Important points:
- Wellness thrives in beauty retail by translating transformation into sensory storytelling.
- As ingestible beauty rapidly expands, trust, compliance, and education are key.
- Pleasure, taste and experience drive wellness trials and repeat purchases.
The BeautyMatter FUTURE50 2026 Summit’s closing panel, “The Wellness Shelf: Competition in Beauty Retail,” addressed one of the most pressing questions facing the industry. As beauty and wellness continue to merge, what does it really take for wellness brands to succeed in a retail environment built for beauty?
The panel, hosted by BeautyMatter editor Cristina Montemayor, featured Shizu Okusa, founder and CEO of Apothékary; Charlotte Crews, Alice Mushroom Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer. Laura Velez, VP of Wellness, Ulta Beauty; We sat down with TOSLA Nutricosmetics Scientific Committee member Lorne Lucley for a conversation that spanned commercialization, compliance, education, sensory appeal, and the future of ingestible beauty.
The central theme was that wellness is no longer a peripheral industry adjacent to beauty retail. It is becoming a core part of consumer behavior. For Veles, this change is being driven directly by customers. “72% of guests are already prioritizing wellness in their daily lives,” she said, adding that two-thirds plan to increase their spending in this category over the next year. “Consumers not only want to look good, they also want to feel good. And in many ways, beauty and health complement 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 routine. “Our guests are into routine,” says Velez. “They might use a wrinkle treatment topically and combine it with ingestible collagen. That completes the journey.”
But for founders, transforming wellness into a beauty retail environment poses unique challenges. As Mr. Okusa explained, the fundamental difference lies in what is being sold. “For beauty, people come for aspiration. For health, people come for transformation,” she said. “So you really have to sell emotion. It’s not just how you want to look, it’s how you want to feel.”
This distinction becomes especially important in stores where wellness lacks the built-in benefits of a beauty sensory-driven experience. Cruz noted that sampling is an important means of bridging that gap, especially since Alice Mushroom’s chocolate format makes trialling intuitive. “Everyone wants to have a bite of chocolate,” she said. “If you’re walking down the aisle and someone offers you a capsule, you’re like, ‘What?’
Trials are often converted quickly because this product has a noticeable effect. “We sample Focus Chocolate, and 30 minutes later people come back and say, ‘That was really good, I’m going to buy it,'” she added. “With drinks, we say ‘drink to the lips.’ For us, it’s ‘chocolate to the lips.'”
Beyond sampling, education remains a major barrier, especially when it comes to emerging ingredients like functional mushrooms. Mr. Cruz emphasized the importance of a balance between information and friendliness. “We’re always conscious of what we have to overcome: helping people understand what a functional mushroom is and how it works so that it doesn’t feel trivial,” she said.
In this sense, packaging has become an important tool not only for differentiation but also for increasing reliability. Both Mr. Okusa and Mr. Cruz intentionally drew on the visual language of beauty to elevate wellness beyond traditional clinical aesthetics. “It’s no longer just that it has to work,” Velez added from a retail perspective. “It has to look good, too. That’s what gets consumers to pick it up.”
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