How Lyn Kirby used a new vision to guide Ulta beyond cosmetic change

Take simplicity to your front line
Still, having a bunch of executives behind an idea, believe it or not, is like having eight kings on a chessboard: You’re not going to get a lot of movement. Kirby spent 18 years at Avon Products Inc., and she learned something from her CEO.
“Jim (Preston) used to say to us, ‘Never forget who pays your salary. It’s not me; it’s the Avon lady,’” Kirby says. “It’s one of the great things that has always stayed with me. I repeat it to this organization all the time because that front line of the business, without them, we can’t execute anything.”
So Kirby had to get front-line employees behind her vision or it would die. That would take rewriting systems and expectations that were effective yet easy. First, she hired a store operations person who was behind her vision to watch over the processes.
Then, like looking for entrepreneurialism with her executives, Kirby thought it useful to go the one-word route to describe what she was looking for in front-line people so she could sum it up for anybody doing hiring. That word is approachability.
The industry was mostly composed of drugstores, which were not approachable because, Kirby says, they generally offered little help and were dirty. On the other end were department stores filled with commission-based help that most women find intimidating. But approachability gave Ulta an angle.
“So there’s this huge swath of space in the middle to offer women a nonthreatening experience where they could come and learn comfortably,” Kirby says.
Most of Ulta’s legacy employees had come from the drugstore heritage, so building that approachability required some new blood and better training.
“I put a very simple tenet in place to begin this transition to the right culture of approachability. When you’re interviewing a candidate for the store team, if they are not outgoing, if they don’t smile at you during the interview process, they’re not the right candidate for us, because they have to have that in their basic DNA,” she says.
Kirby also hit the road with her four E’s, explaining them to every store along the way. They may not seem relevant to other businesses, but there’s a wrinkle of genius to it. While the four E’s apply directl
y to Ulta, it’s the simplicity of the systems that acts as the main lesson. You don’t have to be in the beauty business to understand what customer experience means. It’s just one phrase, but it allows quick recall about everything from how customers shouldn’t have an intimidating retail experience to organizational functions like shelving products so people don’t have to look for them. Putting a vision into memorable pieces makes all the difference.
“It was a game-changing approach because they’re simple words, but I could give you six other strategies behind each,” she says. “It was really important for them to be able to remember the framework, because the execution can manifest itself in different ways. To be able to get the team to embrace the vision that we were not going to be discount beauty, that we were going to be a superstore … was a very big shift for our people on the front line. When I joined the company, the front line was only 70 stores or so. We’re now 320 stores and without that easy memory of what the vision gets translated to, day in and day out, by our front line, we would have never done it.”