ELF chief brand officer Laurie Lam talks the importance of diverse boardrooms

Business Insider

Laurie Lam, the chief brand officer of ELF Beauty, talks about the importance of having a diverse board of directors and how purpose can power performance.

Transcript

00:00When you have incredible diverse board members you actually can have incredible

00:07results and it drives and fuels the performance that you actually have on

00:11the business. At Elf Beauty we're really proud to be one in five companies today

00:20out of 4,100 publicly traded companies with board of directors that is 67%

00:25women and 44% diverse. One in five is not good enough and when you actually look

00:30at Elf Beauty that composition is driving incredible growth for us to be

00:35exact 25 consecutive quarters of growth. We're actually one of the fastest

00:38growing beauty companies today in the top 20 mass brands and that incredible

00:43feat is not by accident it's actually by design from our CEO who's built a board

00:47that has that diverse mix and being able to drive that forward. So this became

00:52something that we were like well what if other companies could actually build

00:55diverse boards as well because we know that US boards today are 88% comprised

00:59of 88% white and so that can really change the dynamic and the trajectory of

01:03a company where you can see purpose can actually power your performance incredible

01:08results for the company. So the campaign so many dicks is a incredibly bold and

01:13disruptive way to actually share what we found through research which was that

01:18there were more dicks on boards than underrepresented groups of people. By that I

01:23mean dicks men named Richard, Rick or Rich and that's an important part to

01:29actually say well what would happen if you actually bring more women onto

01:32boards. Today US boards, US corporate boards on average 88% white. That's an

01:38incredible thing when you think about the rest of the portfolio of America so

01:41having those board seats is really important and we really wanted to

01:44showcase that it's okay to be a dick but you just need to make more room for

01:47everyone else on American boards. This particular chapter was really making sure

01:52that we can link it to what was actually happening and try to build a

01:58coalition of movement for companies to get behind us and the exciting thing

02:03about it was we went down to Financial District you know where there's a lot of

02:06dicks and a lot of men named Richard by that I mean and we really wanted to make

02:11it clear that you know diversity matters and especially at a location like that and

02:16what we found was the community and the consumer was so excited about it created a

02:20groundswell and that campaign that was originally created for B2B and just to

02:25talk to other companies to say it's great to put men you know diversity and

02:29build diversity into your boards ended up being something that the consumer was

02:34like thank you Elle for saying this I didn't buy you before but I'm gonna buy you

02:37now and then it created a groundswell with our community that further fueled us so

02:42now we've made a commitment doubling the rate at which women and people of

02:47diversity and people of color are put on to U.S.

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