“Mad Money” host Jim Cramer doesn’t usually fangirl over the chief executives he interviews on his CNBC show.
But in a memorable on-air interview with E.l.f. CEO Tarang Amin in 2023, he did just that during a discussion about the key drivers of the company’s 15th consecutive quarter of growth. (E.l.f. has since notched up 21.) After Amin outlined the product innovation and social media wins fueling E.l.f.’s resonance, Cramer asked how the company is able to stay so close to its consumers.
“We have a knack because we have this great workforce that knows our consumers,” Amin answered, detailing E.l.f.’s internal demographics: A workforce that is more than 65 percent Gen Z and Millennial, more than 75 percent women and more than 40 percent diverse. Not to mention a board of directors, one of only 4 out of 4,200 in corporate America, that is two-thirds women and one-third minority.
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“I’m gonna break form here for a sec,” Cramer replied, setting aside his script.
“It ain’t coincidental that you are where you are with who you have.”
Amin couldn’t agree more. The soft-spoken CEO is an ardent believer that E.l.f.’s oversized success is driven by its internal culture, one that places a premium on equity and diversity.
“I actually started my career in beauty many, many years ago as part of the team that relaunched Pantene in the early ’90s. I love beauty,” he said. “I love the passion for ideas, the passion for innovation. But one of the things I didn’t like about beauty is sometimes it felt exclusionary.”
In fact, one of the very earliest goals he set for himself when he became CEO in 2014 was to diversify the company’s workforce. “The first goal I had was I wanted our team to reflect the community we served, so that’s the reason why we’re so diverse,” Amin said. “If you have a team that reflects your community, you can operate much faster. You’re not having to go to a focus group to figure out what do they like, or how they’re engaging, or where are they living.”
Amin is equally as passionate about driving diversity and inclusion on Wall Street and not just at E.l.f., setting a goal to help double the rate of women and diverse members added to corporate boards by 2027.
E.l.f. kicked off the “Change the Board Game” initiative earlier this year when it announced a partnership with the National Association of Corporate Directors and its sponsorship of 20 women and/or diverse board-ready candidates through NACD Accelerate, a two-year program that creates a pathway for executives to prepare for board service.
In May, it highlighted that ambition with a mic-drop media campaign on digital screens surrounding Wall Street called “So Many Dicks.”
Working with purpose-driven agency Oberland, E.l.f. conducted research on corporate boards in the U.S. learning that men named Richard, Rick, or Dick (Dicks) serving on these public company boards outnumbered women and diverse groups.
“We don’t want to be one of just four, and we feel we have a responsibility as good corporate citizens to encourage others,” said Amin of the campaign.
“It all starts with intention,” added E.l.f. chief financial officer Mandy Fields. “It’s been very intentional to have more women on our board, because that’s the community that we serve to ensure that there are diverse candidates as a part of our board selection. Just setting that intention helps to get things moving. Without an intention or a goal or something to anchor back to, you just kind of wander out there.”
Not every company is willing to put itself out there with such a bold campaign, but for Fields, what better way to get Wall Street to more effectively champion diversity and inclusion.
“I actually got a lot of compliments on the ‘Change the Board Game’ campaign. It was a unique E.l.f. way of breaking through on that topic,” she said. “Diverse groups, diverse management teams, boards of directors, they generate better results than other companies. No one can argue with our 21 consecutive quarters of growth, we’re doing the right thing at E.l.f.”
When it comes to ensuring this ethos cascades down through the rest of the organization, Scott Milsten, senior vice president, general counsel and chief people officer at E.l.f. Beauty, stressed that the key is that the employee base should mirror the consumers that it serves.
“We start from a common place of, this is a beauty company, a young beauty company,” he said. “It naturally attracts like-minded people.”
While E.l.f. does not have quotas, its recruiting team is always mindful of presenting a diverse slate of candidates, he said.
Amin has also created an environment where everyone’s free to give pinpointed, specific feedback in the spirit of helping the team succeed, eradicating the need for performance reviews. “No one ever has to wonder what I’m thinking. I will tell you,” he said. “I want to make sure everyone is comfortable being able to express themselves….I didn’t want the crutch of a performance review. I wanted to take away that stuff. Sometimes the reviews were based on who’s going to get paid more, who’s going to get paid less. For me, it’s like, no, we’re all in this together. I want everyone actually to make a lot of money. I want everyone to rise and fall together.”
Amin doesn’t just pay lip service to this idea. He put his money where his mouth was, literally, creating a compensation program that gives equity to every employee no matter where they are based or what their level is.
“I said that on Day One, I want to make sure it’s not just the people on the top, but every single person working in the company who benefits from the long-term value creation we’re going to have,” said Amin.
That included all global markets, which before the company went public was no easy task, having to create something called phantom equity.
“We have a real belief that outsized performance should deliver outsized returns to everybody, and we’re super pleased that it has,” said Milsten. “It makes your work way more impactful. I would just cringe at the thought of going into a room and watching a stock price, and six people are celebrating, and 27 people don’t know what we’re high-fiving about. It doesn’t work for me on a personal level. It doesn’t work for Tarang on a personal level, which is why we really set out to do it a different way.”
To engage with staff, Amin sends out a weekly company note email that began in the pandemic (his 227th had been published at press time) and then there’s afternoon at the Amins.
Each summer, he invites everyone on the leadership team and their significant other from all markets to his house for cocktails and food. He does two in California, where the company is headquartered, and one in New York.
“We’re flying people from London to have cocktails at Tarang’s house. It’s one team, one dream, right? There’s no ‘oh, the U.S. leaders are important, not the U.K. leaders,’” said Milsten.
Marcus Collins, a former Wieden + Kennedy executive who is a professor of marketing at the University of Michigan, has seen that dynamic at play firsthand. Invited to speak at an E.l.f. off-site in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, he started chatting with a tablemate at dinner. It turned out that she had joined the company about two months prior and was the office coordinator.
Surprised that even such a relatively recent hire would be invited on a company trip to an exotic locale, Collins mentioned the encounter during his tech check the following morning with Amin and some other executives.
“‘Oh, you met Rosie!’,” he recalled Amin saying to him, stunned that the CEO even knew her name.
“I’ve never seen a CEO, CMO, CPO anywhere know the people who are lower in the social hierarchy of the organization,” said Collins, who has worked with Nike, Google, Apple and others over the course of his career. “This idea about a focus on people and democratization — it is real,” he continued, laughingly noting that the one of the most popular sessions of the off-site was about EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization].
“The fact that everyone owns shares is not normal. That is a democratizing aspect,” Collins said. “Beauty is just a vehicle for which E.l.f. shows up in the world, but they are driven by something much greater and it is made tangible and manifests through their cultural practices.”
