As government mandates have shuttered Ulta Beauty stores, a large number of customers have engaged with the retailer online for the first time, and Ulta moved quickly to take advantage of the new audience, CEO Mary Dillon said on the retailer’s first-quarter earnings call. “We’ve got a lot of guests who've never shopped online with us before who are now converting to omni-channel guests, I guess out of necessity. The more that we can keep them shopping multiple channels, the better. They spend almost three times as much historically as somebody who shops in stores only.”

Ulta executives rushed to launch a curbside pickup program and beef up the retailer’s buy-online-pickup-in-store program. “Since launching this option six weeks ago, we've seen a nice acceleration in the average number of orders per store, strong average order values and high satisfaction ratings,” Dillon said. The efforts paid off. Though same-store sales plunged 35.3 percent year over year for the quarter, “we more than doubled our e-commerce sales,” she said.

Approximately 840 of Ulta’s 1,264 stores are open for curbside pickup. A quarter of Ulta's total stores are open to guests for retail, and salon services are open in 283. The retailer expects all stores to be operational by the end of June. “While it’s early in the reopening process, we've seen stronger-than-expected sales in reopened stores, and we're seeing great guest engagement with our salon services, with many appointments booked several weeks out,” Dillon said.

In stores and online, the retailer is using tech tools to mitigate the fact that shoppers can’t test and play with Ulta’s products in store. Since the crisis began, engagement with the app’s virtual experience for trying products has increased five-fold. “We know there's a strong connection in beauty between the digital and the physical, and we're looking at our brick-and-mortar footprint and how we can accelerate our efforts to build a comprehensive multi-channel view of how we serve our guests,” she said.

To that end, Ulta plans to invest $92 million in new stores, remodels and merchandise fixtures in 2020. The company, which has about $1.5 billion in cash on hand, will open 30 to 40 new stores in 2020 and relocate three stores. “We have chosen to defer some store openings into 2021 and are currently evaluating what the right pace of new store openings should be next year,” Dillon said. “We have a strong and profitable fleet of stores, and given the new operating environment, we plan to accelerate efforts to strengthen our fleet through relocations, negotiations with our landlord partners and potential store closures.”