The pandemic has wrecked many beauty brands. Stores closed. People on lockdown didn’t need makeup, and still didn’t need lipstick when they left home wearing masks.
Yet e.l.f. has defied competitors’ steep double-digit declines with growth of 8% and 7% respectively the past two quarters. Part of that was being well positioned. The 16-year-old brand founded in e-commerce still gets most sales that way and had no need to pivot. Most of its other retail distribution is at Target and Walmart stores that never closed. And with an average $5 price for its makeup, e.l.f. was an affordable luxury for anyone wanting to trade down in a recession.
But e.l.f. mainly earned its place among Marketers of the Year through what it did before the pandemic that served it well later—like mastering TikTok—and what it didn’t do once the pandemic started: panic.
Leading the marketing is Kory Marchisotto, a beauty veteran who spent most of her career with Shiseido before she was hired by e.l.f. Chairman-CEO Tarang Amin in February 2019 to lead a marketing “recharge” of a brand that had stumbled in 2018 against an onslaught of influencer-fronted brands.
“We rewrote the brand book, the color codes, the cues, the messaging, the story line,” says Marchisotto. “And we went to market with this incredible campaign. So when COVID hit we were riding this incredible wave of resurgence.”
In October 2019, when competitors were just starting to talk about TikTok, e.l.f. launched its first campaign on the platform built around a 15-second “Eyes Lips Face” song—developed by Movers & Shakers and inspired by Kash Doll’s 2018 hit “Ice Me Out”—to remind people what the brand acronym stands for. E.l.f. has since spawned 10 billion views for its content on the platform.