The CEO of e.l.f. Beauty on Maintaining a Startup Culture While Scaling
Kelsey McClellan
Summary.
Even as it has become a major player in the beauty industry, e.l.f. continues to operate like a startup, driven by its vision, mission, and values, acting as one nonhierarchical, passionate, high-performance team, and constantly exploring how to move further and faster than the competition.In 2024 e.l.f. Beauty became the company with the top-selling mass cosmetics brand in the United States, as measured by unit sales, surpassing all its legacy competitors. It was a big milestone, and in one of my weekly notes to our 500 team members, I congratulated everyone on reaching it. But we didn’t pause for a big celebration. Instead we immediately asked ourselves, How quickly can we get from number two to number one in dollar sales, as well?