Kecia Steelman: The Leader Who Never Left the Floor
From retail associate to CEO of Ulta Beauty, Kecia Steelman’s journey proves that resilience, operational excellence, and people-first leadership create lasting success.
Kecia Steelman didn’t get her leadership training in a classroom. She got it standing behind a register, folding clothes, and figuring out, one shift at a time, what it actually takes to run a business that depends on people showing up. She was a young single mother working retail when most of her future peers in the C-suite were still finishing business school. She didn’t hide that fact later in her career. She built her entire leadership identity on it.
Kecia started as an assistant store manager at Target. It was hard, unglamorous work, and there was nothing about that period that promised a corner office. She has described it flatly as earning her “PhD in life,” poor, hungry, determined, no cushioning, no shortcuts. From there she moved through senior operating roles at Home Depot and Family Dollar, building a track record grounded in operations, not theory. When she joined Ulta Beauty in 2014 as Senior Vice President of Operations, she brought that same floor-level fluency with her, and she didn’t stop climbing. Over the next decade she moved through escalating leadership roles, including Chief Operating Officer, becoming the executive who understood exactly how the stockroom connected to the strategy table.
Earning It, Not Waiting for It
Kecia has been open about being passed over for roles earlier in her career, and she doesn’t sugarcoat how that felt. Her response wasn’t resentment. It was a decision, one she’s stated directly: choose to be better, not bitter. That decision paid off. When she was named President and CEO of Ulta Beauty in January 2025, it wasn’t a leap of faith by the board. It was the payoff of over a decade spent earning trust from the inside out, role by role, with no shortcuts taken.
Moving Fast, Not Cautiously
Kecia didn’t ease into the CEO role. Within her first year, she pushed Ulta Beauty beyond its long-standing U.S. base and into international markets, including the United Kingdom, Mexico, and the Middle East, a bold move for a company that had built its identity on domestic dominance. That’s not incrementalism. That’s a new CEO making a statement about where she intends to take the business.
She’s paired that external ambition with a clear internal agenda. Under her leadership, Ulta’s MUSE Accelerator continues to back emerging beauty and wellness brands, many founded by women of color, with real funding and mentorship, not symbolic gestures. It reflects a leadership philosophy Kecia states plainly: an industry built on beauty should make room for the people who’ve historically been shut out of building it.
Refusing to Perform a Role
What sets Kecia apart isn’t just where she’s led the business. It’s how she refuses to perform leadership the way earlier generations were forced to. She’s said outright that she once felt female leaders had to act harder and more masculine to be taken seriously, and that she paid a personal price for it, missing school concerts and soccer games to prove her commitment. She’s not interested in preserving that model for the next generation of women coming up under her. She’s actively dismantling it, building an organization where flexibility isn’t treated as a weakness and where culture carries as much weight as performance on paper.
“Culture is everything,” she’s said, and she backs it up by showing up in stores herself, in person, unannounced, paying attention to how a space feels rather than how sharp it looks on a walkthrough. Kecia Steelman didn’t rise because someone opened a door for her. She rose because she refused to stop climbing, and now she’s making sure the door stays open behind her.
