Beauty retail runs on small rituals. A customer picks up a lipstick, turns it over, sets it back down, picks up another. It is a business of tiny decisions made thousands of times a day, across thousands of stores, by people who mostly never meet each other. Kecia Steelman has spent more than a decade learning how to make all of those small decisions add up to something enormous. Today she is President and CEO of Ulta Beauty, the largest specialty beauty retailer in the United States, a role she has held since January 6, 2025, and one that puts her at the head of more than 60,000 associates working across stores, distribution centers, and corporate offices.
It is worth sitting with that number for a moment. Sixty thousand people is a small city. It is more than the population of towns most Americans have never heard of, and Kecia oversees all of it with a philosophy that sounds almost quaint next to the size of the operation: keep the guests and the associates at the center.
The Long Ascent Inside Ulta
Kecia did not arrive at the top of Ulta Beauty by accident or by a single fortunate promotion. She has now spent 12 years and 2 months with the company, and her path through it reads like a slow, deliberate climb up a very tall ladder.
She joined Ulta Beauty as Senior Vice President of Store Operations in July 2014, a post she held until September 2015, when she became Chief Store Operations Officer. She remained in that role until June 2021. In June 2021, she became Chief Operating Officer, a position she held until September 2023. In September 2023, she became President and Chief Operating Officer. Then, in January 2025, she became President and CEO, the job she holds today.
Laid end to end, that is five major leadership stages in one company over twelve years, each one a little larger than the last, each one presumably harder to let go of when the next one arrived.
Retail in Her Bones
Before Ulta, Kecia’s resume reads like a tour of American retail itself. She spent roughly 12 years at Target, from 1993 to 2005, serving in a variety of retail operations and merchandising roles of increasing responsibility.
From there, she moved into Vice President and General Manager roles at Expo Design Center, Home Depot Design Center, and YardBIRDs, as well as Director of New Store Innovations at The Home Depot, from 2005 through 2009. Then came Family Dollar, where she joined in 2009 as Vice President of Store Development and Store Operations and became Group Vice President in 2011, a role she held through 2014.
Three decades. Four companies. One long apprenticeship in how large numbers of people, spread across large numbers of buildings, actually get things done.
A Boardroom Life Beyond the Sales Floor
Kecia’s education is a single, uncomplicated fact: a bachelor’s degree in business management from Kennedy Western University. Beyond her corporate career, she has built a significant portfolio of board and civic commitments.
She joined the board of the Adler Planetarium in January 2015 and served as its Chair from 2023 to 2025. She previously served on the board of Metropolitan Family Services, and her current board service includes The Bay Club Company, the Adler Planetarium, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, and Pinterest. She also serves with the Economic Club of Chicago and World Business Chicago. Ulta Beauty’s current board biography confirms her service with these organizations and her February 2026 appointment to Pinterest’s board.
The Breast Cancer Research Foundation announced her appointment to its board in 2025, highlighting the more than 30 years of retail and operational leadership she brings to the organization.
It is a lot of boardrooms for one woman who spends her weekdays thinking about beauty retail, stores, operations, strategy, and customer experiences, but it suggests something about how Kecia understands her own reach: not as confined to one company’s four walls, but as something owed, in smaller doses, to the causes and industries around her.
What She Carries Home
For all the titles and the store counts, Kecia’s bio ends somewhere quieter. She is married, and her family, including children and grandchildren, is scattered across the United States. It is a small detail, almost an afterthought in a career built on scale, but it is a useful reminder that the woman running the country’s largest beauty retailer measures her life, in the end, the way most people do: not in stores or associates, but in family found in more than one zip code.
Ulta Beauty, under her leadership, continues to pursue its long-term strategic vision while describing its mission in terms of creating positive impact for associates, guests, partners, and other stakeholders. It is an aspiration that depends entirely on those small, repeated decisions on the sales floor, the ones Kecia has spent thirty years learning to multiply by tens of thousands of associates.
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