Navigating Beauty and Balance: Insights from a Marketing Maven
The Intersection of Passion and Profession
Hello, I’m Anne, your host at the Beyond Beauty Podcast, and I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Elise Markowitz, a remarkable marketing and growth consultant, as well as a dedicated mom of two. Our shared history at Kendo, a division of LVMH, set the stage for a nostalgic trip down memory lane, where we reminisced about our early days in the call center, crafting brand marketing and PR strategies for an array of beauty brands.
Elise’s Journey into the Beauty Industry
Elise’s path to the beauty industry is a testament to the power of passion and the importance of following one’s dreams. Despite her degree in political science, Elise was drawn to the allure of beauty and marketing. Her career began in fitness marketing at the dawn of social media and digital marketing, but it was her determination and networking skills that landed her a coveted role at Sephora. There, she honed her skills in brand marketing, working with notable names like Kat Von D Beauty and Formula X.
The Evolution of Marketing in the Beauty Realm
Our conversation delved into the transformative landscape of marketing within the beauty industry, with a particular focus on the rise of influencer marketing. Elise recounted the early days of influencer partnerships, navigating the challenges and celebrating the successes that came with this novel approach.
Motherhood and Career: Striking a Balance
Elise’s personal journey took center stage as she opened up about the profound impact motherhood had on her career trajectory. The struggle to balance professional aspirations with the demands of raising a family led her to establish Markowitz Marketing, her own consulting agency. Elise’s story is a powerful reminder of the need to find a work-life balance that resonates with our individual priorities and family needs.
Empowering Women in Their Choices
We wrapped up our discussion by emphasizing the significance of supporting and empowering women, whether in their careers, family life, or both. Elise and I agreed on the importance of offering non-judgmental advice and understanding the unique paths individuals take.
Adapting to a Changing Marketing Landscape
Elise highlighted the profound impact of the pandemic and shifting consumer behaviors on marketing strategies. She underscored the importance of adaptability and the continuous testing of new approaches in a world where consumers wield considerable influence over brands through social media and the internet.
Beyond Social Media: The Depth of Marketing
Dispelling the myth that marketing is solely about crafting social media content, Elise stressed the depth of experience, data analytics, and strategic decision-making that underpin successful campaigns. She emphasized the importance of presenting well-thought-out plans to company leadership, while also acknowledging the unpredictable nature of marketing.
Reflecting on Personal and Professional Growth
As we explored the concept of “sitting in the stands” in one’s life, Elise reflected on her own challenges in balancing professional growth with personal responsibilities. She shared her aspirations for expanding her agency while maintaining a healthy work-life balance, highlighting the complexities involved in this endeavor.
Advice for Aspiring Beauty Industry Professionals
For those looking to break into the beauty industry, Elise’s advice was clear: take calculated risks, reach out to industry leaders, and showcase initiative and creativity. Her encouragement serves as a beacon for aspiring professionals eager to make their mark.
In this ever-evolving world of beauty and marketing, Elise Markowitz stands as a shining example of how passion, adaptability, and a commitment to balance can pave the way for success. Her journey is not just a roadmap for aspiring marketers but a narrative that resonates with anyone striving to harmonize their professional and personal lives. Thank you for joining me on this insightful exploration, and I look forward to bringing you more inspiring stories from the world of Beyond Beauty.
Podcast Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:00:03) – Well, today on the Beyond Beauty podcast, we have Elise Markowitz, mom of two and a marketing and growth consultant. Elise, we’re so happy to have you on the podcast today.
Speaker 2 (00:00:14) – Thank you. I’m so happy to be here. It’s great to see you, Anne.
Speaker 1 (00:00:17) – It’s good to see you. So everyone, Elise and I work together at kendo, which is a division of LVMH. We were there in the very early days. I believe we worked in what we called the call center together, which is where there’s a lot of people that had just started working on Kat Von D, Marc Jacobs beauty, Ulla Henriksen, and we were just we were making everything happen from brand marketing to PR strategies. So we got to spend a lot of quality time together back in San Francisco. So Elise, we’re excited to hear your story in the beauty industry, how you got involved, how you got started. So let’s go back. Where did this all begin? At one point, did you know you wanted to go into the beauty industry, and how did your career evolve, and where did you get to the point? Or how did you get to the point where you are today?
