- I watched my mom be told no all the time.
No, you can't go to college.
Women don't go to college.
No, you can't fill your car with gas.
That's a man's job.
So for me, no became the fierce motivator.
It was like, yeah, you tell me no,
and I'll show you what yes looks like.
- Hey, I'm Sarah Franklin,
and welcome to Connections.
My guest today is Kory Marchisotto,
the CMO of e.l.f. beauty.
They're an Oakland-based company dedicated
to providing affordable beauty products
for every eye, lip, color and face.
e.l.f. has gone 100% digital
in the last two years,
and their business has taken off.
Kory is a no-nonsense trailblazer at the forefront
of innovation in marketing and commerce.
I caught up with her at Yerba Buena Gardens
here in San Francisco,
near the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial,
which felt fitting
given Kory's lifelong connection
to social justice.
- Can we talk about the confetti emoji?
- The confetti emoji. What about it?
- I just love that that's your favorite emoji.
- I mean, yeah.
It's like celebration all the time.
- I love that.
Is that because you're an optimist?
- It's a good question.
I should ask a therapist.
What is your emoji?
- Mine is a rocket ship.
So I drop a lot of rocket ships
because I believe we're all superheroes
on a journey flying in a rocket ship
and we're here to unleash our superpowers.
- I mean, you're a CMO of an incredible company,
and what gave you the courage to,
go down this pathway?
I know myself growing up as a girl, it was hard.
People always didn't say,
"Sure, go get 'em."
What was it like for you?
- I set an intention at a very young age.
I would say three things:
The first thing was fiercely independent.
I grew up around women
who were very dependent
on male head of household.
My mother didn't go to college.
My sisters didn't go to college.
I wanted to be the first person in my family
to seek a higher education
and be a successful businesswoman,
so it was important for me to take a different path.
I remember as a child
going to church for weddings
which were supposed to be happy moments,
and when they would say the word "obey,"
for me, felt like-
- Like what?
- Being punched in the gut
and I remember sitting there at weddings
and everybody was
happy and smiling and I'm like,
why do I feel like I got punched in the gut
and all these people are very happy?
So I made a declaration that I would never
obey anybody, and I would set out
in my life to be independent,
self-reliant, on my own journey.
- And now you are CMO of e.l.f.
What was your journey to get there?
When people are watching, trying to understand
how I make that connection into
this career pathway.
How do I be a strong,
empowered woman in the workforce
and a leader?
Tell me about your road to e.l.f.
- I was in the premium sector
in the beauty space
for my whole career,
and I started asking myself
some tough questions,
like what is the next part of
my career going to look like?
What I started to realize was
I was becoming too much
of an expert in one particular thing, right?
- Yeah.
- I was marketing premium products to a very small portion
of the population who could afford those types of offers,
and I wanted to branch out into
being able to market things
to a much wider audience.
So, I had received a phone call from a recruiter
who brought me the e.l.f. opportunity.
I really understood that they had the culture
and the conditions necessary
for the art of the possible
to transpire.
This is a company that was
built on an impossible mission
of creating $1 premium cosmetics
and selling them over the internet in 2004,
and I was watching them from the sidelines,
being the naysayer,
like you can't sell cosmetics over the internet.
- You love that they were being told no, right?
- Yeah, I loved every second of it.
- Like they're being told no.
I'm going to go there
and we're going to make this awesome.
- Exactly,
so really what I set out to do was water
those renegade roots and go back to the story
of our founders and go back to the art of the possible
and put the superheroes on the rocket ship
and unleash everybody's superpowers
and it's just been an exceptional journey.
- I love it. All the emoji rocket ships
like going up there for e.l.f., that's incredible.
What's it like to disrupt the space?
I mean, they call you the OG disruptor.
How did that feel when you went in there?
- It's invigorating,
and one of the things I learned being
in the bigger corporations is inspiration is
definitely perishable.
When you have this
great idea of disruption,
you have to draw a deck
and that deck is lengthy
and it's almost like a business case and it's backed
with tons of facts and figures
and you have to have large teams of people work on it,
and then you have to go convince various stakeholders
why you want to move this particular disruption forward.
You meet with a lot of naysayers.
You meet with a lot of hesitation.
You meet with a lot of resistance.
It gets watered down
and maybe nine to 12 months later,
this great idea that you had
in a watered-down version is
ready to go to market,
and you missed the moment.
- Yeah, because it took you nine months.
- At e.l.f., we have the freedom.
We have permission to do the unexpected.
I truly believe culture has to be a mindset.
If people wake up every morning and they say
to themselves,
"Today, anything is elfing possible."
- I love that, elfing possible.
- Anything is elfing possible.
- Jinx.
- That's a very powerful motivation.
