e.l.f. Speed: How e.l.f. Built a Culture That Runs Faster Than the Cosmetics Market

Nate Challen: That's it for this week's Brandistry Buzz. One more idea to help you navigate whatever comes next. If this episode made you think, subscribe wherever you're listening, so you don't miss what's next. And come find me on LinkedIn where I'm posting between episodes, trends, takes, and the occasional things that I'm still figuring out. Prefer to read? Brandistry Buzz is also a weekly newsletter on LinkedIn and Substack. Links are in the show notes. I'll be back next week. In the meantime, stay ready. The marketing landscape is shifting faster than anyone predicted. The old maps don't work. And the brands that are winning aren't following a better playbook, they're pioneering on without one. This is Brandustry Buzz, the podcast for marketers who are ready for whatever comes next. I'm Nate Challen, brand strategist, marketing executive, and someone who's spent three decades helping brands navigate uncertain territories. Each week we'll take one idea in marketing, leadership, or innovation, and follow it through until it's actually useful. Last week I wrote about how e.l.f. built its relationship with its community, the persona playbook, building zero distance into its operating model, and proving that inclusion executed with conviction can be a more powerful targeting strategy than segmentation. if part one was about e.l.f. thinks, part two is about how e.l.f. runs. Real examples, honest takes, clear recommendations. So let's buzz. When I was leading marketing at Sanofi, I got a mandate to embed agility into the working process. We consulted experts, trained teams, ran pilots. Leadership expected it to make us more efficient, but they missed and what took us time to learn is that agility isn't really about resourcing, it's about organization. Specifically, it's about closing the gap between learning, decision making, and execution. The core tools of Agile is the stand up, a short, regular meeting where the team reviews progress and decides the next action. The name comes from the idea that the meeting is brief enough that nobody has time to sit down. What makes it work or fail is whether decision makers are present and empowered. When leaders can't commit to being available, won't make direction clear enough for teams to decide without them, are unwilling to delegate, the stand up becomes theater. The speed never comes. e.l.f. solved this problem structurally, what e.l.f. president Corey Marchisotto calls e.l.f speed. It isn't a mandate or a mood, it's organizational answer to the question most companies never get right. When most organizations have a speed they actually have a process problem. They had steps, reviews, and approval layers to manage risk. And then wonder why they're always a beat behind the market. e.l.f went the other direction. They built speed in as a structural capability, not a mood or a mandate. A trained, documented, repeatable organizational muscle. They call this e.l.f speed, and in a marketing environment that's making agility mandatory, it's worth understanding. The best way to understand what e.l.f means by speed isn't a slide or a mission statement, it's a story about the Super Bowl. In 2023 e.l.f.'s Insight team flagged that a competitor ranking could be flipped with the right stunt. The timing? Three weeks before the Super Bowl. Jennifer Coolidge had just publicly said she wanted to play a dolphin in her next role. e.l.f. wrote her a dolphin script timed to a skin product, signed her, produced spot, and got it all to air, all inside three weeks. They were late for national placement, so it ran regionally, but the idea worked. In twenty twenty four, courtroom drama was dominating every major streaming platform. e.l.f built an ensemble cast around the cultural moment, the cast of suits, Judge Judy, and ran it nationally, seven weeks from concept to air. In twenty twenty five, Bad Bunny's halftime show was the cultural moment. e.l.f already had a Latin chart anthem. Four Telenovas and deep community relations within the Latin market. They pulled it all together in a new Super Bowl spot national in eleven days. It was widely recognized as a campaign most aligned with the cultural moment of that Super Bowl. Three weeks, seven weeks, eleven days. The compression tells the real story. Each year e.l.f. studied what slowed them down, removed it, ran the play again, faster. Like an athlete whose training shows up on a race day. The results are visible, but the work happened long before the clock started. As Marchisotto puts it, cultural relevance is the greatest competitive advantage that you have. Speed has to be an enabler of that. If you're putting something to the market now that you thought about 12, 18, or 24 months ago, it's already old. So what enables e.l.f speed? When Marchisotto talks about what makes