Ulta Beauty's Amiee Bayer-Thomas on Why Stores Are Queen, Plus Wayfair's Big-Box Bet and Shein's Hong Kong Pivot

**Michael LeBlanc** (0:07)
Welcome to the Remarkable Retail Podcast episode number 308, I'm Michael LeBlanc.

**Steve Dennis** (0:12)
And I'm Steve Dennis.

**Michael LeBlanc** (0:13)
On this episode, our guest is Amiee Bayer-Thomas, Chief Retail Officer for Ulta, recorded live in person at our pop-up podcasting studio in New York at the Commerce Next Growth Show.
Amiee was named Chief Retail Officer in January 2025 She oversees all aspects of Ulta Beauty's stores and services operations. 1,500 store teams coast to coast across the country.
Background at Ulta is impressive. Chief Store Operations Officer, Chief Supply Chain Officer, Senior Vice President Stores. Prior to Ulta, she had spins through JCPenney and Limited Brands.
It's a great interview. We get to that in and after we touch on the news. And of course, there's lots of it in our summer bi-weekly format. Taking a look at the overall retail results for June and what that tells us. Focus on the grocery sector's numbers anchored in Albertsons results. And we'll say something directionally somewhat positive about Wayfair and Shein and what is on our respective radar screens for the future. Now, speaking of our summer schedule, don't sleep on our periodic latest store tour videos. Decovus and Buck Mason with more to follow all summer recorded while we were in the Big Apple at Commerce Next. So let's get on to the news. Now there's lots of news in and around us and in and around retailers that's impacting how they think about today, tomorrow and the future. Let's anchor it though with an update of your number one prediction for 2026 and that is uncertainty reigns supreme.

**Steve Dennis** (1:45)
Yeah, so just as a little bit of background, and folks might have heard, we did this a couple of episodes ago. Instead of doing a full mid-year review of how the predictions are looking, we're just going to periodically dip in and do an update. And I thought this one was pretty appropriate to the state of the world right now. So the original podcast was broadly about the chaos agenda of the Trump administration, lingering tariffs, just the general macro environment, AI disruption, and just some of the trends that we've seen in retail kind of accelerating, particularly things like the great concentration. Well, and I guess just something that I think probably most people have experienced, which is over time, the volatility and uncertainty we see just seems to keep being amped up. And I think that's the rate at which technology change happens. We're all connected, so ideas disperse very quickly. So that's not really a new idea, but that's kind of a backdrop to the prediction. Now, having said that, never in a million years did I think the no forever war president would get us into what is looking like at least a bit of a forever war.
But anyway, that is what's going on. And so I probably don't need to say much about that because I think we're all living that every day more than we want to. But then also, tariffs have re-entered the building. Again, I'm sure many people have seen the news on this. So the tariffs that were disallowed by the Supreme Court that has led to a bunch of these rebates, they expired last week.
A specific tariff that was still in place that was expiring was a 10% global tariff. There were a bunch of carve-outs and special situations, but basically, there was a 10% global tariff. So now, that has been replaced by a range of tariffs, so it's a pretty narrow range. For the most part, 10% to 12.5% on 60 trading partners, and the 60 cover almost 100% of all US imports. So more or less, it's a blanket tariff. And I should point out, as Michael and many of our listeners would know, Canada was granted an extra special high rate of 50% on a number of products, so congratulations. And Brazil...

**Michael LeBlanc** (4:09)
Good luck buying that hockey stick. Good luck buying that hockey stick, all you listeners out there, for a reasonable amount of money.

**Steve Dennis** (4:15)
And Brazil, also for reasons unknown, Trump didn't like the election results, apparently, has a 25% rate on a bunch of products, several exemptions. The rationale for this policy, the Trump administration has tried two different angles to justify the tariffs. One, because it's actually a, not to get into the weeds too much, but it's a power that's largely vested in the Congress, not the president. So first was he declared an emergency, wasn't really clear what the emergency was, so that was a problem. The other issue was this calculation around the balance of payments, trade deficits, and this crazy formula that was part of Liberation Day.