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19 May

E.l.f. CEO Tarang Amin’s Three-Part Leadership Strategy – WWD

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 chief who has led E.l.f. through 16 consecutive quarters of growth said it’s taken him his a long time spent in consumer goods to search out his winning strategies.

“I’ve been in the buyer space for 32 years, helping construct brands in sectors as varied as food to paper to home care,” he said. “I spent eight years on Pantene as a 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.”

Amin’s formula for fulfillment is threefold — ”End up, disrupt your industry, and aspire to vary the world,” he said — and it’s a through-line that has defined his entire profession.

“For much of my time, I felt like an outsider,” Amin said. “Just a few years ago, I used to be on this stage, talking about finding your superpowers. The more I reflected on it, I spotted my outsider perspective is probably my superpower. I needed to look no further than inspiration from our founders, who brought a recent perspective and a recent value to our industry.”

That penchant for industry disruption extends across all facets of the corporate, including its workforce. E.l.f.’s worker base is greater than 75 percent women and greater than 65 percent Millennial and Gen Z. “There was an area of the industry I didn’t like — people at the highest will get to toil for years before being assured financial security on your family,” Amin said. “Incentive systems were misaligned and causing conflict. We modified our system to create wealth for our employees and align us as one team in the wonder space. We’ve given away over $100 million of equity just with our employees.”

Beyond that, Amin strives to create a collaborative culture. “How can we develop passionate relationships, encourage healthy conflict and demand mutual accountability?” he said. “You could be considering we’re way too generous with our employees, however it’s well-known that higher engagement results in higher productivity. In actual fact, while you have a look at sales and profit per worker, E.l.f. is three to 5 times more productive.”

The result’s an organization that brings prestige-quality formulas and trends to mass market, and infrequently, before anyone else. The key lies within the marketing.

“I often consider us more as an entertainment company that happens to sell cosmetics and skincare,” Amin said. “We love entertaining, either on our own channel, or once we’re dramatizing the advantage 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 appears 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 in regards to the future.”

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