the speed possible, she's specific. There are five structural enablers, none of them glamorous, all of them deliberate. One, clear the launch pad, remove roadblocks, bureaucracy and red tape before they slow the work. The goal isn't move fast during the sprint, it's to have already cleared the obstacles before the sprint begins. Two, concurrency, not sequence. Most organizations run in handoffs. Brief legal, then brief creative, then production. e.l.f. runs legal, talent negotiations, creative, and production When the timeline's eleven days, you don't have the luxury of sequential process. Three, known partners. When there are three weeks to build a campaign, you can't spend any of them onboarding a new agency or negotiating a new relationship from scratch. Speed requires trust already established. Four, legal built for speed. Marchisotto calls this out explicitly as underrated. Signing a global icon contract days requires an attorney whose entire operating model is speed. Most legal departments are optimized for protection. e.l.f.'s is optimized for speed and protection in that order. Finally, five. Pre approved authority. Knowing who can make which decisions in real time without routing up to the leader eliminates the single biggest source of organizational drag. Waiting. Marchisotto offered a quote from Chime CMO Vinit Meira. Go fast, don't rush. She added, When you're rushing, you're dropping stuff on the floor. When you're going fast with discipline, you produce great work. distinction matters. Rushing is reactive. It creates errors, cuts corners, and the output shows it. Speed with discipline is built before the moment, so that when the moment arrives, the organization is ready. So how does e.l.f embrace failure? In most organizations, failure has a name, postmortem. The word is accurate and the framing is a problem. Postmortem implies something's died. It treats the evaluation as a verdict on a finished effort rather than an input into the next one. e.l.f doesn't use the word. March Soda won't say it. Instead they run after action reviews in real time, immediately after each initiative, while the details are still alive and the learning is still available. the operating principles that govern the culture make the philosophy explicit. Do more of what works, quit doing what doesn't, run towards friction, not away from it. The last one is worth pausing on. Most organizations treat friction as a signal to slow down or change direction. e.l.f treats friction as the signal to lean into. Because breakthroughs live in the constraints and tension that most most teams are trying to route around. e.l.f treats friction as the signal to lean in, because breakthroughs live in the constraints and tension that most teams are trying to route around. As Marcia Soto says, you only crash into the walls, you build yourself. The Super Bowl arc is the most visible evidence of this approach, applied to marketing. After every campaign, e.l.f studied what slowed them down, systematically, removed it, and showed up the next year running faster. The compression from three weeks to eleven days wasn't accidental. It was after action reviews turned into infrastructure. So going beyond speed, Marchisotto has five codified conditions she credits for sustaining growth across twenty-six consecutive quarters. They're worth naming directly because the distance between most culture values and these is the distance between a poster and a practice. Beyond speed, Marchisoto has five codified conditions she credits for the sustaining growth across 26 consecutive quarters at e.l.f. They're worth naming directly because the distance between most culture values and these is the distance between a poster and practice. Build build the environment where innovation wants to happen. You cannot mandate creativity. The conditions for it are structural: psychological safety, resource access, a leadership posture that rewards. Tries as much as wins. Two, hire a parade of unicorns. She used the word intentionally. People who believe in making the impossible possible and who do it together. A group of unicorns is called a blessing. She's aware of this. Three, force multiply, find kindred spirits inside and outside the organization and amplify each other's superpowers. The ecosystem isn't zero sum. At Santa Fe, we used to call this one plus one equals three. four, constant state of evolution. Your company cannot grow unless your people grow. Continuous upskilling, movement, and curiosity, not as a perk, but as an operating requirement. finally five, have a good time. Nothing good happens when fear is in the driver's seat. Teams that are genuinely enjoying the work want more of it, and the quality reflects it. The through line across all five is something March Soto calls the ethos cascade. Your ethos powers your purpose, your purpose powers your people, your people power the