While Vennette Ho, managing director, global head of beauty and personal care at Raymond James, is known as the go-to beauty banker for deals of all shapes and sizes, that career was not her original plan — and at the time it wasn’t even really a thing.
“It was a happy accident,” recounted Ho, among the 2025 CEW Achiever Honorees. “I started off in retail and stumbled into investment banking, despite the fact that I never wanted to be a banker in the first place.”
A graduate of Brown University who majored in history, Ho began her career as a fashion accessories assistant buyer at Bloomingdale’s before pivoting. “I left buying and merchandising and was hired by a former dress buyer at Macy’s who did equity research at Lazard, and I was covering retail and apparel. Then Financo found me in a résumé book in business school, and that was 21 years ago,” she said.
Related Articles
Eager to get her first big deal as a banker, she famously approached father and son Alan and Joey Shamah, founders of E.l.f. Cosmetics (now E.l.f. Beauty) and aided them in securing a minority investment from TSG Consumer Partners in 2011. Just a few years later, it was acquired by TPG Growth, with Ho once again advising the brand.
From there, she built out the beauty business from scratch.
“Financo was known as an apparel and retail investment bank, and beauty was something that was a bit on the side. It’s a big moment in a young banker’s career when you find your own deal and get your own client. You take a client from beginning to end and the very first deal that I did that for was a little father-and-son company on West 33rd Street, E.l.f. Cosmetics,” she said.
“My group head John Berg had a thesis that in the sector, the only way you could win was becoming a specialist,” Ho continued. “He said, ‘Vennette, don’t do anything else except beauty.’ I was initially resistant, and he said, ‘You’ve done more beauty deals than anyone else.’ That was like, two at the time. We built this entire practice from scratch.”
She quickly added to her deal list, including Paula’s Choice’s sale to Unilever, in addition to Huda Beauty to TSG and Drunk Elephant to Shiseido.
In her current role, she is one of five senior bankers that covers the sector. Though she’s both ridden and driven the beauty M&A wave of the last decade, she’s just as focused on leading her team as she is on leading her clients.
“My job is twofold,” she explained. “In sports terms, they call it a player-coach. It’s the coach, but also a player on the team, meaning I help spearhead our global efforts in this area, and help with a lot of the business development and the training and supporting our team and figuring out where we want to play. But I also do a lot of deals by myself, too.”
Despite the might of the practice — and the valuations of some of her greatest hits — Ho is hungry for transactions of all sizes. “I love deals, and because we work with a wide range of companies, we’re probably the bank that has the biggest range in size of the company. We’ll work with the company raising $20 million or work with the company selling for billions of dollars. And all of them are important to us.”
On being a woman in the male-dominated financial sector, Ho said: “This is a great sector to be a female banker, because inherently, there are a lot of female founders, and I have the ability to support a lot of women in great places.”
Her goal, she said, is not to be the best female banker in the sector. “The goal is to just be the best banker I can be.”