “That’s why you haven’t seen many products in Ulta of our type. We’re about science and ethics first, and Ulta’s really on board with that. You can see that with a lot of the different products they bring in. They’re really pushing that conscious beauty ethos.” Ora and Ulta Beauty are also aligned on pricing clean ingestibles as accessibly as possible. None of Ora’s products are over $40, and all its items launching at Ulta Beauty are priced at $34.99. Bryers says, “Even though our products are organic and high quality, we’re willing to take a hit on margins so that people can actually afford them.”

Executing the massive The Vitamin Shoppe launch in 2018 served as preparation for Ora’s national launch at Ulta Beauty. Bryers shares that the brand pitched products, several new to its lineup, to Ulta before it had finished producing them. “We knew going into it what we needed to order in terms of the number of our products,” she says. “We had a really open conversation with Ulta about how frequently they would be placing their orders, and we knew from previous retailers what we could expect in terms of volume over time.” Since The Vitamin Shoppe launch, Ora’s workforce has doubled in size from 10 to 20 people. Bryers reports a revenue lift of 80% from January last year to the same month this year.

In addition to Ulta Beauty and The Vitamin Shoppe, Ora’s other retail partners include a diverse mix of mass and prestige destinations, including Nordstrom, where the brand has an especially large presence inside the New York flagship. Ora’s gut health line is carried in 450 CVS stores throughout the country. Select additional stockkeeping units are sold at Erewhon, Urban Outfitters and Free People’s website.

Distribution diversity bodes well for Ora’s long game as The Vitamin Shoppe continues to struggle. The retailer registered $253.1 million in sales for the third quarter last year, an 8.5% dip from the like period a year before. In August, it was announced that the Franchise Group Inc. had entered into an agreement to acquire The Vitamin Shoppe. Meanwhile, the global dietary supplements market is expected to accelerate at an annual growth rate of 5.5% to exceed $216.3 billion by 2026, and Ulta Beauty has a comparatively rosy outlook. The beauty chain’s sales increased almost 8% to nearly $1.7 billion in the third quarter of 2019, up from $1.56 billion a year ago. In the quarter, Ulta opened 31 stores and closed three, representing a 6.9% increase in retail square footage from the prior year.

With Ora expanding, Bryers, who founded the brand in 2015 with Will Smelko, Sebastian Bryers and Ron Chang, has shifted her day-to-day duties from execution to oversight. A current initiative Bryers is managing is Ora’s upcoming pop-up in Austin, Tex. “This is one of the things I am giving input and direction on, but I’m not actually doing it myself, which is new for me,” she admits. Reminiscing on Ora’s earlier days, Bryers says, “I used to go and build Ora’s expo booth. My team would look at me with a drill and pieces of lumber, and be like, ‘You’re a crazy woman.’” The Austin pop-up, Ora’s first, is scheduled to open in June.