For Tarang Amin, chief executive officer of E.l.f. Beauty, the third time’s the charm.
During his third time speaking at WWD’s annual Beauty CEO Summit, the executive who has led E.l.f. through 16 consecutive quarters of growth said it’s taken him his decades spent in consumer goods to find his winning strategies.
“I’ve been in the consumer space for 32 years, helping build brands in sectors as varied as food to paper to home care,” he said. “I spent eight years on Pantene as part of a team that moved sales from $50 million to $2 billion, a forty-fold increase, and I’ve now been CEO of E.l.f. Beauty for over nine years, helping grow shareholder equity from $135 million to $5 billion.”
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Amin’s formula for success is threefold — ”Find yourself, disrupt your industry, and aspire to change the world,” he said — and it’s a through-line that has defined his entire career.
“For much of my time, I felt like an outsider,” Amin said. “Just a couple of years ago, I was on this stage, talking about finding your superpowers. The more I reflected on it, I realized my outsider perspective is perhaps my superpower. I had to look no further than inspiration from our founders, who brought a new perspective and a new value to our industry.”
That penchant for industry disruption extends across all aspects of the company, including its workforce. E.l.f.’s employee base is more than 75 percent women and more than 65 percent Millennial and Gen Z. “There was an area of the industry I didn’t like — people at the top will get to toil for years before being assured financial security for your family,” Amin said. “Incentive systems were misaligned and causing conflict. We changed our system to create wealth for our employees and align us as one team in the beauty space. We’ve given away over $100 million of equity just with our employees.”
Beyond that, Amin strives to create a collaborative culture. “How do we develop passionate relationships, encourage healthy conflict and demand mutual accountability?” he said. “You might be thinking we’re way too generous with our employees, but it’s well known that higher engagement leads to higher productivity. In fact, when you look at sales and profit per employee, E.l.f. is three to five times more productive.”
The result is a corporation that brings prestige-quality formulas and trends to mass market, and often, before anyone else. The secret lies in the marketing.
“I often think of us more as an entertainment company that happens to sell cosmetics and skin care,” Amin said. “We love entertaining, either on our own channel, or when we’re dramatizing the benefit of our Power Grip Primer and the entertainment value of its stickiness, teaming up with Jennifer Coolidge and our first foray into TV.”
His strategy seems to be working. “We’re driving over half a billion dollars of net sales, and a $5 billion market cap with 350 employees,” he said. “So, we’re pretty bullish about the future.”