We solidified each of the ways in which we democratize access, and the first place that has to start is with your employees. It means access to equity. We democratize access to the Board of Directors: We’re one of only five companies out 4,200 to have a board of directors at 67% women and 44% diverse. We democratize access to our C-suite: I go on TikTok Live, and [e.l.f. Beauty CMO Mandy Fields] is teaching financial literacy on our Twitch channel, and 100,000 people showed up.
So, how did sports enter the equation?
They are interconnected in deeply meaningful ways: 94% of women who make it to the C-suite are former athletes, so democratization of access to the playing fields creates pathways for growth into the business arena.
Where did our sports journey begin? With a Twitch channel called e.l.f. You, and it started with one statistic: 77% of women reported being bullied on the platform. They didn’t have a safe space. They started to change their names and come in on the platform under aliases so that they wouldn’t get bullied, but could take a rightful place at the table because their skills were such that they could take on the boys. So we started a channel intended to be like, “E.l.f. you to the bullying. E.l.f. you to the aliases. Come here and fully express yourself.”
We’re going to talk about the fact that we can be women, and we can put on makeup before we start our live streams, and that we can talk about things that are important to our means of self-expression. That was the signal that we needed to keep going, because our channel became wildly popular. We realized that people wanted to talk to us about all different kinds of things, and that there was a need for us to push on beyond that.
When e.l.f. sponsored Katherine Legge at the Indianapolis 500 last year, she was just the ninth woman to run the race and the only woman in the field that year. How did that experience influence e.l.f.’s sports marketing strategy?
Before that, all of her sponsors were oil and gas. Our activation was between Waste Management on one side and oil and gas on the other, and ours had a line miles long to get inside.
Fifty percent of that audience was women, but nobody was speaking to them. Then we saw the pink car go around the track, and people lost their minds. The screaming young girls and the energy of the crowd weren’t actually about that pink car. It was about the symbol, the access to a new world that others shut her out of. That’s the critical underpinning.