performance, and the performance powers the possibilities. It sounds like a framework, but at e.l.f, it's their daily reality. And perhaps most counterintuitively, the company explicitly rejects studying competitors as a growth strategy. e.l.f CEO Tarang Amin frames it cleanly. When you get to the top of the mountain, you're at the bottom of the next mountain, and Marchisotto is even cleaner. We're going to explore a new world by our own map. If e.l.f benchmarked against the category average, they'd be optimizing for four percent Kager instead of twenty three percent. The greatest competition isn't L'Oreal or Maybelline, it's the best version of elf. So how's Elf ready? In my assessment, e.l.f's agility scored a twenty-four out of twenty-five, their highest scoring dimension and its most visible competitive advantage. The Super Bowl arc alone would earn a strong score, but what makes this score distinctive is the capability is systematically built, not improvised. The sensing, decision making, and execution infrastructure are all designed for speed, and they reinforce each other. The pioneering principles lens adds something the scores alone don't capture. Courage shows up most clearly here. Saying yes to a Super Bowl spot with 11 days on the clock at national scale is institutional courage across every level of the organization. Leadership, legal, creative, production partners. Maintaining a six to ten dollar price point through inflation when every competitor raises prices was a courage decision, made in the face of every financial model, and that said to charge more. The go fast don't rush principle is patience as a competitive advantage. The discipline is to build the infrastructure before the moment rather than scrambling when the moment arrives. And the after action reviews run in real time rather than quarterly retrospectives reflect humility at the organizational level, the willingness to evaluate honestly, regularly, and without dispensiveness. Conviction holds it all together. Ignoring unanimous advice to segment holding a six ten dollar price point when every competitor raises prices, refusing to benchmark against the category, each decision. Only possible because the belief was already settled. All four of them operating together. That's what makes e.l.f speed sustainable rather than exhausting. So what are the final takeaways? Part one was about consumer Part two has been about building the organizational infrastructure to actually act on what you find. Proximity without speed is frustrating, so e.l.f built both. Here's your five cultural considerations if you want elf like results. Audit your launch pad, not your launch. The bottlenecks that will kill your next great are already in your organization. Find them before the moment arrives, not during it. Marchisotto's structure enablers, legal, authority, partners, concurrency were all established before any specific campaign existed. two, replace postmortem with after action reviews and mean it. The language shift signals something real. This is not a verdict, it's an input. Run reviews in real time while learning is available, not in quarterly retrospectives when the details are gone. Three, distinguish between rushing and going fast. Rushing is reactive and shows. Speed with discipline is built through relationships, infrastructure, and authority that's been pre-established. Your team can tell the difference, so can your output. Four, build the cultural conditions, not just the cultural deck. e.l.f.'s Five principles work because they're operating requirements, not posters. What does your organization actually reward? Trying or only winning? That's the answer to your real culture. Finally, five, set your own benchmark. If you measure yourself against the category average, you'll optimize for it. The brands and leaders who outperform the market have typically stopped measuring themselves against it. Your greatest competition is the best version of you. month I was walking out of a conference holding an elf swag bag. So putting a close to this series elf. Last month I was walking out of a conference holding an elf swag bag. Since then I've been spending a significant amount of time thinking, reading, and writing about the brand. Because the one because the more I looked, the more I found. A $1.64 billion business growing at twenty-eight percent per year, built on inclusion, community, and a culture that genuinely runs differently. e.l.f isn't a social media story or a lucky trend, it's a brand built ready, with the relevance to belong to everyone and the agility to move at the speed of the community it serves, with pioneering principles exemplified by its leaders and embedded in its culture. The lesson isn't to copy e.l.f. it's to ask how big can your audience be and what is your equivalent of elf speed? And do you have the conviction to build it? Are you ready?