By NEAL WAGNER / Managing Editor

ALABASTER – As a frequent shopper at the Ulta Beauty store at Hoover’s Patton Creek shopping center, Julie Glasscock found her perfect job when the company began looking for a manager for its new Alabaster location.

“I just love Ulta anyway, and I frequently shopped at the store in Hoover,” Glasscock said during an Oct. 12 interview as she managed the freshly opened Alabaster Ulta store. “I live in Helena, so it’s nice to have this store a little closer to home.”

Glasscock and her employees have seen a “wonderful” amount of business since the store opened its doors for a soft opening on Oct. 9, and were seeing higher-than-expected traffic at the store on Oct. 12 due to the Columbus Day holiday.

“It’s been going well. We’ve been doing (business) well above what we expected,” Glasscock said.

In less than a year, construction crews demolished the former maurices store between Dicks Sporting Goods and Best Buy in Alabaster’s South Promenade shopping center and constructed a new 70-foot-wide by 145-foot-deep building to house the new Ulta store.

The Highway 31/11 LLC development company owns the Dick’s Sporting Goods property and developed the adjacent Ulta Beauty store.

During a February meeting, the Alabaster City Council voted unanimously to approve an incentives package for Highway 31/11 LLC valued at up to $516,000 over the next five years. The vote came after a public hearing on the matter, during which no residents spoke for or against the incentives.

For the past several weeks, Glasscock and her employees have been working to construct the inside of the store “from the ground up.”

“We unloaded boxes, we put together displays, everything,” she said. “So it’s nice to get to reap the benefits of that now.”

The store is now open during its regular business hours from 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays, and from 11 a.m.-6 p.m. on Sundays.

On Oct. 16, the store will hold a grand opening ceremony at 10 a.m., and will award “beauty treats” to the first 100 customers at the store on Oct. 16, 17 and 18. The free gifts will be valued between $5 and $100.