Ulta Beauty Creates Cutting-Edge Digital Experiences Through "Low Code" Strategy

Ulta Beauty is creating new online experiences using pre-built modules. Since 2016, the beauty behemoth has collaborated with enterprise technology development platform provider Lterate.ai to create, deploy, and scale a number of cutting-edge digital customer experiences. Ulta Beauty makes use of the company's Interplay middleware solution, which is a drag-and-drop environment for rapid app development and production through modularized, pre-built components.

Interplay provides Ulta Beauty with a low-code environment that allows for customization as well as drag-and-drop functionality. The platform comes with 475 pre-built modules that include advanced AI/ML, IoT, voice, headless commerce, blockchain, data integration, and API connections.

“We could not have built the cutting-edge applications as efficiently as we did without our partners at Iterate.ai,” said Michelle Pacynski, VP of digital innovation at Ulta Beauty. “As early believers and first-movers on Iterate’s low-code invention, we quickly understood which applications were going to work and which weren’t. The ability to experiment rapidly allowed us to make confident, data-backed decisions that have allowed us to capitalize on opportunities where we can authentically and directly engage our guests in various experiences.” he continued.

Using Interplay, Ulta Beauty was able to develop a number of customer-facing solutions with rapid experimentation and minimal hardcoding. These include an updated version of GlamLab, Ulta's AR-based mobile app feature that allows customers to see how different beauty products would look on them.

Ulta Beauty also worked with Interplay to create an artificial intelligence (AI)-based skincare virtual beauty advisor that is available on the ulta.com e-commerce site. Customers can use the virtual advisor to browse the retailer's skincare selection by concern or by-product.
The virtual beauty advisor asks a series of questions that are dynamically generated and then presents a set of personalized recommendations that can be reviewed and then purchased.