Pacifica Beauty Executes Rebrand And CEO Change As Founder Brook Harvey-Taylor Transitions To Creative Role

Brook Harvey-Taylor has relinquished her position as CEO of Pacifica Beauty, and Eric Reiter, partner at Brentwood Associates, the private equity firm that invested in the brand in 2022, is occupying the role on an interim basis.

While she’s passing the CEO torch, Harvey-Taylor, who founded Pacifica Beauty with her husband Billy Taylor in 1996, is staying on as chief creative officer to guide the brand’s product innovation, storytelling and creative vision. Jay Sung, an operating partner and CMO at Brentwood Associates and previous president of North America at Proactiv and president of L-Nutra, where he worked to stabilize finances and attract talent, has joined Pacifica Beauty as chief marketing and revenue officer.

“A big lesson for me is Pacifica works best when we have creative and operations running in lock step. We need that perfect mesh,” says Harvey-Taylor. “One of the things we are doing is designing an operating model where I can stay deeply involved, but we can have a world class operator to run the day-to-day operations. I’m not an operator and that’s really where Eric is stepping in.”

The news of Reiter taking over as CEO for Harvey-Taylor confirms an anonymous tip provided to the beauty industry Instagram and Patreon account Estée Laundry describing personnel upheaval, poor morale and sales challenges at Pacifica Beauty. Harvey-Taylor acknowledges the brand went through a turbulent period that she’s confident is behind it.

Natalie Kristo, former CEO of Huda Beauty, was briefly CEO of Pacifica Beauty in 2022 before Harvey-Taylor resumed the post she held from 2019 to 2022. Denny Downs, former CMO of Murad, was CMO of Pacifica Beauty for less than a year between 2023 and 2024. Currently, the brand has 34 people on staff. It’s a fully remote office, though it has quarterly get-togethers.

“With leadership changes, people fall out, and a new leader comes in, and they want to bring in the team and they move folks out, and it starts to affect culture. In 2022, we lost key people in the brand, people that I miss a lot,” says Harvey-Taylor. “This causes more stress on the team below the leadership group and causes people to get upset and angry and start blaming each other.”

Reiter is in the process of meeting with and listening to Pacifica Beauty’s employees to shore up lines of communication and morale. “I am the visionary and creative. Eric has different skills,” admits Harvey-Taylor. “I’m good at getting our team excited about how I see the brand and the brand vision, but the day to day of building teams, having one-on-ones and close connections, that’s where Eric is really strong.” She continues, “With intentional changes, we have been able to create a strong, healthy and stoked team again.”

Brentwood Associates’ typical investment horizon is three to five years, but Harvey-Taylor, who owns a majority stake in Pacifica Beauty with her husband, doesn’t feel pressure from the private equity firm to speed to a liquidity event. “The cool thing about Brentwood is they just brought in more funding for Pacifica because they believe in it long term,” she says. “They are not looking for a quick exit. Their goal is to create a really strong brand that is a brand built for the future.” She underscores Pacifica Beauty isn’t in a rush to name a permanent CEO either, saying, “We are hiring for the next decade, not the next quarter.”

“We are hiring for the next decade, not the next quarter.”

Asked about how the business is performing, Harvey-Taylor responds that it’s “healthy and diversified.” She views it as propitiously situated in the mass market as sales are growing in the segment and there are signs beauty consumers are trading down. According to market research firm Circana, in the first half of this year, mass beauty lapped prestige beauty with sales up 4% versus 2%.

“There’s a huge opportunity for mass fragrances and carving out what we have always tried to do, which is a prestige experience at a mass price,” says Harvey-Taylor. “Over the next few years, that’s going to be more important than ever.”

Pacifica is rolling out a rebrand to make the most of mass’s momentum. The brand hired Established, the New York City agency that counts Isima, Point of View, Rare Beauty and Tilt Beauty as clients, for the rebrand that has trimmed its assortment 40% to under 200 products. The brand has edited its makeup selection in particular to play to its strengths in fragrance, skincare, body care and haircare. This month, it’s placed a haircare set at Ulta Beauty. Along with Ulta, Pacifica Beauty is sold at Whole Foods, Target and Amazon.

Without doing away with its emphasis on color, the rebrand has increased the cohesiveness of Pacifica’s packaging and modernized its logo. Harvey-Taylor says the brand is pursuing a hero product strategy rather than a product franchise strategy and reinforcing core tenets, including that it’s vegan, cruelty-free and affordable. A recent analysis of the new packaging revealed consumers scanning it look first at what the products do for them compared to looking at the art and ounces with the old packaging.

Although Pacifica Beauty raised prices on select products in 2022 and 2023—Harvey-Taylor mentions some jumped from $20 to $24—it’s critical to her that, with the rebrand, it generally prices products under $20. She says, “If we’re going to talk about accessibility and affordability, we have to mean it.”

In tandem with introducing the rebrand, Pacifica’s main goals this year are to bolster retail productivity, partner with its retailers to ensure its assortment is sharp, drive ownable product development and connect with its community. The brand’s core consumers are younger millennials, and it’s reaching gen Z consumers by collaborating with college-age content creators and showing up on campuses.

“Over the last few years, we have responded to trends and lost a little bit of our brand focus. Right now, it’s key for us to stay in our lane and do what we do best, which is creating the best skincare and scents for our customers,” says Harvey-Taylor, adding, “It’s a really big moment for an entire company reset with everything we are doing with packaging, with how we are thinking about the brand moving forward and with Eric as my partner at the helm…We are a 30-year-old brand. A lot happens in 30 years, but we have been able to stay meaningful to our customers. Not sure how many brands can make that claim. My goal is to be around in another 30 years.”