Kory Marchisotto has been building her beauty industry résumé for two decades, spending 18 years at Shiseido before coming to E.l.f. Beauty in 2019. The company’s portfolio includes a handful of brands from E.l.f. to Naturium to Alicia Keys’s Keys Soulcare; the marketing prowess Marchisotto brought as senior vice-president and chief marketing officer helped it surpass $1 billion in net sales this year. You’ve probably seen the company’s viral ads, from “Judge Beauty” — the spot starring Meghan Trainor, Suits stars Rick Hoffman and Gina Torres, and Judge Judy herself that aired during the Super Bowl — to its most recent campaign for its hero product, the E.l.f. Power Grip Primer, starring Joey King.
But the storytelling that Marchisotto is pushing goes beyond the brand’s viral products. She also led the So Many Dicks campaign, a Wall Street takeover that shed light on the lack of women and diverse candidates on company boards across all industries. In partnership with the National Association of Corporate Directors, the beauty company is creating a board accelerator program that trains and creates visibility for 20 board-ready candidates. As the first person in her family to graduate college and navigate such a dynamic career, Marchisotto says, “It was hard to blaze a new trail and be around people who didn’t understand what that was, including myself. It’s hard not to have somebody to look up to tell you, ‘This is the North Star, this is where you need to go.’” Now, her goal is to be that North Star for a younger generation of E.l.f. customers. She meets them where they are, whether that’s on TikTok or going on Twitch to give career advice. Marchisotto lives in San Francisco; here’s how she gets it done.
On her morning routine:
I start my day with a 20-minute morning-exercise routine, to which I’ve now added music from Get Ready With Music, the Album, because everyone needs an anthem that will turn up their wattage. I say three affirmations in the mirror, a life-changing ritual I learned from Alicia Keys when we started our dream partnership with Keys Soulcare.
On balance:
If you’re seeking balance, you’re going to spend your life disappointed. Three words: Balance is bullshit. There are seven days in a week and we spend five of them working. That’s not balanced. There are 52 weeks in a year and we spend 50 of them working. That’s not balanced. Eighty percent of our waking hours are spent at work, that is not balanced. I would rather position it as, if you are going to spend 80 percent of your life at work, make sure you are with people you love, doing what you love, and making an impact that you’re proud of.
On the most rewarding part of her job:
The hardest things can also be the most rewarding. I will take it to one of our recent campaigns, So Many Dicks. It is an incredibly bold move to take on Wall Street and to come out and say that we need to champion more women and more diversity in the highest seats of power of publicly traded companies. We are shocking people into awareness, which is why we needed to be so disruptive with the headline. I give every E.l.f. that stands behind that initiative a major amount of credit, because that is a very brave move to make that kind of impact.
On managing stress:
Stress usually comes from two places. When you’re in a state of fear, you have to ask yourself, “What am I afraid of? And what is the worst thing that can happen?” When you de-risk the environment, the stress levels go down. The second place stress comes from is what I’ll call a foggy situation, meaning there’s a problem I can’t solve. The first thing that happens is people get emotionally charged. Emotionally charged environments are not the right place for problem solving. You have to infuse objectivity to de-escalate the situation. When you identify the working parts of the problem, you can solve it piece by piece, and that de-stresses the entire environment. Once I started morning affirmations, it changed my entire day.
On the pushback she’s received in her career:
I’ve been getting pushback my entire life, starting with I shouldn’t go to college. Then when I started my first job in sales operations, my heart was bending toward the marketing department. I found a way of doing the work that I needed to do to leave me two or three hours at the end of the day so that I could go volunteer in the marketing department. I did that for a year, then went to see the VP of marketing — this is when I was at LVMH — and propositioned him for a job. He told me that everybody needs to start at the bottom and if I wanted to get into marketing, I would have to start by being his personal assistant. I quit and I got a job being a marketing manager instead. That is my greatest fire, turning a “no” into a “yes.” Even if I think about my time at E.l.f., why would E.l.f. partner with Chipotle? What is E.l.f. doing on TikTok? Nobody knew what TikTok was. They were all on the edge of the pool with their floats on and their diving instructors and we were already in the deep end, flailing around figuring it out.
On dupe culture:
I have an allergy to this word “dupe,” because other people are duping all day, every day. Go do it. Have at it. It brings great value to the marketplace. Oftentimes, though, it’s a lower-quality or lower-priced alternative where compromises are made in order to reach said price. The difference in what we’re doing here at E.l.f. is saying, “You want that quality, we’re not going to compromise. You can have that quality. We’re going to give it to you at an affordable price.” That’s what we work really hard to do.
On making beauty accessible:
Accessibility is a very dynamic word and it can mean many different things. For most people, the starting point comes to price. I started the other way around, with opening the boardroom and giving women and people of color access to the highest seats of power and democratizing access to a board, then the C-suite. I am on TikTok live, my CEO is on TikTok live, my CFO and I went on Twitch — 18,000 people showed up. You want to know what they wanted to talk about? Career advice. That’s access.
The word also means access to a world in which you’ve been shut out of, making the best of beauty accessible. Delivering prestige, quality, experience, textures, sensations at an accessible price point. We make sure that we are not compromising on quality, on packaging, on look and feel, on how we wrap that up with a communication platform and entertaining content that is going to bring a burst of joy to your day. We bring together the best combination of cost, quality, and speed.
On the best advice she’s ever gotten:
In Alicia Keys’s book, More Myself, there was a quote that stuck with me: “The closer and closer you get to yourself, the closer and closer you arrive at peak state at all times, which should be the goal.” It took me a while to realize that. I didn’t feel like I belonged in the place that I am, because I didn’t take the path everybody else took to get there. I never spent time talking about my background because it would expose the fact that I didn’t belong here. I’m more myself now in my late 40s than I ever have been before. My advice to everybody would be find your true north and stick to it. I’ve been in peak performance for five and a half years at E.l.f. It’s when your head, your intelligence, your heart, your passion, your soul, and your intuition are completely aligned. In order for that to be true, you need to know who you are.
