Urban Outfitters is making a serious beauty push. Fragrance is already 40% of beauty sales and grew 11% YoY. Makeup category is +38% YoY on Flower Knows alone. Yes Day, the new brand from a 13-year-old founder with the Rhode formulator, launches exclusively at UO in July.

Urban Outfitters ($542.6M reported revenue, 171 stores, 9M social followers) is rebuilding its beauty business around what head of non-apparel merchandising Karen Booker calls "function, fashion and fun," with a deliberate strategy of being a hyper-curated discovery channel rather than competing with Sephora and Ulta on assortment breadth. The internal numbers from Urban Outfitters Inc. show fragrance at 40% of beauty and personal care sales with 11% YoY growth. Makeup grew 38% YoY in 2025, with Chinese indie label Flower Knows as a primary driver (and Ulta added Flower Knows to its own assortment in December as a follow). Recent additions: Sol de Janeiro in April, plus an exclusive partnership with Yes Day (a new skincare line from 13-year-old founder Coco Granderson and Rhode formulator Ron Robinson) launching in stores and online this July. The brand also runs an "ambassador network" of 27,000 young shoppers who get discounts and exclusives in exchange for feedback on brands and products.

The bigger CPG read is about the future of beauty distribution for emerging brands. Sephora's positioning as the prestige beauty mecca is still intact but the assortment has gotten sprawling, which creates a real "where do I even start" problem for Gen Z and especially Gen Alpha shoppers (the oldest of whom turn 16 this year). UO is betting that "be there first, find the cool thing, discover something nobody else has" is the wedge. The retailer placing beauty product directly between racks of clothing and vinyl records, rather than walling it off as a separate department, is the most Urban Outfitters-specific way to execute that thesis. For emerging beauty brands evaluating retail channel strategy, UO is now a credible second-tier mass-prestige hybrid alongside Target and Anthropologie.

For beauty brand founders and beauty retail folks: is "curation over assortment" actually the right wedge for emerging beauty channels right now, or does the Sephora sprawl model keep winning at scale? And the Yes Day launch (a 13-year-old founder with a Rhode formulator) is interesting on its own: are we now at the point where Gen Alpha is launching brands that mainstream retailers can carry, and what does that mean for the rest of the prestige beauty category?

Source - Business of Fashion