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| Hi, welcome to Line Sheet. I hope my fashion friends who went to the Industry Season 3 premiere at Metrograph (and the afterparty at Nine Orchard) on Monday night had a great time. (It is a very stylish show and feels very Dimes Square-circa-2022 coded.) Speaking of, why haven’t the Industry guys been on How Long Gone? Perhaps I need to launch an investigation.Today, I’ve got some fun micro-scoops for you—good news from Proenza Schouler, and some behind-the-scenes intel on Gap’s collaborations biz—but the main event is Rachel “Rachel@puck.news” Strugatz’s conversation with e.l.f. C.M.O. Kory Marchisotto. I am completely obsessed with the success of e.l.f., which is run like a startup, as one of their executives recently said to me, but with a market cap of $10 billion. The rest of the beauty industry is obsessed, too, and I’m glad Rachel snagged a rare sit-down with Kory. It’s worth reading no matter which industry currently employs you.
P.S., don’t think because it’s hot outside and I’m extremely tan that I haven’t noticed you over-forwarding this email. (Welcome to all the Nike folks, by the way.) Let me remind you: Puck is less than $100 a year! Subscribe here and you will feel better about yourself, I promise.
Mentioned in this issue: e.l.f., Kory Marchisotto, Proenza Schouler, Jack McCollough, Lazaro Hernandez, Patrik Ervell, White Lotus, Mike White, Nike, Gap Inc., Richard Dickson, Madhappy, LVMH, Palace, Dôen, J.Crew. J.D. Vance’s “guyliner,” TikTok, the Super Bowl, Jennifer Coolidge, Mike Cesario, and many more. |
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| 13 Emmy® Nominations
including
Outstanding Limited Series
Outstanding Directing For A Limited Or Anthology Series Or Movie - Steven Zaillian
Lead Actor In A Limited Series - Andrew Scott–
[WATCH] Emmy® Nominee Andrew Scott Becomes Tom Ripley
Award-Winning & Emmy® Nominated Creator and Director Steven Zaillian and Emmy® Nominee Dakota Fanning discuss the performance of Andrew Scott in Ripley.
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For more on Ripley, visit series.netflixawards.com |
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- Proenza Schouler is launching menswear in 2025: I’ve heard from a well-placed source that Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez are developing a men’s collection, which will debut in early 2025 (so, likely at the show next February). The twist: The designers have enlisted their friend Patrik Ervell to work on the collection with them.I was a big fan of Ervell’s namesake line. He came up with a bunch of American menswear designers, including Adam Kimmel and Tim Hamilton, who played easily on the international stage. Kimmel doesn’t design anymore (everyone still loves him), Hamilton had a successful stint at The North Face before moving to Nike, and Ervell was most recently designing menswear at Vince. Anyway, Patrik is great, and I love the way Jack and Lazaro dress (black t-shirts and faded black jeans), so I’m interested to see what they come up with together. Proenza has become a go-to brand for American women who like fashion, but are turned off by fashion with a capital F—remember my leather jeans?—so maybe they can attract a similar customer on the men’s side. (A rep for the company declined to comment.)
- Why is Gap so collab happy?: Did you see that Gap launched yet another collaboration, this time with Los Angeles-based, LVMH Ventures-backed, “optimism centered” sweats label Madhappy? (Apparently young kids like it.) There have been a ton of these partnerships within the past year: Two months ago, Gap dropped a collab with Dôen; and two months before that, there was the collab with Palace. Before that, Dapper Dan. And before that, LoveShackFancy. I’m probably missing one or two.A smart Line Sheet reader wondered whether it makes sense to release these product lines so close together, which doesn’t leave much time for any individual brand moment to breathe. Also, how much is Gap paying? These types of partnerships are usually quite bespoke, depending on the volume of merchandise preordered, the projected marketing impact (the bigger the name, the bigger the payment), and so forth. Back in the day, designers would get paid something like $100,000 or $200,000 to do a Target collaboration: a measly sum, to be sure, but worth it for the exposure. At Gap, I’m told the deal structure typically involves an upfront payment of between $200,000 and $500,000, plus royalties, so usually that nets out to anywhere between $500,000 and $700,000. And then there are incentives that scale with success.My sense is that, generally, these collaborations have gone well for the brands that have participated. Gap is a giant, well-oiled machine that understands it needs these partners to draw in younger (or simply cooler) customers. And the brands themselves certainly benefit from the marketing boost—Dôen told WWD that launch day was their website’s most highly trafficked window ever—even when the product is mediocre.
As for whether these drops are actually driving customers to purchase other Gap gear, my guess is that the basket size on that first order increases, and that they may come back at least once. (For instance, buying a swimsuit from J.Crew’s Maryam Nassir Zadeh collaboration reminded me that the brand’s swimsuits are generally great, and so a week later I bought a different one.) The goal, of course, is for the main line to be so good that you don’t need to do marketing stunts like this. And just a reminder: Collaborations usually take about a year to come together, and this strategy was in place before Richard Dickson became the C.E.O. last summer.