Speaker 3 (00:01:03) – Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:01:04) – It has been a long and interesting journey for sure. I tell everybody I have a very eclectic career background compared to most in the industry, and for me that was really on purpose. I wanted to be somebody who had a very 360 holistic view of beauty and not only beauty, but marketing. So I’ve always been a beauty lover. Since I was a very young age, I would steal my mom’s lipsticks, similar stories to to some people out there. And when I was older, I ended up getting my degree, my bachelor’s in political science, so nothing even remotely close to marketing. So that was really helpful. And then as I grew up, I graduated in 2009 from college, which was the height of that recession then. So there weren’t a lot of jobs out there. I had to just make it work. I worked abroad in Korea for a year teaching English finance, and I just took that time to travel. When I came back to the States, I started working in marketing for fitness actually, and I liked it.
Speaker 2 (00:02:10) – It was in the early days of social media, digital marketing, all of those things. So you actually go in and manually upload your Google ads, and social media was all about just posting cute stuff and keeping it on brand. Nothing like it is now. Influencers didn’t exist, which is, I know, shocking for so many people. There was a time, so that was great. And then I knew I wanted to be in beauty. So I I’m a little bit of a woo person. Definitely like hard working, but I just put it out there. I just said out loud, I said, I want to be in marketing at Sephora or in beauty. And just because I did one day to myself and then I’m like, how could I make this happen? So I went on LinkedIn back when LinkedIn was actually very new itself, and I looked at everybody who I knew, who worked at Sephora, and then if I had any mutual connections to them, and I found one person who worked there that I had a mutual connection with that I actually worked with at my current role.
Speaker 2 (00:03:14) – And I just asked her to to introduce me, to send her my resume. And as fate would have it, like two weeks later, she was looking for a temp for a role there. And that’s how I got my foot in the door. And then I got hired on full time shortly after.
Speaker 1 (00:03:28) – Wow. And then within the world of marketing, there’s so many different things you can do in marketing. Even before the influencer marketing days. There’s like you said, there’s the Google Ads side, there’s more of the analytical growth marketing, and there’s more of the brand marketing, of the aesthetics, the colors, what their point of view is or brand image and identity. What role did you learn at Sephora? Was that the role that you wanted it? Was it the role that was a stepping stone? And how did you figure out what you clicked with the most in marketing? Yeah, or within the greater industry?
Speaker 2 (00:04:00) – That’s a great question. And I don’t think I knew when I really started in marketing what aspect of it I liked the most.
Speaker 2 (00:04:07) – I landed a role in brand marketing at the time, which back then really had a different meaning, I think, than it does now. I think you’ll see cyclically that all of these terms within marketing change, it’s like brand marketing and then it’s engagement marketing. And then now growth marketing is like the new hot thing. So back then it really it was a little more broad than brand marketing is now. It was just a catchall for all marketing. So I landed that role and I really enjoyed it. It was on Kat Von D beauty in the early days of Kat Von D beauty and on a nail brand called formula X that doesn’t exist anymore. So those two roles and just learning about all of them, how to work really closely with our partners, our retail partners, how to grow the brand, what different activations we can do to grow the brand. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:04:58) – Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:04:59) – And so you were on Kat Von D when. I think it was the number one brand at Sephora. Is that correct? And that was or close to it or it definitely between the liquid lip, the liquid eyeliner it was everyone was talking about.
Speaker 1 (00:05:15) – So what was that like when you’re sitting on the top, per se of the beauty industry, and what did you learn from that?
Speaker 2 (00:05:22) – It was wild. I will say that I started on the brand when it wasn’t necessarily taken seriously by everyone in the beauty industry, especially within beauty artist industry. So that was a huge focus for us at the time. Is getting into artistry showing how great the formulations were in addition to being a celebrity brand kind of beyond that and helping to showcase Kat as an artist. So that was really special to be a part of that and that transition of the brand, seeing how people grew to respect it from a formula, artistic perspective as well. It was crazy. I remember not myself being able to get a Lolita liquid lip from inside the office, so that was crazy and it was just exciting to be a part of.
Speaker 1 (00:06:13) – Mhm. That is a good point too. It’s not only do you have a celebrity paired with a beauty brand, which we saw a lot with within fragrance, but this is before Fenty.
Speaker 1 (00:06:23) – This is before Rare Beauty which is definitely more common today to have a celebrity tied to makeup skincare, fragrance. But we saw in the 90s it was all about celebrity licensing, fragrances, but not so much within the beauty space. Yes, there might have been. I think it was Julia Roberts who was on with Lancome. Right. And there would be the back of the Vogue magazine or like the front 20 pages in terms of ads, but now someone is endorsing this line, using it, and it’s not just slap a name on a label, but it’s they’re involved from everything, not only from marketing, but also truly from product development. And, like you said, marketing to those genuine makeup artists. It’s all about the formula and the payoff and the color, the consistency. That was a really big deal back in the day. And then on top of it around 2014, 2015, that’s when every brand started focusing on influencer marketing. So tell us about that. How did you navigate that? Because I personally still remember people were saying, why are you gifting? Why are you spending so much money to gift mail, create custom boxes, send videos and boxes to these people on the internet that you don’t even know that aren’t even obligated to post.
