Walmart’s Beauty Strategy Has a Gen X Problem

Bluemercury identified Generation X as one of its biggest opportunities last year and built a campaign around women over 40 to capture it. Ulta CEO Kecia Steelman told Yahoo Finance in early April that catering to older shoppers is now part of company strategy. Sephora told CNBC it is actively expanding brands aimed at the high-spending Gen X group. The data behind those moves is straightforward: Circana reports Gen X households accounted for 44% of total beauty dollars over the past year, with skincare leading the mix, and NielsenIQ projects the cohort’s beauty market will grow 1.3 times its current size in the next five years.

Walmart has been building toward the same shopper without naming her. The premium brand additions, the Marketplace expansion, and the share gains in high-income households all converge on Gen X. The question for suppliers is whether the strategy is structurally complete, and the answer turns on a service expectation Walmart’s footprint cannot easily meet.

The Income Math Already Points at Gen X

Walmart’s most quoted growth story over the past two years has been its share gains with high-income households. On the company’s fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call, new CEO John Furner told analysts that the majority of share gains again came from households making more than $100,000. CFO John David Rainey told CNBC in February that fashion gains in the quarter came almost entirely from households earning above that threshold.

That data is often read as a cue to chase affluent shoppers as a single block. The Gen X numbers reframe the same trend. Households at the financial peak of their earning years, with established brand loyalties and rising skincare spend, are not a separate audience from the high-income cohort Walmart keeps citing. They are a substantial part of it. NielsenIQ estimates the cohort will spend $15.2 trillion in 2025 alone, with annual spend rising to $23 trillion by 2035, and projects Gen X will remain the highest-spending generation in the world through 2033. AlixPartners consultant Lindy Firstenberg told CNBC that Gen X spending power runs nearly 25% above the national average.

The implication for line review preparation is specific. Walmart’s vice president of merchandising for beauty, Vinima Shekhar, said in a company press release tied to last year’s Beauty Event that the retailer’s customers range from teens to women navigating perimenopause and beyond. Suppliers presenting to the merchant team should not treat Gen X as a sub-segment within a broader premium pitch. The cohort warrants its own slide, with its own assortment logic, and its own Connect plan.

The Premium Build Fits the Cohort, with Different Implications by Channel

Walmart added more than 40 premium beauty brands in 2025, including Color Wow, Kenra, and TULA, according to the company. The retailer announced an expanded La Roche-Posay rollout earlier this month, with Shekhar framing the partnership around the brand’s medical-grade skincare positioning. Walmart Marketplace launched a dedicated Premium Beauty storefront in 2024, opening a 3P pathway for prestige and emerging brands that previously had no shelf path through 1P. Each move fits the Circana finding that skincare is Gen X’s top beauty category.

For 1P suppliers, the strategic question is whether existing line architecture has a Gen X SKU set or whether the cohort is being served accidentally by products developed for general anti-aging shelves. Brands with explicit menopause, perimenopause, or longevity formulations are likely to find more receptive merchant conversations than they would have two years ago. Suppliers without that work done should consider whether reformulation or repositioning is faster than waiting for category expansion to absorb them.

For 3P sellers in Premium Beauty on Marketplace, the calculus is different. The Marketplace storefront gives sellers direct control over brand storytelling, content depth, and founder narratives, which are the elements Sephora’s executive vice president of merchandising, Carolyn Bojanowski, told CNBC resonate with Gen X clients. Sellers should build product detail pages that lead with clinical claims, ingredient rationale, and founder credibility rather than with discount mechanics. The standard Marketplace optimization playbook, tuned for price-sensitive search behavior, does not match how this cohort makes purchase decisions.

The Service Gap Is the Weak Link

The CNBC source repeatedly returned to a point Walmart’s strategy does not yet answer. Firstenberg told the network that the importance of knowledgeable sales associates is 23% higher for Gen X than for Gen Z. Members of the cohort grew up at department store counters and expect education, curation, and one-on-one service as part of the purchase. Ulta’s investment in wellness specialists, Sephora’s expansion of dedicated brand consultants, and Bluemercury’s high-touch model are all built around that expectation.

Walmart’s answer so far is the Beauty Bars pilot, which the retailer launched in 40 stores in spring 2025 alongside its Beauty Event sale. The pilot offers shopper guidance and sampling experiences. Forty stores against a Walmart U.S. fleet of roughly 4,600 stores is a test, not an answer. Even at meaningful scale, the format would need to deliver service quality competitive with specialty retailers staffed by associates trained on prestige brand portfolios, not generalists rotated across the store.

This is the gap suppliers should plan around rather than expect Walmart to close in the near term. The retailer’s structural advantages, including store proximity, price, omnichannel speed, and the assortment breadth Glossy reported in March 2026, do not extend to in-store category expertise. Suppliers who are counting on the Walmart associate to educate the Gen X shopper at shelf are counting on the wrong thing.

The implication for Connect budget allocation is that upper-funnel education work matters more for this cohort than it would for a Gen Z launch. Display advertising on Walmart’s owned properties and through Walmart DSP gives suppliers the ability to deliver the brand education and ingredient explanation the in-store environment cannot. Sponsored Brands placements that lead with credentialing, such as clinical studies, dermatologist endorsement, and founder expertise, earn more on a Gen X audience than the same dollars spent on conversion-focused Sponsored Products. Replenishment-team conversations should reflect the longer consideration cycle this cohort runs through, with planning bias toward sustained presence rather than burst-driven promotion.

What This Changes for the Next Cycle

The data CNBC reported is not a near-term opportunity. NielsenIQ’s projection runs through 2033 at minimum, with peak spending extending to 2035. Suppliers building assortment and Connect plans for fiscal 2027 line reviews are planning for a cohort that will be Walmart’s largest beauty consumer block for the better part of the next decade.

The retailer’s premium build, Marketplace expansion, and high-income share gains all converge on the same shopper. The question for suppliers is whether their own product, pricing, content, and media plans converge there too, and whether they have a strategy for the service gap Walmart’s footprint cannot solve on its own. Shekhar told the company press tied to the La Roche-Posay rollout that Walmart is anchoring its beauty strategy in customer access across every tier of the category. The suppliers who will benefit most are the ones who treat Gen X as a tier of its own.

Winning With Walmart

Winning With Walmart is an independent platform for suppliers, sellers, solution providers, and industry experts.

Articles are developed by staff editors, contributing experts, and trusted partners.

Some are researched and drafted with the assistance of AI tools and are reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by Winning With Walmart editors before publication.

Editorial judgment, sourcing decisions, and final approval rest with the publication's human editors in every case.

We are committed to accuracy and fairness. If you believe this article contains an error, we welcome your feedback.