- J.D. Vance’s guyliner mystery, solved: Begin typing “J.D. Vance” into Google these days and you get a couple amusing autocomplete suggestions: “jd vance couch,” “jd vance couch story,” “jd vance running mate”—wah?—and “jd vance eyeliner.” Yes, the debate over whether the Republican vice presidential candidate is wearing kohl on his waterline simply won’t die. Heather Schwedel over at Slate has already done a lot of work on this, and came to the conclusion last week that he is eyeliner free.Her best argument: “Looking at Vance, I’m also reminded of lash icons Elizabeth Taylor and actor Néstor Carbonell, both of whom are said to have had an extra row of eyelashes at birth. It’s actually a condition, known as Distichiasis, that affects approximately 1 in 10,000 people. Though Vance has never indicated that he has it, it’s a good reminder of the first half of the Maybelline slogan: Some people are just born with it.”Vance is not the first politician accused of going all Fall Out Boy on us. Never forget that, a decade ago, former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had to quash a similar rumor by revealing that he took a glaucoma medication that made his eyelashes thicker. As much as I want to believe Vance is wearing eyeliner because it’s funny, pretty much any presidential candidate—but especially a conservative one—wants to look more masculine, not less, and I don’t think he’s doing this on purpose. As Schwedel notes, Vance has nice eyes, and his trim beard helps enough to frame them (and disguise a weak chin).
The consensus among people in Washington was that he is not wearing eyeliner, although one person who has known him for a long time was convinced otherwise. This obviously doesn’t really matter, but sort of matters, the way all aesthetic choices sort of matter.
In the end, I was able to solve the mystery. I have received confirmation from the Vance camp that he is not wearing eyeliner. Vance’s wife, the lawyer Usha Vance, sent me the following statement via representative: “They’re all natural. I’ve always been jealous of those lashes.”
- Correction!: On Monday, I said that Mark Lee installed the triumvirate at Gucci back in 2004 when Tom Ford exited. It wasn’t Mark Lee, it was Giacomo Santucci. Lee was still in Paris running YSL. (Also owned by what was then known as PPR, via its subsidiary The Gucci Group.) Soon after Lee became the C.E.O. of Gucci, he dismantled the top-heavy organization and gave Frida Giannini the lead gig. I’ve updated the original story, but wanted all of you who only read in-email to know as well.
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| Now, to the main event… |
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| The $10 Billion e.l.f. on Your Shelf |
| How the multibillion-dollar cosmetics kingpin outmaneuvered rivals through savvy marketing (Jennifer Coolidge!), employee equity, and behaving more like a Silicon Valley startup than a New York beauty brand. |
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| Last year, e.l.f. Beauty shot and produced its first Super Bowl commercial, co-written by White Lotus creator Mike White and starring Jennifer Coolidge, and acquired skincare line Naturium for $355 million. The deft multitasking was but one example of why e.l.f. remains an anomaly in big beauty—maneuvering like a startup but with the budgets of a publicly traded company with a market cap around $10 billion.The Oakland-based cosmetics brand also truly gets youth culture, despite being 20 years old—an almost ancient vintage in an industry that’s particularly prone to rapid trend cycles. E.l.f. was early to invest resources in TikTok, and among the first to cut a deal with Roblox. It also dropped a collab with Liquid Death, the attitudinal water brand, and partnered with Chipotle on makeup sold in silver cases that looked like burrito wrappers. (Okay, maybe that last one isn’t so cool...)Of course, e.l.f. has had its rough patches, too: In 2019, the brand decided to close its 22 freestanding stores and prioritize its online business, part of a larger turnaround plan to pare down its product line, start acquiring and incubating other brands, and defy an industry-wide makeup slump. The shift coincided with the arrival of Kory Marchisotto, who left Shiseido after 16 years to became e.l.f.’s chief marketing officer. With the company’s quarterly earnings coming on Thursday, I decided to catch up with Marchisotto, who was in town last week for the premiere of e.l.f.’s Show Your(s)e.l.f. docuseries, to discuss the brand’s meticulous corporate strategy, new markets, and the craziest ideas she’s pitched. The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity. |
| A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR |
|
| 13 Emmy® Nominations
including
Outstanding Directing For A Limited Or Anthology Series Or Movie - Steven Zaillian
Lead Actor In A Limited Series - Andrew Scott–
[WATCH] Emmy® Nominee Andrew Scott Becomes Tom Ripley
Award-Winning & Emmy® Nominated Creator and Director Steven Zaillian and Emmy® Nominee Dakota Fanning discuss the performance of Andrew Scott in Ripley.
