Building from TikTok, Twitch
In a similar fashion, e.l.f. originally entered TikTok “because there was a large community of people calling for us to be there,” Marchisotto said. “While everybody else was waiting on the side of the swimming pool for the right KPIs and the right monetization and the right way to present it to leadership, we were in the deep end swimming and figuring out how to do the backstroke in turbulent waters.”
The TikTok experience gave e.l.f. the confidence to enter Twitch, she said, “because what we learned on TikTok was that there was a high affinity for gaming.” E.l.f.’s partnership with Twitch has generated tens of billions of views and showed the brand there’s “an entire community of people who wanted to live at the intersection of gaming and beauty.”
Many brands have come and gone from Roblox, but e.l.f. plans to stick around long term, Marchisotto said. “We see a lot of brands create a campaign, they make some noise, and they leave,” she said. “What took us longer to get here is that we’re building a world that is permanent.”
Building e.l.f. Up! around entrepreneurship is part of that strategy because “we’re seeing this huge passion economy of these Gen Z and Alphas who really don’t want to work in traditional organizations anymore,” said Brad Timmons of eGen, a technology services company. “E.l.f. didn’t want to turn up in a makeup way. We wanted to turn up in a supportive way of those passion economies.”
Twitch also taught e.l.f. that the “Elfaverse” could be a safe place for self-expression among the brand’s fans in a way that gaming often isn’t.
“We knew that 77% of people, women, were reporting they were being bullied” on Twitch, Marchisotto said. “They were coming in under aliases. We wanted to create a world where they could feel safe. One thing that really stuck out to us was that 80% of Gen Z say that expressing themselves in immersive spaces helps them feel comfortable expressing themselves in physical spaces.”