So nine times out of 10,
my team will come to me with ideas
and we have a very quick chat about it.
I'm like, "Go do it, sounds great."
- Like what?
You want me to do that?
- And then we circle back, how'd that work?
Because we have a culture of testing and learning.
You're writing the playbook as you're going,
so it's definitely something that requires fearlessness
and it's not for everybody, and that's the sort
of entrepreneurial spirit that really drives e.l.f.
and that art of the possible that really gets me
out of bed in the morning.
- You're on a journey.
You charted the course
and went there super fast to digital.
What was that like?
I imagine you have a lot more information
and data coming in now that you've gone all digital.
- So one of the things that
I think is really important is
look around and who are the 10 people closest to you,
and if you want to be a digital disruptor,
if you want to excel in the tech space, well,
who are you sitting with?
And Salesforce is a huge part of that
and attaching ourselves to
organizations and companies
who are like-minded spirited disruptors,
then you can start to force multiply.
- I love that idea of, we call it a lot of times
"beginner's mind" of like, surrounding yourself
with people that are going
to bring other ideas.
I heard,
I don't know if this is true,
- Yeah.
- That you read like over 2000 comments a day
from like your customers and people.
Is this a superpower?
- It is, so it's a week, 2000 a day would be a lot.
It's a commitment of 2000 a week.
- Oh, they told me a day.
I would go with a day, we can go with a day.
- We can go with a day, that's fine.
What's most important for us
is who are we trying to serve
and what problem
are we trying to solve?
And I don't think as a CMO
that you can be really effective
if you don't understand who you're serving
and what problem you're trying to solve.
So yes, there are reports for that.
Yes, people can serve me up data,
but what I can't see is the confetti emoji
or the rocket ship
or what color heart are they using?
And that matters.
I commit to reading a lot of input,
and then one thing that I've recognized,
one of my super powers is
I do have an uncanny ability
to break through a lot of noise to find the signals.
- The signals, yeah.
- And then I'll have the team pressure test
those signals, and if they're proof-positive, let's run,
let's turn it into action fast.
- You've broken it down to such a simple framework
of don't take no,
challenge the norms, be the disruptor,
act fast, meet the moment, and then,
once you have those ideas,
make them scale and listen.
It's so actionable.
Have you found that your team is
drawn to that leadership?
- Yeah, and I love that.
I was reading something about you, where
somebody said that,
- Oh god, I don't want to know.
- Your enthusiasm was contagious
and that you have a sort of spell on folks,
and my team often says that to me
is that I just create
this contagious energy and this sort of orbit
that people want to plunge into.
So if you make it an exciting place to be, I think more
and more people want to be involved in that journey.
- It's been a year of just rapid digital acceleration.
What advice do you have to younger people,
aspiring marketers looking to get into the business?
- I would say be unstoppable.
I like to wrap it up in three Cs.
The first one is curiosity.
The second one is courage.
And the third one is conviction because
your curiosity gave you the knowledge,
your courage gave you the fearlessness
to put into an action plan.
The conviction
is going to give you the resilience
to carry it all the way across the finish line.
- So the reason we selected this location,
we're in San Francisco,
Yerba Buena Gardens,
we're sitting near the Martin Luther King Jr.
Memorial fountain,
is inspired by how you are so passionate
about social activism.
Can you share where that came from?
- e.l.f. stands with every eye, lip, face and paw.
That purpose platform is not something we say,
it's something we live, it's something we breathe,
it's something we eat, it's something we sleep,
and it was really built off all the treasures
that were already inside our treasure chest.
This was a brand that was built off inclusion.
It was built off being cruelty-free.
It was built off empowerment.
So it was really important for us
to find a way to continue
to use our platform
and our brand to make a positive impact
on the world, similar to how you do at Salesforce,
and we're really motivated every day
by more than just selling product.
It's about what kind of impact can we make
on our community.
So when things arose on women's empowerment,
our answer is already there.
It's our second pillar is empowerment.
When it came up with social unrest,
our answer was already there.
We support Black Lives Matter
and we stand with all Black people
in this nation against racism of any kind.
We stand with the Asian community.
So it's in our DNA.
It's fundamentally who we are at our core,
and we live it every day.
- I'm super connected to that.
We need to bring love in
and ground ourselves on values
and build trust and connection
between ourselves.
It's so important.
- So I don't know if you know,
but we work with Alicia Keys.
She's an inspirational icon.
You spend one hour with this woman
and you are absolutely a changed person.
One of the things that she says
is she calls herself
"a light warrior."
She says that there's enough darkness in the world,
let's bring forward the light.
And I just love that, and I feel like
that's what we do with purpose.
Let's take the light and shine the light.
Only love can box out hate,
only light can box out darkness.
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We'll see you next time.