Small business takeaway:
- Wellness has become a mainstream retail growth engine, with Americans spending more than $500 billion annually. The playbooks from Walmart, Ulta Beauty, and Amazon show how companies of any size can compete as consumer priorities converge across health, beauty, convenience, and personalization. Walmart’s approach points to trusted expertise as merchandising infrastructure. Ulta’s boutiques show category expansion deepening loyalty. Amazon’s AI-driven storefronts signal the next battleground: outcome-based discovery that turns fragmented needs into larger, more connected baskets.
Americans are spending more than $500 billion annually on wellness, according to McKinsey. Now, retailers are expanding assortments and shuffling shelves to create new ways to meet that demand.
Walmart is adopting a holistic approach that directly connects everyday consumer wellness with its pharmacy and health services. Ulta Beauty is broadening its footprint by expanding beyond traditional cosmetics into dedicated wellness categories. At the same time, Amazon is leveraging its platform to build an increasingly integrated offering that seamlessly blends health, beauty, and wellness.
These moves reflect a shift toward living better and longer. Eighty-four percent of U.S. consumers say wellness is a “top” or “important” priority, according to research from McKinsey & Company.
Wellness doesn’t have just one meaning. Consumers look at wellness holistically, combining supplements, medications, fitness, grooming, and beauty into a personalized health strategy, according to Sherry Frey, Vice President, Total Wellness at NielsenIQ. Shoppers are also more discerning. “They turn packages over and read labels. They want brands to educate them,” she said.
[Read more: The GLP-1 Effect: How Weight Loss Medications Are Shaping the Future of Wellness and Beauty]
Amazon: Tapping AI-powered shopping environments that tackle the ‘wellness outcomes consumers are trying to achieve’
The evolution isn’t lost on Amazon, which has created an integrated shopping experience built around concerns and connecting consumer searches with product suggestions.
Shoppers think beyond categories when it comes to wellness, Wendy Franks, Amazon’s U.S. General Manager, Health & Beauty, told CO—. “They're focused on their needs and on the outcomes they're trying to achieve.”
Amazon is leaning heavily into integrated shopping environments to capture broader customer demand across beauty, health, and wellness. Rather than relying on traditional, isolated product categories, the retail giant is building specialized destination digital storefronts tailored for specific consumer needs. Amazon’s cross-category capabilities help build basket sales, such as linking weights or nutritional supplements to a consumer searching for items for healthy aging, according to Franks.
AI is also part of Amazon’s wellness playbook. Alexa for Shopping brings together the benefits of Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, with Alexa+, its generative AI-powered personal assistant. The new assistant can view previous orders, compare items, review product details, and even browse and purchase products from other retailers on behalf of consumers using the Buy for Me feature, all without leaving the platform.
Online merchants can seamlessly and fluidly cross-promote categories in real time, a benefit brick-and-mortar retailers can’t easily duplicate, she said.
The playbooks from Walmart, Ulta Beauty, and Amazon show how companies of any size can compete as consumer priorities converge across health, beauty, convenience, and personalization.
Walmart: Leveraging its 4,600 pharmacists to connect the dots between wellness and beauty in stores: ‘People shop wellness by solutions’
Traditionally, beauty products are merchandised around categories such as vitamins, gut health, or skin care in disparate aisles.
That’s changing with retailers including Ulta Beauty and Walmart leading the charge. “People shop wellness by solutions,” Vinima Shekhar, Vice President, Merchandising, Beauty told CO— in an interview during the Women’s Wellness: The Next Revolution symposium hosted by WSL Strategic Retail and retailmediaIQ.
Walmart is utilizing its roughly 4,600 pharmacists to help connect the dots between wellness and beauty in stores. A recent example was Walmart’s launch of professional-grade L'Oréal-owned skin care brand La Roche-Posay.
Recognizing pharmacists as trusted advisors, L'Oréal created educational programs led by a board-certified dermatologist and a French pharmacist to better equip pharmacy teams to answer skin health questions. Shekhar said pharmacists, who are among the most trusted associates in Walmart stores, are provided with digestible, solution-based education materials to help customers discover La Roche-Posay.
Across the store, Walmart staged a Wellness Day in July with free health screenings, pharmacists’ consultations, vision screenings, and low-cost immunizations. Added this year was education in GLP-1 therapies, nutrition guidance, medication support, same-day pharmacy delivery, and virtual care services.
Walmart is also introducing Wellness Minis in about 2,000 stores and online. The assortment, anchored in value, consists of smaller packages from emerging wellness brands, priced starting at $2, allowing customers to sample products before buying full-size versions.
[Read more: 3 Beauty Brands Poised to Drive Growth Among Cost-Conscious Consumers]
Ulta Beauty: Piloting advisor-staffed wellness boutiques: ‘We started with a smaller concept and saw we needed to go bigger and bolder’
Ulta Beauty recently made wellness its first new merchandise category in its more than three decades. Its original Wellness Shop has morphed into "Wellness by Ulta Beauty," with 500-square-foot boutiques now being piloted in four stores.
“We started with a smaller concept and saw we needed to go bigger and bolder,” Laura Beres, Vice President of Wellness, Commercial Lead at Ulta Beauty, told CO—.
The concept features 58 brands across Nutrition & Supplements, Intimate Care, Rest & Reset, and Essential Routines. The areas have dedicated wellness advisors and are a direct response to shopper requests, according to the company. There are 58 brands in the assortment, including emerging lines like The Nue Co. and established names including Vital Proteins.
Wellness is a category the retailer’s shoppers say they are looking for. According to Beres, eight in 10 of Ulta's 47 million rewards members view wellness holistically.
Beres noted that longevity, weight loss medications, streamlined routines, and increasingly sophisticated shoppers as key growth drivers.
“Consumers are starting to think about wellness and beauty together,” Beres said. “Eighty percent know that when they have their health, it impacts their appearance,” she said.”
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