Tarang Amin, chairman and chief executive officer of E.l.f. Beauty, doesn’t just want his firm to be a different kind of beauty company. He wants E.l.f. to be a different type of company — period.
“Our ambition is to build brands that disrupt norms, shape culture and connect communities through positivity, inclusivity and accessibility,” he said at the WWD Apparel & Retail CEO Summit.
A key part of this vision is for all employees to enjoy the fruits of their labor (sales surged from around $100 million to $1.3 billion in a decade and it just clocked in its 23rd consecutive quarter of growth), creating a compensation program that gives equity to every employee no matter where they are based or what their level is.
“At E.l.f., we grant equity to every employee, every year, everywhere around the world. Since our IPO in 2016, excluding the executive officers, we’ve granted $180 million of equity in a stock that’s gone up six times,” he said.
“We started with 120 employees. We still only have 550 employees, driving that $6 billion market cap,” he explained. “Our equity value’s now accumulated to about $1 billion so that’s about on average $2 million per employee. We’re really serious about driving meaningful wealth creation for each person.”
That ownership mindset, in turn, also leads to a high-performance team culture at E.l.f., according to Amin. “We don’t take anything for granted from a high-performance team culture point of view. We train people on how do you develop passionate relationships, how do you give pinpointed specific feedback in the spirit of helping the team succeed and how do you drive mutual accountability.”
At the same time, he wants to make sure the company is doing what employees value. This is highlighted by the company’s approach to charitable donations. Instead of giving employees a few options, E.l.f. lets them donate to any cause that’s important to them. Then the company matches that, and Amin and his wife also match the donation.
“That in turn leads to incredible levels of engagement — 97 percent of our employees recommend working at E.l.f.,” Amin said.
At the heart of all this lies E.l.f.’s diverse workforce and boardroom, with Amin early on setting this as an important goal.
“We’re the only public company in the U.S. out of 4,100 that has a board of directors that’s 78 percent women and 44 percent diverse,” he said.
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 unveiled 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 serving on these public company boards outnumbered women and diverse groups.
“There’s nothing wrong with being Richard, Rick or Dick. We just need to make room for everybody else,” he said.
E.l.f.’s wider workforce is more than 75 percent women and more than 40 percent diverse.
“At E.l.f. we know who we are and why we exist and our E.l.f. ethos powers our purpose. Our purpose powers our people. Our people power our performance, which creates possibilities. We always say at E.l.f., anything is elfing possible and the results speak for themselves.”
