It Starts with the Community

Your products are now sold in stores like Target and Walmart, but e.l.f. very much started as one of the cosmetic industry's first digitally native brands, and you have fiercely loyal, highly engaged consumers who have contributed more than 130,000 product reviews on your website. You became CEO in 2014 but could you tell us the story of how did e.l.f. go about selling this new concept of making makeup available as purely an e-commerce market?

I give a lot of that credit to the founders, Allen and Joey Schama who are fearless entrepreneurs and wanted to start and really disrupt the market by creating something completely different, and having cosmetics sold over the Internet add these extraordinary values every day, and really, came from adversity. I think when they first started their business, they wanted to get into retail distribution and were rejected by a number of different retailers on that very model, so Joey actually started, at the time, I was at face.com which is our original e-commerce site, and then did something remarkable at the time. People, one, thought they were crazy for selling cosmetics over the Internet but they were really savvy in terms of how they were able to create this model that got the best of beauty and made it accessible to everyone, and then the second thing is they authentically built this community, they let consumers leave reviews, they responded to every review, and it created this really great and viral and organic community base who felt that the brand was theirs, and they have since been our best advocates, so it's such a core part of our DNA all the way back to the founding of the company.

And so, that, of course, led to great success, right? e.l.f. is now the number one e-commerce site in cosmetics, and what strategies did you put in place not only to create this digitally native cosmetics company but also to dominate that category in addition to creating that incredible sense of social media community that you just talked about?

Well, I think it starts with the community. As long as your entire mission is making the best of beauty accessible to every eyes, lip, and face, it was inherently inclusive, a great deal on empowerment, and really in service of our community, so I think being very open to what did our consumers want, how did they want to interact with us, engage with us, and how do we best serve them is really what has created this over the last really 14, 15 years.