–
For more on Ripley, visit series.netflixawards.com |
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| Rachel Strugatz: What’s the quickest you’ve brought a campaign to life?Kory Marchisotto: The Super Bowl. Three weeks, start to finish, with Jennifer Coolidge. That was 2023. It was the first time we ever even dreamt of doing a Super Bowl.What made you decide to do it?
We’re always looking for the places and spaces where women and beauty are being underserved––the Indy 500, the Super Bowl. We started looking at data points, and the audience of the Super Bowl is nearly 50 percent female. So I get under the hood and say, That’s pretty outrageous. I didn’t even know that. Okay, 115 million people, 75 percent of whom say their favorite part of Super Bowl Sunday is the commercials. And then you say, Well, what are those commercials? Less than 1 percent of them are beauty. Okay, underserved people, but that still doesn’t give us a reason to be there yet, right?
So it’s the Golden Globes and Jennifer Coolidge is asked, If you could play your dream role, what would it be? And she said, My dream role is to play a dolphin. That’s what I call “the e.l.f. signal.” We knew women were being underserved in sports, but we didn’t know what the right entrance was.
We knew we wanted to break through with broader brand awareness, and we knew that we had this thing called Power Grip Primer, which was blowing up the universe. We were asking ourselves, How do we take this thing and capitalize on it, in the moment? It was the number two SKU––in all of mass cosmetics––which has never happened for a primer. Primer is the 13th-smallest category in the business. I was with my head of insights, and she was like, You realize that we’re this close to number one? And I said, What would it take to make us number one? She looked at me and she goes, What it will take to get to number one is one of your marketing stunts. My eyes bulged out of my head. So we stuck our head in the stars, and we were like, Super Bowl-Jennifer Coolidge-Power Grip Primer. Okay, we only have one problem. The Super Bowl is in three weeks.
What happened in those three weeks?
You bring the team together that you know has the capability to do this, because we’ve done this before––maybe not with stakes as high as the Super Bowl. That was the biggest platform we ever put the brand on. We cleared the path for speed to happen. I called our C.E.O. and said, “Do not call me for three weeks. I am taking this group of people off the machine, and we just need to clear the path for speed to happen.”
Has there been anything you’ve presented to the C-suite and they’ve said, What? That’s insane.
Almost everything we do. The key is building trust. If you took all the things we did over five years and made a list, nobody would ever sign off on that. You do one, you show that it works, then everybody wants more. You do another one, you show that it works. And then you build trust. So even if people are like, “You want to do what? With who?” They’re like, “Okay.” |
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| What was the craziest idea you’ve pitched?Liquid Death was pretty crazy. Corpse Paint on a random Tuesday in March, pretty insane. The genesis was my obsession with Liquid Death. Mike Cesario was my idol. I was watching every move they made. They disrupted the water aisle. They changed the game in every way. We started having conversations about what this could potentially look like and started to get to know each other better. This was a long courting process. In the beginning, they didn’t understand why they would hang out with us. Then we found our way. We stretched each other into a new dimension that neither one of us could have gotten to without one another.How is a company that’s doing a billion dollars in sales able to move so quickly?
We act more like a Silicon Valley startup than a New York-based beauty company. We’re at a place where we’re big enough to do great things, but small enough to be nimble and agile. We have true entrepreneurs, a bias for action, a bias for speed, and a bias for getting shit done with a high risk tolerance.
How can this be sustained? Every e.l.f. employee has equity. Every single one. To put that in context: minus the C-suite, e.l.f. has granted $150 million of equity to its employee base since we I.P.O.’d seven and a half years ago, on a stock that’s delivered 12x. Why do you have ivory towers? Because you have ivory structures—the big dogs get the big packages. At e.l.f., every single employee is granted meaningful equity every year.
How many people are we talking here?
The employee base is only 450 people. We have 450 people to run a billion-dollar brand, a billion-dollar company. We democratize beauty by democratizing organizational corporate structure. That explains almost everything.
Expand on that.
We’re all bonused on one thing. In the corporate universe, you can be with your peers around the water cooler and nobody knows what bonus you got, because we all have different variables. That creates a different kind of energy inside an organization, and it expends a certain amount of energy of people having resentment, because they’re like, Wait, why did you get paid 80 percent and I got paid 60 percent? At e.l.f., it’s one number and one number only, period. Full stop. And it’s EBITDA. Everybody is bonused only on EBITDA. It’s especially nice to get one when you know that if you make it, everybody makes it. If you don’t make it, nobody makes it. |
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| That’s it from Rachel and me. Before we go, a quick Blake Lively update: Yes, I saw the Vogue cover. I don’t have the energy to go there today (maybe soon), but I do want you to know that Blake is apparently offering up her styling services to co-stars now. What a world!Until tomorrow,
Lauren |
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| FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT |
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