Newly minted Walmart beauty vice president Vinima Shekhar is making her mark.
That includes continuing the retailer’s push into premium beauty, as well as the return of Walmart Start, the retailer’s beauty brand accelerator program.
The Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer began adding premium beauty to its online marketplace in August 2024, starting with 20 brands and more than 1,000 stock keeping units, with a heavy focus on skin care and hair care. Now, it has 80-plus brands and more than 2,500 items in stock for premium beauty.
Vinima Shekhar
“Customers have been loving the addition of premium beauty to Walmart since we first launched our initial assortment a few years ago,” said Shekhar, who was promoted to the role last year, succeeding Creighton Kiper. He was promoted to senior vice president of the retailer’s home business.
“Through Walmart’s marketplace we’re able to introduce new and exciting brands, including CosRx, T3 and Beachwaver. Since the launch last summer, premium brands such as L’ange & Victoria’s Secret have seen double-digit growth post-launch, with T3 hitting triple digit growth,” she said.
Launches this month include La Roche Posay skin care, Buxom’s line of lip products like glosses, Tizo skin care and FHI Heat hot hair tools and accessories.
La Roche Posay
More retailers are leaning into marketplace models. Ulta Beauty recently revealed that it will be launching an invite-only marketplace later this year. Amazon, meanwhile, continues to push deeper into the prestige beauty market.
Away from the marketplace, Walmart continues to bring in more beauty in-store amid a competitive landscape.
“We’ve launched over 60 new brands in the past year, including noteworthy beauty favorites, like Pretty Smart, Being and Curology, with many still to come that will be part of the premium beauty program,” said Shekhar.
Walmart’s strategy also includes a shop-in-shop partnership with Space NK to bring prestige beauty to its aisles, including a co-incubated brand called BeautySpace. Space NK’s U.S. wholesale division was acquired by the PCA Companies for an undisclosed sum.
As for what shoppers have been interested in, Shekhar said it is in line with industry trends.
“Skin health, and skin in general, continues to be a category that has been growing, and we see that we win really well in the hair care business, both from the premium side as well as the everyday essentials,” she added. “We continue to see that fragrance is having a moment and Walmart is winning in fragrance.”
Nails are also big business. “If you layer on kind of what’s happening in the economy, a lot of customers are having to make some tough choices. And so going to the salons is something that they’re rethinking, but they want to have the nails. Nails is a new form of self expression, and instead of having to wait three weeks to go into a salon, you can pay half the price and get new nails every week. And so that continues to be an area that is growing for us.”
At the same time, Walmart Start is welcoming its third cohort.
This year’s group includes Maison 276, a hair care system for silver and blond hair, founded by Angel Cornelius; Nappy Styles, a natural hair brand using ingredients like shea butter, black castor oil and coconut oil; Lattafa, an Arabian-inspired fragrance brand, and Kativa, a hair care line.
Lattafa
The brands will be available on Walmart.com and in select Walmart stores starting this week. Brands chosen to be part of Walmart Start will receive access to resources such as education, mentorship and brand activation.
“For us, we want to work with suppliers large and small. This is really a great white glove service at Walmart, started three years ago, and we continue to lean in and invest,” said Shekhar.
“The largest retailer can sometimes be intimidating and requires a lot of investment and a lot of expertise. What we do is we actually provide them more favorable terms, we hand-hold them and help them understand how to set up their items, how to manage their inventory, how to manage their supply chain work, and also just to make sure that they understand how to actually drive sales, whether it’s online or on shelf,” the executive added.
There’s no timeline for how long they will be available at Walmart. “What we’ve seen is actually all the Walmart Start brands that we’ve onboarded continue to grow and continue to be successful. Our hope is, as we bring on these brands, not only are they meeting a customer need and helping us grow our business, but it’s also helping these smaller suppliers grow their business and help them be more successful,” she said.
For the three months ended Jan. 31, the retailer reported revenues of $180.6 billion, up 4.1 percent from $175.4 billion in the year-ago period. Groceries saw midsingle-digit growth and health and wellness grew in the mid-teens. General merchandise generated low-single-digit growth, with hardlines, toys, home and fashion the best-performing categories.
