Kory Marchisotto is not any stranger to being first.

The chief marketing officer of E.l.f. Beauty and president of Keys Soulcare, who first brought the brand on then-fledgling TikTok and whipped up the brand’s viral Jennifer Coolidge industrial for the Super Bowl in a mere three weeks, likes to be first to any space. It’s what she calls “moving on the speed of culture.”

When she has an idea, “Don’t do it in six months, or nine months, or 12 months from now when all of the KPIs are perfect and buttoned up,” she said. “Do it now. Jump within the deep end of the pool, and begin swimming.”

That’s a very important tenet of her roadmap to success: starting with getting ingrained within the audience, dream big, put one’s feet on the bottom and end with lightning fast execution.

Marchisotto was the primary of her siblings to attend college, when she landed a job at Parfums Givenchy after a slew of economic job interviews that she found sterile. “Minute one within the Givenchy office, I used to be totally seduced,” she said. “I spotted the facility of how beauty makes you’re feeling, that this was a category with a deep emotional connection — this wasn’t actually about selling products. It was about feelings, emotions, and that you might touch people in a way I had never seen within the CPG space, or in anything I had studied.”

From there, she went to Puig, working on brands like Jean Paul Gaultier, Paco Rabanne and Nina Ricci. After that, she worked on a slew of designer brands at Shiseido. She carried lessons from each to E.l.f.

“Once I take into consideration where I began, it’s an incredible collection of experiences,” Marchisotto said. “Jean Paul Gaultier is the last word anti-conformist. Issey Miyake taught me the facility of infinite curiosity…my experience with Burberry was digital domination, they taught me about having my finger on the heart beat of digital synapses. I worked at Hermès, I still have orange blood in my veins, they taught me about fascinating and compelling storytelling, and I worked on Narciso Rodriguez for years, which taught me discipline.”

In 2019, when Marchisotto joined E.l.f., the goal was to translate her learnings from prestige beauty — with high-spend consumers she calls “the lucky few” — to the touch more shoppers via beauty.

“It’s a culture of innovation and humility,” she said of the ethos of E.l.f. “That’s what makes us a unicorn; I used to be drawn to the concept that you could be each disruptive and do it with humanity. The second thing is, I saw limitless potential.”

Amongst her coups is Keys Soulcare, the brand she helms alongside founder Alicia Keys, which she sees as the longer term of beauty. “Beauty has to deliver greater than a functional profit, greater than going to cut back advantageous lines and wrinkles,” she said. “It takes me full circle to what I learned the minute I walked into Givenchy, which is all about how people feel. [Brands] must deliver a deep, meaningful emotional resonance that’s on this bridge between beauty and wellness. Beauty must transcend into one other dimension.”