Once known for one-dollar lipsticks, e.l.f. Beauty is now a billion-dollar company with a portfolio of viral beauty brands experiencing massive growth across the globe. From the 20-year-old e.l.f. Cosmetics to Alicia Keys’ Keys Soulcare, their products are beloved for their accessibility, their quality, and the ethos behind them. While the brands’ individual sites cater to DTC commerce, e.l.f. Beauty needed a new digital hub to engage across the entire portfolio as it rocketed to new heights.
Our task was to create a corporate website that felt anything but corporate, catering not just to e.l.f. Beauty's investors but also passionate fans, conscious consumers, and the beauty industry at large. The site needed to be as bold as the e.l.f. brand while highlighting all the proof points of the company’s success, including everything from a deeply active community to a consistent stream of entertainment content. Yet the back end needed to be exceptionally simple, paving the way for frequent updates powered by e.l.f. Beauty’s small, nimble team.
e.l.f. Beauty names itself “A bold disruptor with a kind heart,” and this ethos drives every decision they make. We used this as the guiding light for our site experience as well.
We began by reimaging the new corporate site as an immersive storytelling experience. Moving beyond simple updates, we created a playground for these narratives to be discovered, highlighting everything from e.l.f. 's latest community-centered documentary at Tribeca Film Festival to its viral boardroom diversity campaigns. The site is designed to be equally compelling to the general public as it is to investors, with accessibility baked into the core.
Visually, the site takes cues from e.l.f. Beauty’s bold branding, which we extended into a dynamic and scalable digital UI system. For our initial launch, we thoughtfully crafted 83 modular components with a heavy emphasis on front-end motion and animation while maintaining accessibility standards. Together, these offer the unique feel of a custom-coded site while providing the scalability to easily build endless immersive page combinations.
The content engine of the site also supports this new mode of dynamic storytelling. The underlying logic of the BUZZ (news) page balances the latest viral campaign with investor-focused market reports, with coverage dynamically balanced to avoid overpowering the younger brands. Within BRANDS, we highlight the diverse portfolio under e.l.f. Beauty’s umbrella while giving each a branded moment to feature its values and impact. A dynamic yet modular timeline brings audiences through 20 years of e.l.f. Beauty history.
Critically, we created a new home for IMPACT to highlight e.l.f. Beauty’s belief that businesses can do good while being good. What was once a simple annual PDF is now an ever-evolving interactive story of impact. We go even deeper with our new Changing the Board Game hub, where we track e.l.f. Beauty’s impact on business as a whole beyond beauty, featuring their viral campaigns on boardroom diversity and a game-changing downloadable white paper on the business power of inclusion. With easily updateable microstory cards and thoughtfully immersive animations, we ensure e.l.f.’s impact is clear, engaging, and visible to the world.
Underpinning all of this was a complete re-platforming and migration to a new headless CMS. With such an animation-heavy user experience, we built the admin experience to balance customization at scale while maintaining a drag-and-drop editing interface. Our dev and creative teams collaborated at e.l.f. speed to deliver quality work through a scaled international team across the US, South America, and India. The entire project from brief to launch was completed in 4 months and timed in tandem with e.l.f. Beauty’s 2024 impact report.
The result? A rich, future-proof experience that feels custom-made. e.l.f. Beauty’s new corporate website allows for rich animation while maintaining brand integrity and gives the e.l.f. team a dynamic tool that’s as flexible as it is easy to use. From the CMO to the corporate comms team, the site has been praised for both embracing e.l.f. Beauty’s ethos and for its ability to scale to reach their audiences.
Across the project, a total of 83 reusable and customizable components were built, including 22 animated modules. These were used to create an initial set of 20 immersive storytelling pages with endless possibilities to support future initiatives and campaigns. Our rearchitected content platform also allows for hundreds of articles and updates, future-proofing e.l.f. Beauty’s editorial engine for years to come.
After the launch, we saw a 57% increase in average engagement time per session, a 63% increase in average engagement time per active user, and a 97% increase in sessions started through organic search results (compared to the 45 days before launch). We also saw dramatic improvements in mobile load time and performance, achieved despite a substantial increase in media-rich content.
