Pros
Fast growing company with a lot of good, dedicated employees. The products are fun. The workplace environment is reasonable balanced.
Cons
Mary Dillon, the CEO, is an incredibly lucky woman. After a career full of mediocrity, capped most recently by a putrid performance at US Cellular, she stepped into this rocketship. She talks a good game, and she is not without political talent--you should see the way she massages the board members--but she has not made one significant, strategic contribution to this business. She made some cosmetic changes to the culture (which have not borne much fruit if the reviews on this site are any indication), brought in a bunch of her lackeys, and has done nothing else but lap up the misplaced credit the analysts and press are so willing to give her. Of all her faults, the most damaging is her lack of confidence. I'm not talking about her public facade, which she artfully maintains. I'm talking about the voices deep in her psyche, the ones telling her she doesn't deserve her success, that she could lose it all at any moment. They incessantly chip away at her brittle self-assurance. She fights these internal whispers by surrounding herself with executives who constantly validate her with false praise. Her real worth will be revealed in about two years, when the business inertia she inherited fades and the pipeline of new store opportunities starts to run dry. If she hasn't contributed something meaningful to the company's strategy by then, the bloom will be off the rose. Knowing Mary's luck, she will already be gone by then. Some board full of suckers, enthralled with her "success" at ULTA, will have hired her away with a huge pay package. But the voices will still be there.
