Mentorship Masterclass: Elana Drell-Szyfer On The Hard Pivot From Big Beauty To Smaller Brand Management

If the success of mentees is a credit to the mentor, then Elana Drell-Szyfer has achieved the mentor equivalent of Rouge status multiple times over. Her many mentees include Liz Cavalieri, CRO of BeautyStat Cosmetics, Lori Singer, president of Parlux, Joel Maza, chief product and innovation officer at Olaplex, Amanda Baldwin, CEO of Olaplex, and Cristina Nuñez, co-founder and partner at True Beauty Ventures. In a Substack post in June, Nuñez wrote, “She showed me what real leadership looks like. How to be resilient. How to navigate being an executive, a mom of three, a wife, and a daughter—all with strength and grace.”

Now, after over three decades in the beauty industry with CEO stops at Laura Geller Beauty, Ahava and RéVive, which sold to Chinese company S’Young Group last year during her tenure atop the skincare brand, following roles at Avon, L’Oréal and Estée Lauder, where she was SVP of global marketing for the Estée Lauder brand, she’s mentoring and teaching the next generation of beauty industry recruits as an adjunct professor in the Fashion Institute of Technology’s graduate program in cosmetics and fragrance. She also recently joined the board of Dime Beauty and is an advisor to Cos Bar owner Tengram Capital Partners and a member of the boards at Cos Bar and Nest New York.

While beauty industry growth overall is slowing, Drell-Szyfer believes there remain plenty of opportunities for brands to drive growth. “It’s about being on the pulse of the consumer mindset and understanding what people are still gravitating to,” she says. “While people are focused on tariffs and the availability of jobs, they still want entertainment and to go out. Looking good is a high priority, and there’s a focus on personal style. People aren’t cocooning. They’re prioritizing connection and experiences and making choices about how they achieve their personal style.”

Beauty Independent spoke with Drell-Szyfer about what she tells executives at big beauty companies interested in moving into management at emerging brands, how they can adroitly navigate the transition into smaller organizations, the challenges of beauty brand platforms and a crucial time when she turned to someone else for guidance.

What’s an impactful move you made in your career early on?

When I came to Lauder, my boss sat me down on the first day and made it clear to me that people understood how culture worked at L’Oréal, that it was tough and demanding, and there was confrontational behavior and not in so many words said, “That’s not how we behave here.” I asked for a cultural guide, someone to make sure I acclimated from a cultural perspective.

I had seen at Avon that a lot of people were very high in skill, but low in EQ, and, because they couldn’t fit in culturally, they got fired. My cultural guide was Pauline Brown. She was in M&A at Lauder and then went into private equity and LVMH. She was the chair for North America of LVMH. Now, she’s an author, radio show host and investor. She’s still one of my best friends.

Did you have a strategy for achieving your ultimate career goal?

Not to be CEO of a brand. I didn’t understand that as a possibility. I planned out as far as being head of marketing for a global brand. That was my North Star. My first two years at L’Oréal, I worked in the licensed fragrance division: Ralph Lauren, Armani, Drakar Noir, Cacharel. This elegant woman was head of marketing, had a corner office and wore Armani suits. I was like, that’s my dream.

Eighteen years later, I ended up on the Lauder brand in that role. I did it for three years and was like, OK, I can do something else now. It was then that people were saying to me, “You should own a piece of something and go work at a smaller company that’s more entrepreneurial.” I said, “I’m a big company girl. I always have a deck in front of me, and I do 25 presentations a week.” But I’m definitely somebody who likes to continue to learn new things.

I was ready to be a GM. It wasn’t out of the question for me at Lauder, it was just out of the question after three years in global marketing. My colleagues became GM after five years. Five years after Lauder, I was on my second GM or CEO role at an independent company, and I was on boards for private equity. While people thought I was absolutely bananas for leaving my dream job 15 years ago at Lauder, at this point, three times a week, I get calls from people at L’Oréal, Lauder or another big company asking me, how do you become a CEO at an independent company or get on boards?

