Key Takeaways:
Wellness succeeds in beauty retail by translating transformation into sensory storytelling.Trust, compliance, and education are critical as ingestible beauty rapidly scales.Joy, taste, and experience drive trial and repeat wellness purchases.
The closing panel at the BeautyMatter FUTURE50 2026 Summit, “The Wellness Shelf: Competing in the Beauty Retail Landscape,” tackled one of the most urgent questions facing the industry: As beauty and wellness continue to converge, what does it actually take for a wellness brand to succeed in a retail environment built for beauty?
Hosted by Cristina Montemayor, Editor at BeautyMatter, the panel brought together Shizu Okusa, founder and CEO of Apothékary; Charlotte Cruze, co-founder and COO of alice mushrooms; Laura Beres, VP of Wellness at Ulta Beauty; and Lorne Lucree, member of the TOSLA Nutricosmetics Scientific Board, for a conversation that spanned merchandising, compliance, education, sensory appeal, and the future of ingestible beauty.
A central theme was that wellness is no longer a fringe industry adjacent to beauty retail; it is becoming a core part of the consumer journey. For Beres, the shift is being driven directly by the customer. “Seventy-two percent of our guests are already prioritizing wellness in their everyday lives,” she said, adding that two-thirds plan to increase their spending in the category over the next year. “Consumers want to look good, but they also want to feel good—and in many ways, beauty and wellness complete each other.”
That insight has shaped Ulta Beauty’s expanding wellness strategy, which includes supplements, intimate care, sleep, and stress-related products, all organized around routines. “Our guests are really into routines,” Beres noted. “They might be using a wrinkle treatment topically, and then pairing that with ingestible collagen; it’s about completing the journey.”
For founders, however, translating wellness into a beauty retail environment presents a unique challenge. As Okusa explained, the core difference lies in what’s being sold. “With beauty, people are coming in for aspiration. With wellness, people are coming in for transformation,” she said. “So you really have to sell the feeling—how do I want to feel, not just how I want to look.”
That distinction becomes especially important in-store, where wellness lacks the built-in advantages of beauty’s sensory-driven experience. Cruze pointed to sampling as a critical lever for bridging that gap, particularly because alice mushrooms’ chocolate format makes trial intuitive. “Everyone wants to try a bite of chocolate,” she said. “If you’re walking down the aisle and someone offers you a capsule, it’s a little like—what?”
Because the product delivers noticeable effects, the trial often converts quickly. “We’ll sample our focus chocolate, and people will come back 30 minutes later and say, ‘That was really good—I’m going to buy it,’” she added. “In beverages, they say ‘drinks to lips.’ For us, it’s ‘chocolate to lips.’”
Beyond sampling, education remains a major barrier, particularly for emerging ingredients like functional mushrooms. Cruze emphasized the importance of balancing information with approachability. “We’re constantly aware of what we have to overcome—helping people understand what a functional mushroom is, how it works, and making sure it doesn’t feel fringe,” she said.
Packaging, in that sense, has become a critical tool not just for differentiation but also for trust. Both Okusa and Cruze intentionally drew on beauty’s visual language to elevate wellness beyond its traditionally clinical aesthetic. “It’s no longer just that it has to work,” Beres added from her retail perspective. “It has to look beautiful, too; that’s what gets consumers to pick it up.”
