Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) has a fresh plan for its ‘indie’ brands. CEO Stéphane de la Faverie says the beauty giant now has a strategy built specifically to speed up their growth.
The timing’s no accident. According to de la Faverie, skin care brand The Ordinary is closing in on US$1bn in annual sales, a figure he shared at the Barclays Global Consumer Conference on 9 September.
While walking through early results from ELC’s ‘Beauty Reimagined’ turnaround plan, he named The Ordinary as one of the group’s three fastest-growing brands. The other two? Kilian Paris and Le Labo.
ELC’s relationship with The Ordinary’s parent company, Deciem, has been a slow burn. It first invested in 2017, took a majority stake in 2021, and finally bought the business outright in 2024.
“Kilian Paris and The Ordinary are two examples [where] the brand has created an alternative model to be able to accelerate an indie brand within the portfolio of the Estée Lauder Companies,” said de la Faverie.
“That is new from the model that we had in the past, and mainly operationalised by ‘Beauty Reimagined’.
“So, we can create the next big brand for the future that will add more building blocks of growth for the company in the future.
“We really think that we have the winning playbook.”
Not everyone’s convinced, though. Several founders whose brands were snapped up by ELC have recently opened up about how tough life got under the conglomerate’s roof.
And some brands didn’t survive at all. Becca Cosmetics, for instance, was shut down after the acquisition.
Jerrod Blandino co-founded make-up brand Too Faced, which ELC bought in 2016; he left in 2022. In August, he alleged that after a strong first year post-deal, a battle for control kicked off “very quickly”.
Then there’s Bobbi Brown. The MUA sold her namesake brand to ELC back in 1995, and she’s since launched Jones Road Beauty.
Speaking on the Aspire with Emma Grede podcast earlier this year, Brown claimed her final two years at the brand left her “miserable”.
It’s gotten to the point where some industry insiders have a name for it: the ‘ELC curse’.
New ‘One ELC’ model ‘is working’
So how did we get here? Back in November 2023, the beauty giant unveiled its ‘Profit Recovery and Growth Plan’ (PRGP) to prop up sagging sales.
That programme grew in February last year. It was rebranded, and broadened, under the ‘Beauty Reimagined’ banner.
Now there’s a new ‘One ELC’ operating model too. According to de la Faverie, it leaves the conglomerate “better positioned to compete in prestige beauty, accelerating our speed at which we are driving the pace of the demand of the consumers, but also the competition of the indie brands today,” as he told the Barclays Consumer Conference.
“And, as we move further, we will not just match the speed of the indie brands. Our intention is to push past their speed.
“The speed of innovation for us is really absolutely key.
“We are a simpler organisation today, much more agile as one team, with fewer layers and silos, and greater accountability as we are exiting the PRGP two-year restructuring programme that we have just concluded on 30 June.
“We are also a nimbler organisation with refined ownership between who does what in the organisation, between brands, between regions, and between the operations within the company.
“That has really helped us to strengthen our brand building, between brands and around the world, and also to be much more strategic on how and where we are spending our consumer-facing investment.”
He didn’t stop there. De la Faverie continued: “We are a much bolder organisation, more united and transformative-oriented organisation through all the beauty commitment that we have deployed, that now have been cascaded to all the organisations around the world.
“And, finally, we are a more efficient organisation, having evolved how we work between us, but also with our partners.”
As for exactly when The Ordinary will cross the $1bn line, he kept things vague. All he’d say was that the brand is “coming very close to that for the near future”.
Once it gets there, it’ll join some heavy hitters. ELC’s billion-dollar club already includes Estée Lauder, Clinique, MAC Cosmetics, La Mer, Tom Ford Beauty and Jo Malone London.
The Ordinary is ELC’s biggest ‘indie’ brand, but it wasn’t the only one in the spotlight. De la Faverie also pointed to strong 2026 fiscal year performances from MAC Cosmetics and Kilian Paris.
“Kilian Paris, while a much smaller brand in our portfolio, is another great case study of how powerful ‘Beauty Reimagined’ is,” he said.
“During the course of 2026, we have really deployed the brand in more channels, more retailers around the world.
“We have invested in innovation, and today we are proud to say that we have a 19% point acceleration in organic sales growth from fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2026.
“From a large brand to a smaller brand, the model is working.”