What do you tell them?

For people who have stayed in big companies for 20 years in international or general management roles, the transition to CEO is going to be harder because there are more people out there who have been small company CEOs and investors are about pattern recognition. So, it gets harder and harder for people to take a chance on you.

I try to help them hone in on what in their skill set is going to be meaningful as a story to investors on what their strengths are. For people who are now getting laid off because their companies are downsizing and they have been in these global roles for a long time, they should think about taking consulting work to see what the businesses are like, meet the investors and network with people. The L’Oréal and Lauder networks are strong.

What was it like for you to leave Lauder to become GM of Ahava?

I got hired as a GM because the company didn’t know as much as I didn’t know. We were both novices. They should not have hired me, and I should not have been hired. Together, we learned, but it was such a cultural shock that I honestly had a panic attack. I remember saying to my husband, “Oh my god, I made the biggest mistake ever.”

It was so not Lauder. The main company was in Israel owned by the original kibbutz that had started the brand, and there was a private equity minority owner. We were trying to take back the North American distribution from a non-beauty distributor that was 7^th Avenue garmentos. But I was determined to make it work and be successful.

What do you tell first-time CEOs at smaller brands?

Everybody who works in a big company and has a budget thinks they manage a P&L. They don’t manage a P&L. They never thought about inventory. They never thought about paying employees. They don’t think about paying vendors. They don’t do a 12-week rolling or 13-week rolling cash forecast.

I try to impress on people, if you come out of marketing or sales, you haven’t thought about the whole business. Don’t go into it thinking, “I know everything or I should know everything.” The best thing you can do is observe for a little while.

Don’t deny the organization the things you are good at, which might be marketing or commercial relationships, but don’t think you have to be the CFO, head of operations, all those things. You better find out the things you don’t know and make sure you hire or have a way to get those functions done without you doing them because you don’t know them.

Because I had come out of such a professional environment and felt that I was in an environment that was much less sophisticated, it was hard simultaneously to be, “This is much less sophisticated,” but I also understand I didn’t know things. I had to learn. I should have asked a lot more questions.

How was working with private equity?

Working in big companies, there’s a business agenda, but there’s always a personal agenda or “soft politics.” At some point for me, there was a calculus of how much passion and time I was putting in plus travel and the additional time for the work of corporate politics, and I was becoming less and less satisfied with how the trifecta was playing out for me.

What I have always appreciated about private equity is that it’s very cut and dry. Everybody knows what they are there to do: grow value and sell a company. There’s a playbook, there are KPIs, exit is the ultimate success. For somebody who is like, “I don’t need someone telling me what to do, I don’t need the politics, I’m 100% motivated to make this happen,” the private equity environment can work out really well.

Some people don’t like it. They don’t like the idea of not having shared services. They don’t like the idea of how in the weeds they have to be. They don’t like the idea of being very transparent in terms of metrics on a lifetime basis, but I always felt, it’s not my money, somebody gave money to private equity instead of putting it in a bank, and private equity has put it in my care to get a return for investors. Of course, they want to know what’s happening, and, of course, I want to share the good, bad and ugly with them.

You were CEO of Laura Geller Beauty when it was acquired by now-defunct Warburg Pincus-backed company Glansaol. What happened?

I got fired six months after the acquisition. We didn’t agree. I didn’t think they were doing the right thing by the brand and the business. I could have been more elegant about it, but I wasn’t wrong. They went bankrupt 18 months later.

Do you think they could have saved the company?

Without question. They bought healthy brands: Laura Geller, Julep and Clark’s Botanicals. They didn’t have a clue what they were doing with the integration. They had too much hubris. This is an important lesson for investors. There was a mismatch between the types of investments they had done, and the skillsets of the people and the expectations.

