Beautycounter: Gregg Renfrew. She Built Beautycounter to $1B… Then Got Fired From Her Own Company
Greg Renfrew, founder of Beauty Counter, shares her entrepreneurial journey from an early online wedding registry sold to Martha Stewart, to building Beauty Counter into a billion-dollar clean beauty brand using a direct sales model, being ousted by private equity firm Carlyle Group, and ultimately buying back the company's assets out of foreclosure to relaunch it as 'Counter.'
Summary
Greg Renfrew grew up outside New York City in a financially constrained household after her parents divorced. After college, she began her career selling Xerox copiers in Manhattan's jewelry district, learning cold sales techniques before moving on. Following a brief first marriage, she spent time in London and Hong Kong where she encountered a bespoke wedding registry concept called 'The Wedding List,' run by Nicole Hindmarch. This inspired Greg to license and adapt the concept for the U.S. market, adding an e-commerce component in the late 1990s during the dot-com boom. The Wedding List partnered with Nordstrom and grew to around $4.5 million in revenue with roughly 30 employees before the dot-com bust forced a premature sale to Martha Stewart Living in 2001.
Working for Martha Stewart proved to be a demanding experience in a fear-based corporate culture, though Greg credits it with teaching her the importance of attention to detail and the combination of creativity and business acumen. After completing her contract, she became CEO of Best & Company, a high-end children's clothing brand owned by Tommy Hilfiger and his then-estranged wife Susie. That role ended abruptly when Greg was fired via a messenger delivering papers in front of her entire team — an experience she describes as humiliating.
Around 2008, Greg relocated to Los Angeles and began consulting for actress Jessica Alba, helping explore the concept of safer products for babies and children — work that informed what would become The Honest Company. Meanwhile, Greg became increasingly passionate about the environmental health movement and the lack of truly clean, high-performing beauty products. She connected with leading makeup artist Christy Coleman and began developing the concept that would become Beauty Counter, which launched in March 2013 with nine products.
Greg chose a direct sales model — similar to Avon but with key differences — because she wanted to build a movement, not just a brand. Representatives, mostly women, could earn commissions on sales and optionally build small teams. All transactions went through Beauty Counter's e-commerce platform, and large orders were flagged to prevent inventory hoarding. The model proved highly effective for customer acquisition and brand amplification. By 2020, Beauty Counter was generating nearly $400 million in annual revenue, with skincare thriving during the pandemic even as cosmetics sales declined.
In May 2021, private equity giant the Carlyle Group purchased a majority stake, valuing the company at approximately $1 billion. Almost immediately after closing, post-pandemic consumer behavior shifted — people redirected spending toward travel and fashion — and the business plateaued. By October 2021, Carlyle informed Greg she was no longer the right person to lead the company and commenced a CEO search. Her replacement, a French executive with experience at L'Oreal and Shiseido named Mark Ray, reportedly did not value Greg's institutional knowledge and lasted only about a year and a half before being asked to resign in May 2023.
After a difficult period on the sidelines, Greg was eventually asked to return as CEO in January 2024. Just six weeks later, Carlyle announced it would cease funding the brand. Unable to find a buyer, the company went into foreclosure. In a remarkable turn, Bank of America — one of the lead lenders — approached Greg's lawyers and offered to sell her the brand's assets back, believing she deserved the chance to reclaim what she had built. Given roughly 48 hours to decide, Greg consulted her family, drew on personal savings, and quickly assembled investor capital to complete the purchase in April 2024. She then had to lay off most employees without severance or health insurance — a decision she describes as 'horrendous' — and officially announced the company's closure on May 1, 2024.
Rather than simply relaunching Beauty Counter, Greg chose to start fresh with a new brand called Counter, preserving the original double-meaning of going 'counter' to industry norms. The new company uses affiliate sales partners who earn commissions on their own sales but cannot build teams, sells primarily through e-commerce and social platforms like TikTok and Instagram, and plans to reopen a physical store on Nantucket. Greg's core mission remains advocating for a meaningful regulatory standard for 'clean beauty,' which she argues is currently an unregulated and largely meaningless marketing term.
Key Insights
- Greg argues that the dot-com bust forced her to sell The Wedding List to Martha Stewart prematurely — a cautionary tale about growth-at-all-costs strategies funded by venture capital that leave founders dangerously over-extended when markets turn.
- Greg claims that working for Martha Stewart taught her that a fear-based leadership culture, while producing excellence, was not the kind of leader she wanted to become — and that Martha's perfectionism came at the cost of accountability.
- Greg contends that being fired from Best & Company via a messenger delivering papers in front of her team — rather than a direct conversation — was a defining humiliation that she attributes in part to her own arrogance in how she handled the founder-CEO dynamic with Susie Hilfiger.
- Greg argues that choosing a direct sales model for Beauty Counter was strategically powerful not because it was fashionable — it wasn't — but because trusted peer-to-peer recommendations were far more cost-effective for customer acquisition than traditional advertising.
- Greg distinguishes her direct sales model from predatory MLMs by emphasizing that Beauty Counter never encouraged large product purchases, flagged orders over $1,000, and routed all transactions through its own e-commerce platform to maintain brand control.
- Greg claims that the term 'clean beauty' has become essentially meaningless in the market, because it is an unregulated label anyone can apply — and that her core ongoing mission with Counter is to fight for an enforceable industry standard that gives the term real meaning.
- Greg argues that Carlyle's decision to remove her as CEO just months after their $600 million investment was driven by discomfort with a post-pandemic plateau in growth, even though she believed the slowdown was a temporary, externally-driven disruption that would resolve itself.
- Greg states that the replacement CEO Carlyle hired did not value her institutional knowledge and chose to run things entirely his own way — and that watching poor decisions being made from the sidelines while still having financial skin in the game was among the hardest experiences of her career.
- Greg claims that Bank of America, one of Beauty Counter's lead lenders, proactively approached her lawyers to offer her the chance to repurchase the brand's assets out of foreclosure — framing it as an act of belief in her and the movement she had created.
- Greg argues that market timing is as important as hard work in entrepreneurial success — citing The Wedding List as a company that was slightly too early for e-commerce adoption, and Beauty Counter as a company that timed the clean beauty movement almost perfectly.
- Greg contends that when Carlyle stopped funding Beauty Counter just six weeks after she returned as CEO in early 2024, she had no plan for what to do — and that buying the assets back in 48 hours was driven more by belief in the mission and encouragement from her family than by a calculated business strategy.
- Greg argues that the reason she relaunched as 'Counter' rather than continuing under the Beauty Counter name was not just a desire for a fresh start, but a recognition that the market had fundamentally changed since 2013 and that the old company's model could not simply be revived.
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