Beyoncé Knowles-Carter isn’t letting her upcoming tour slow down her beauty business.
One year after the multihyphenate launched her big beauty play — the clinically backed Cécred — the brand has revealed its first retail partner: Ulta Beauty.
It will enter north of 1,400 Ulta Beauty doors and debut on the retailer’s website with its Foundation collection of products and its latest launch — tools — along with a first-of-its-kind integration with the retailer’s salons, starting April 6.
The move is a natural one for the brand, which Knowles-Carter told WWD was always meant to work for as many consumers as possible.
“My vision for Cécred has always been to be an inclusive force of excellence, investing in research, science and testing for all hair types. As a Black founder, there are misconceptions that we can only make products for hair like ours. Society has trained us to focus on our differences, and it’s kept us in boxes,” Knowles-Carter said.
“But little do people know, your hair and my hair, whether it’s coily, kinky, wavy or straight, has a lot more in common than it does differences. Seeing our products perform across everyone is proof that when you put science in front of bias, the results speak for themselves,” the Cécred founder continued.
Of the retail debut, Knowles-Carter said, “In the past year, we’ve helped so many make a deeper connection with their hair, building a community that redefines what a typical hair care brand looks like. Our historic partnership with Ulta Beauty represents a meaningful milestone in our journey of getting Cécred in the aisles and salons nationwide for everyone to experience.”
The partnership with Ulta is the largest exclusive hair brand launch in the retailer’s history, said Kecia Steelman, the president and newly anointed chief executive officer of the retailer. “Having 1,450 stores in 50 states with 44 million active Ulta Beauty loyalty reward members, and our unwavering commitment to amplifying BIPOC founders, we’re positioned to bring Cécred to the masses,” she said.
Steelman is giving the brand the red carpet treatment. “It’s going to be very prominent, front-and-center with life-sized fixtures and bottle amplification,” she said. “We’re going to amplify this in a way that we’ve never done before in our salons. It’s going to be a total 360-degree approach.”
Steelman declined to elaborate further on the salon component of the partnership, with details to come closer to the launch date.
According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing for Ulta’s third fiscal quarter results, services and hair care combined made up around 24 percent of the company’s $2.53 billion in net sales for the time period. According to Circana data, the U.S. prestige hair market grew 9 percent in 2024.
Cécred draws product inspiration from global hair rituals that are used across multiple generations, a value proposition that mirrors shopping behavior at Ulta, Steelman said.
“One of the things that tied us to Cécred is the story of Beyoncé sweeping up hair in her mom’s salon. Beauty is generational, hair is generational, and we have that shopping experience at Ulta Beauty with daughters, mothers and grandmothers,” she said. “When you have that coming together with what our view of the consumer is, that’s when magic happens.”
Cécred’s Foundation collection.
Cécred is a family affair. Knowles-Carter also tapped her mother, Celestine “Tina” Knowles, who is commonly known as “Ms. Tina,” upon the brand’s inception as Cécred’s vice chairwoman.
“I owned a very large hair salon in Texas, and I brought that passion to this brand,” Knowles said. “Beyoncé grew up in a hair salon, so it’s been a dream of hers and mine to bring that into a product. Back in the day, when I had a hair salon, I would mix age-old rituals like hot oil treatments and proteins from egg whites to make my own concoctions. She saw me doing all of these things, and always said she’d love to have one product with both science and those rituals.”
The salon piece is critical for two reasons: one, Knowles’ own history in the profession and two, the ability to get consumers to experience the products firsthand.
In partnership with BeyGood, Knowles-Carter’s public charity foundation, Cécred pledged $500,000 in business grants and scholarships to hairstylists and salons upon its launch.
“I went to beauty school at 33 but there were kids there that would not have had a great future,” Knowles said. “Hairstylists are not just hairstylists, they’re poets, they’re artists, they’re psychologists. I hope we can continue to help grow that and give people opportunities.”
The brand has won 30 awards to date in its 12 months on the market, said Grace Ray, the brand’s CEO, who added that it has had “incredible momentum.” Cécred also has 16 patents pending for the technology in the formulas and packaging, and “a community of people of all hair types and textures.”
Currently, the brand has amassed 18,000 five-star reviews on its website, and the launch of its Restoring Hair and Edge Drops hit the product’s first-year projections within the first month of the launch.
“One of the biggest indications that we’re succeeding is the incredible inbound demand we’ve had for distribution expansion, and it’s a major growth fact that we’ll be expanding into retail,” Ray said.
It’s been a busy year for Knowles-Carter, who since launching Cécred christened a partnership with Levi Strauss & Co. that saw its second iteration launch this week; debuted a second fragrance; introduced the whiskey brand SirDavis in a joint venture with LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton; released an album that solidified her lead as the Grammys’ most-awarded artist of all time, and announced an ensuing tour.
And though the star has shown incredible promise on the business front — Levi’s CEO Michelle Gass recently attributed the company’s strong fourth-quarter results at least in part to what she dubbed “the Beyoncé effect” — being thoughtful about where she plays, and why, is critical to her strategy.
“When we’re analyzing business opportunities, we are incredibly intentional and strategic, and we look at a number of key items,” said Janki Lalani Gandhi, who is the head of business development at Knowles-Carter’s Parkwood Ventures. “First and foremost, it absolutely has to be a category and subcategory she’s truly passionate about where there’s an organic connection and where she’s bringing a differentiated point of view.
“There have been many brands that have come to market over the years that have been tied to a prominent person, whether it was a celebrity or another type of founder, and they didn’t have this authentic connection. And for the most part, we’ve seen that it doesn’t work,” Gandhi said.
Gandhi considers the “size of the market, the competitive landscape, white space, the opportunity for innovation and the potential exit opportunities,” she said. “Typically, while we do that, we analyze what we think the appropriate business structure will be.”
Building Cécred as a fully self-funded venture was intentional because “it’s the foundation of an established beauty platform,” Gandhi said. “It’s the first consumer business [Knowles-Carter] has founded and built from the ground up. It’s not an easy feat to build something that is fully self-funded, that stands on its own from a business standpoint, but there is a clear intentionality that ties it back to the rest of our ecosystem.”
In beauty, Knowles-Carter also has a fragrance brand, which drops new products annually and debuted its second scent, Cé Lumière, in October. The goal is to create a category-leading hair brand, Gandhi said, and the rationale has been to build a brand strong enough to stand separately from its founder.
“Beyoncé is at the heart of the brand, and it’s her vision that touches every part of our business,” Ray agreed. “We also want to balance that with building a brand that stands on its own. We’re very intentional about bringing that balance of founder-driven content and community-driven content, for example.
“When she did a get-ready-with-me video last year, it made global headlines. That is a lightning rod for the conversation to shift the narrative in hair care, which is a mission of ours. We also receive feedback and organic content from celebrities and influencers. We want to capture a wide array of people regardless of their hair types,” Ray said.
Such was the mission of the founder. “She is so heavily involved in her brand,” Knowles said. “Usually, in celebrity brands, talent is involved in the marketing and not in the process, and our brand is the opposite, from her designing packaging to picking out the colors. I was in a three-hour meeting with her where she was weighing in on retail, how it’s going to roll out and picking the best models. Nothing goes through without her seeing it first.”
Knowles and Knowles-Carter both still test all the latest products, which include a new collection that “is going to revolutionize hair in some ways,” Knowles said. “Right now, everything that comes through, we test all of the products on our own hair, testing it on other people, and I hope we’ll always continue to do that.”
