How Gregg Renfrew built, lost, and reclaimed Beauty Counter

Executive overview

Gregg Renfrew built Beauty Counter into a $1B beauty brand over eight years — then was ousted by the private equity firm she sold to, watched it collapse, and bought the assets back for pennies on the dollar.

The story is a masterclass in founder resilience: direct sales as a brand-building engine, the dangers of growth-at-all-costs, and the psychological cost of losing something you built.

Conviction in a contrarian distribution model — direct sales — drove Beauty Counter's scale faster and more cheaply than any ad spend could have.

Early career: sales, failure, and pattern recognition

• Started in sales at Xerox straight out of college, cold-calling the Manhattan jewelry district
• First company, The Wedding List, migrated a bespoke British wedding registry concept to US e-commerce in 1997
• Partnered with Nordstrom ($1M investment) after cold-calling the CEO at 7am before his assistant arrived
• Revenue hit ~$4.5M with 40 staff before the dot-com crash forced a premature sale to Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in 2001
• Key lesson from the crash: investors pushing "growth at all costs" leaves founders exposed when tides turn
• Worked for Martha Stewart for ~one year — learned that attention to detail and the creativity-business combination works; also learned what kind of leader she didn't want to be
• Fired by messenger as CEO of Best & Company (Tommy Hilfiger's children's brand) after ~one year — a formative humiliation

The Beauty Counter origin

• Obsession with toxic chemicals began after watching friends diagnosed with cancer and a nanny die at 31
• Consulted for Jessica Alba in 2008–09, helping shape what became The Honest Company; left to pursue her own idea in the beauty space
• Identified a gap: high-performing products that avoided specific chemicals of concern — "clean beauty" didn't yet exist as a category
• Partnered with makeup artist Christy Coleman, the first leading makeup artist to clean up her kit
• Launched in 2013 with 9 products (skincare essentials) using US manufacturers exclusively — a deliberate choice to create American jobs

The direct sales model

• Initially rejected direct sales ("hell no") before researching it seriously
• Key differentiator from predatory MLMs: no large product buy-ins required; flagged any order over $1,000; all transactions shipped from the company's warehouse
• Less than 5% of reps built teams — most were part-time participants giving 1–3 hours a week
• Did a national roadshow before launch, recruiting ~200–300 sellers before the first product shipped
• Reps served two functions: customer acquisition and brand amplification — 8 million people could see a new campaign overnight
• Scaled to hundreds of millions in revenue in 8 years; raised over $80M by 2018; investors included Bono via TPG Growth

The Carlyle acquisition and ousting

• 2020 pandemic year: nearly $400M in revenue; skincare surged while cosmetics collapsed
• May 2021: Carlyle Group acquired a majority stake at ~$1B valuation
• Post-acquisition, business plateaued as consumers redirected spending to travel and fashion; Omicron disrupted in-person sales events
• October 2021: Carlyle informed Renfrew she was not the right person to lead the company; search for a replacement CEO began
• Replacement CEO (former Shiseido executive) lasted ~18 months before being asked to resign in May 2023
• Renfrew stayed connected behind the scenes, motivated by financial stake and belief in the mission
• January 2024: invited back as CEO to attempt a turnaround

The collapse and buyback

• Six weeks after returning as CEO, Carlyle pulled all further funding — March 2024
• No buyer found; company went into foreclosure, taken over by lenders led by Bank of America
• Bank of America approached Renfrew directly on a Sunday night, offering to sell her the brand assets
• 48 hours to decide; used personal savings plus a handful of former investors to fund the acquisition
• Acquired assets in April 2024: formulations, brand name, inventory, website, marketing materials
• Let go of the majority of staff without severance or health insurance — "horrendous"
• Announced company closure May 1, 2024; simultaneously began rebuilding under the new brand Counter

Rebuilding as Counter

• Deliberately chose not to simply relaunch Beauty Counter — the market had shifted fundamentally since 2013
• New model: affiliate relationships (via platforms like ShopMy), e-commerce driving majority of sales, one physical store (Nantucket)
• Brand partners earn commission on their own sales only; no team-building allowed — eliminates the MLM dynamic entirely
• Mission remains: fight for a meaningful, regulated standard for "clean" beauty
• Still owns the Beauty Counter brand name; has not ruled out future use

Reflections on founder psychology

• Identity fusion with a company is real — losing Beauty Counter felt like losing herself
• ~60,000 reps assumed she had "cashed out and peaced out"; couldn't correct the record publicly while still an owner
• Parallel to the Best & Company firing: being removed from something you built is always personal, regardless of how it's framed
• On luck vs. grind: market timing matters more than luck; The Wedding List was "a little too early"; Beauty Counter timed well
• "Overnight success as a founder is 10 years, 24/7"