They kept telling everybody it was going to be the next Lauder, and it is going to be a shared services model. We are going to keep the founders, and we are going to have an IPO where the founders are going to ring the bell. But they had closed all of the banking relationships and didn’t know how to get lines of credit for these companies. Warburg Pincus had never done a deal under $500 million, and all three brands were sub-$100 million.

They never thought about the next day or the next day. How were they going to integrate the back office? How were they going to take costs out of the system? Ultimately, they never integrated and found cost savings, but added corporate overhead. You put a cost structure on these businesses that were profitable, maybe not at 40% profitability, and they had to support that cost structure.

They thought they were too big to fail, but the reality was they were just too big, and they didn’t understand how to find efficiencies.

What did you learn from that experience about platform-type companies like Orveon?

Do they have a plan for the brands? At [Laura Mercier, Bare Minerals and Buxom parent company] Orveon, they are now going on their third CEO. They have never gotten it operationally right. When we did the carve out of RéVive from Shiseido, we did it in three and a half months. We didn’t want to pay them through a transition services agreement for a brand they didn’t want to run. Orveon took two-plus years on the Shiseido carveout.

Instead of focusing on, step one, let’s get out of Shiseido and work on the brands, and, step two, once we are operationally sound, we will do global expansion, they were doing all these at the same time. And they had more corporate overhead. They had three people in M&A looking to buy brands. They opened over 40 countries in two years, but they couldn’t even ship in the U.S.

When people come to me with platform concepts, I’m like, are you sure you know what you are doing? It’s one of those things where it looks good in a management consultant presentation: There’s a white space, and you can consolidate the back end. I do believe platforms can work—L’Oréal and Lauder are platforms with shared services—but you have to figure out where there’s shared service synergy and where there isn’t. You have to wait for growth until you have done the brand and operational side.

The one that is doing it best is Maesa. They are very clear about who they are. They incubate brands. They put brands into retailers they have relationships with. Parlux is a platform that knows exactly what they’re doing. They launch fragrance brands. Lori Singer was a licensed fragrance expert, and now they have taken it to the next level.

What should founders understand about what they take on when they take money? 

The types of founders that I have worked with have 100% understood why they have taken money and what the goal is. Fifteen to 20 years ago, the founders were makeup artists, plastic surgeons or physicians, for example, who didn’t have a business background, but had a creative idea, built a successful business and, at some point, needed a different level of business professionalism to scale. Those are the type of founders I have worked with. I haven’t worked with investment bankers who had an idea like [Nancy Twine, founder of] Briogeo or L’Oréal-trained marketers who launched brands.

At Laura Geller, I came in with a mid-investment CEO change. Laura was very vocal about why she took money. She wanted to be able to grow and to not only be reliant on QVC, but ceding control, even if you realize you are doing it, is hard. You better have a CEO, team and investor willing to give you grace. I think I was a partner like that to Laura, and Tengram was.

Dr. [Gregory Bays] Brown sold RéVive twice. He sold 100% of his interest the first time to Alticor, and he stayed involved, but not from an ownership perspective. He didn’t think Alticor did anything bad. They created a platform and put it together with Laura Mercier. Laura Mercier got a lot of attention, and RéVive didn’t. Then, when the two sold to Shiseido, he didn’t share in the upside.

But it was still his brand from a heart perspective. So, when we came along and said, “We want to give you equity to be on the journey with us again,” he was happy because it was an opportunity for him to be involved again.

Certainly, along the way, he wanted Tengram to invest more money, but he appreciated people reengaging with the company again. It was probably going to close, and we recovered all the money that had been lost and made it as big as it ever was. His goal was for RéVive to be a global brand, and that’s what we did.

What founders need to know about any time they take money is that, when there’s more than one person’s financial interest at the table, there’s more than one person’s financial interest at the table. My husband, who is a litigator, says, “I find that people generally act ethically until there is money involved, and then there’s money and emotion.”