The funds of the Drunk Elephant brand are now at the peak of popularity. They are distinguished by a stylish minimalist design, an original name, and high efficiency, as beauty bloggers say. It has become a real Instagram hit and is also in the top sales among beauty products on the website Sephora. The founder of the brand, which became the beauty trend of 2018, is Tiffany Masterson (“About Us,” n.d.). She couldn’t find her perfect face cream, and she decided to make it herself – this is how the story of Drunk Elephant begins (“About Us,” n.d).
Since childhood, Masterson has been looking for a miracle product that would solve her skin problems. She tried everything even among expensive brands: she recorded the result, checked which substances were included in the composition of a particular product, then found out what role they performed. Two years have passed, and Masterson identified a “suspicious six” – ingredients to which her skin reacted badly. These are essential oils, alcohol, organosilicon compounds (or silicones), chemical sunscreen filters, flavorings/dyes, and sodium lauryl sulfate (E487) (“Our philosophy,” n.d.).
Masterson began to communicate with dermatologists, fashion magazine editors, cosmetics buyers, skincare specialists, and cosmetologists all over the country. When she realized what she wanted to do, Masterson found a chemist through her friends and sent him a sketch of a recipe with a request to make a prototype. After the launch in 2013, she collected the opinions of the first customers for a year and made corrections to the formulas. In August of the following year, a sales website drunkelephant.com was launched in a pilot mode, and in July 2014, its official opening took place. Masterson took the money from family savings; another $300,000 was borrowed from her brother-in-law (Sorvino, 2019).
The myth that elephants in Africa get slightly drunk by eating the fruits of the marula tree inspires the name of the brand. The oil of these very fruits, that is, cold-pressed marula oil and of the highest quality, is part of the entire line. It is rich in valuable unsaturated fatty acids that help the skin adapt to an aggressive external environment. It is also valued for its antimicrobial properties and its high content of antioxidants, including a high percentage of vitamin C (Pina, 2017).
The breakthrough happened when the Sephora cosmetics store chain turned to Masterson. She went to the Cosmoprof exhibition in Las Vegas, where some sales representatives asked her for samples. A week later, she received a call, and five months later, in January 2015, her products appeared on the shelves of Sephora in the United States and Canada (Saltzman, 2018). In the fall of 2018, Sephora brought it to Singapore, and in September, it began to be sold in Hong Kong and mainland China using the Tmall platform. The company grew at an impressive pace: from 2015 to 2016, revenue increased by 600% to $30 million. In 2018, it approached $100 million, and last year it reached $120 million (Saltzman, 2018).
In October 2020, the news flew around the market: one of the oldest cosmetics companies in the world – Shiseido Group, is absorbing Drunk Elephant. It is paying $845 million to 50-year-old Masterson who will get about $120 million from this amount (as Forbes estimates) (Saltzman, 2018). Leandra Medin (author of the Man Repeller blog) invested in the brand, and last year it was headed by Tim Warner, former executive director of Urban Decay. It is difficult to call the Drunk Elephant brand young: it has existed in the beauty market for more than eight years (Saltzman, 2018). However, the growing dispute over eco-friendly skincare products and conscious consumption, which was to the liking of celebrities, have elevated this brand to the top of the beauty Olympus right now (Saltzman, 2018).
References
About us. (n.d.). Drunk Elephant. Web.
Our philosophy. (n.d.). Drunk Elephant. Web.
Pina, T. (2017). Drunk Elephant is doing everything right. Racked. Web.
Saltzman, S. (2018). How Drunk Elephant founder Tiffany Masterson went from stay-at-home mom to beauty mogul. Fashionista. Web.
Sorvino, C. (2019). Hot skin-care brand drunk elephant sells for $845 million, minting founder a fortune. Forbes. Web.