Shelf Shift - Beauty 2.0 at Walmart

By Holly Batagower, Senior Director of Customer Success and Growth at Snap2Insight.

Walk into three Walmart beauty departments this year and the differences jump out immediately — the security, the associates, the whole feel of the place.

• Beauty 2.0 format: wide open at the front door, associates actively merchandising, lotions still on the exterior wall near beauty on the way out — in a noticeably higher-income trade area than the other two.
• Locked format: back of the store, one-way gates at the entrance, half the section locked behind glass, mirrors on the ceiling. That kind of setup has been shown to cut category sales 15–25% before you even get to a facings question (The Week, Jul 2024).
• Legacy format: an ordinary aisle, gaps on the pegs, thin facings — a section that hasn't been walked in a while.
• The 2.0 remodel leans in on some categories, drops others
• Not all 2.0 stores are the same 2.0

None of that tells you what actually matters: which categories and brands are winning the shelf inside each of those three sets. Walmart has 650 stores in active Beauty 2.0 remodel this year — that's a lot of space getting reallocated, and a walkthrough won't tell you where it landed.

The real split isn't locked-case vs. legacy aisle vs. Beauty 2.0. It's that inside any one of those formats, some categories are gaining space and some are quietly losing it, and some brands are holding their facings while others get squeezed — and you can't see that standing in the aisle. I couldn't, and I've been doing this a while.

Comparing the high-security store to the remodeled 2.0-format store, the department didn't just get a security facelift — the category mix itself changed. The 2.0 set leans in hard on cosmetics, with an even wider brand roster (essence, Rimmel, and Revolution joining the usual L'Oréal, Maybelline, CoverGirl, e.l.f., NYX, and Milani lineup), and on nail care, with color, tools, press-ons, and even a seasonal endcap. The biggest shift is hair: hair tools, hair accessories, hair color, and hair care/styling all got their own dedicated real estate, well beyond anything in the high-security store's footprint. Cosmetic bags and travel accessories, a standalone beauty-tools/brushes/sponges/lashes section, and kids' beauty rounded out the additions. At the same time, several categories that were present in the high-security store didn't show up in the 2.0 remodel's beauty run at all: bath & body, men's and women's shaving/hair removal, family planning/sexual wellness, and sun care/self-tanning. This isn't a straight swap of the same categories into nicer fixtures — Beauty 2.0 is pulling hair and nail much further into the "beauty" footprint, while shaving, bath & body, and family planning look like they've been relocated elsewhere in the store or dropped from this section entirely.

As I entered both stores, my view was the same. Beauty front and center, same program, same intent. But in one, skincare is built into the main set (CeraVe, La Roche-Posay, Cetaphil). In the other, it's pushed out to the exterior wall. And, cosmetics were wide open sets in one store, yet sealed behind locked glass in the other. Same brand, same signage, two different shopping experiences. I found a second 2.0 store since, and I was surprised how much varied between them, especially skincare. In the first, skincare flowed within the same continuous run as the rest of the beauty fixtures. In this one, it's its own dedicated aisle (CeraVe, La Roche-Posay, Olay, No7, acne care) with its own aisle signage, separate from the cosmetics, nail, and hair sets up front. And the cosmetics case that was locked in the last 2.0 store I walked? Wide open here — L'Oréal, Maybelline, Physicians Formula, all sitting on open shelving. Same banner, same intent, different shelf — which is exactly the kind of variance a store walk won't catch consistently across every door.

If you sell into these accounts, this is exactly the blind spot Snap2Insight was built to close. We turn photos of the set into facings and share of shelf by category, brand, and UPC — so you know whether you are gaining or losing ground in this reset, instead of guessing from a walkthrough.