Speaker 1 (00:07:36) – But they received and we really had to fight against the critics to say, this is the next wave of marketing and let’s see what we can do and use it as our own growth hack.
Speaker 2 (00:07:47) – Yeah, I always speak to this when I’m talking to people about my career, and it’s exciting, but it also makes me feel old. Like you just said that now people can’t even imagine not gifting influencers or working with influencers or probably influencers being one of the biggest expenditures in their budget. And like you said back then, we had like friends of the brand that you would send stuff to, not even really considering them influencers, just people who you knew liked the brand or who knew the founder or whatever, and you would gift them. They would post and you didn’t really have a way of measuring if there was anything earned from that posting. So I think around that same time you saw a lot of measurement tools launching to capture that white space. And yeah, I think all of the brands at Kendall were on the forefront of that entire industry within an industry.
Speaker 2 (00:08:43) – So that was exciting to be a part of and figure out. The way in there, the right way to gift influencers, because I think we learned really quickly that just the the spray and pray approach of just sending it to everybody and being anonymous, just sending like a printed card wasn’t the way to go. And you really had to be very personal and thoughtful and how you gifted them, especially with a color brand like Kat Von D where you have to not every color works to every person, so how can you make it really elevated and personalized? So it was exciting.
Speaker 1 (00:09:18) – So fast forward to now. So what did you do between working at kendo to to the point you’re at today? How did you get there? How did it evolve? And what was what’s been going on since the days of the beginning of influencer marketing, as we can say, in the history of the beauty industry.
Speaker 2 (00:09:35) – Yeah, yeah. So it’s been a wild ride in a good way. I got pregnant with my first, who was not five while I was still working at kendo.
Speaker 2 (00:09:47) – So that was, I think, the beginning of a very interesting journey with not only my career, but identity as a whole. I always knew I wanted kids, and I think people always say, you can be prepared, but you’re never ready. And I think for me that was 100% true. So I got pregnant, I went on mat leave, and I think that the first year of my son’s life, I was just in shock from being a mom and just this whole new world of, oh my God, like, I actually have a baby now. And I also suffered from postpartum anxiety. Pretty badly. So that was tough. Having a baby, not knowing what it’s like to be working all the time, dealing with that, and you’re a mom now on top of everything else, I think we all know women have all of these expectations in general to be the perfect everything. And then adding on to that, you’re in charge of a whole nother human. It was a lot to deal with.
Speaker 2 (00:10:49) – So I had a major identity crisis, and I also went back to work, and I switched to being at a beauty startup, which I liked, but I just for me, I couldn’t find the right balance of being with what was now the most important thing in my life, my son, and working full time. And at that point, there really wasn’t a work from home situation that was pre pandemic. So that was a special, rare thing. So I would every I always tell this story every Sunday and it’s true. Back then I would just cry and get the extreme Sunday scaries because I knew I wasn’t going to be seeing my son basically the whole week. I would see him like an hour a day before I dropped him off, and then an hour after I picked him up from daycare. And for me, that wasn’t the balance that I wanted. So I quickly learned that I needed to make a change in some way, to make my life what I wanted it to be as a working mom.
Speaker 2 (00:11:52) – So that’s when I decided to start my own consulting agency. And so here I am, five five years later.
Speaker 1 (00:12:02) – This is a topic I’d love to explore, is that sometimes we hear people have more of a work life balance when they work for themselves. Sometimes people say I’m more of a work life balance. When I work for a big corporate company that might offer subsidized daycare, or there’s daycare within the building, what are your thoughts on this, and what advice would you give to a new mom or to a mom of kids that might be five and ten and 15? How do you find that balance, and are there different paths for different types of careers or personalities or family structures?
Speaker 2 (00:12:32) – Yeah, I think the most important thing is that you do what is right for you and your family. If you want to work full time and your kid goes to daycare full time and that works for you, that is great. And I think everybody should just stop judging moms, especially each other, on what we decide to do, how we want to live our lives, how we want to navigate these really intense and sometimes stressful years of raising small children.
Speaker 2 (00:12:59) – For me, that wasn’t what I wanted and what was working for my family at the time. So I chose a different option of. I actually ended up staying home full time for. I went to back to work for a year after my son was born, was not happy, ended up just being like, okay, I need to figure something else out. I was very lucky. I have a supportive husband, so I was able to stay home for about a year and get things to figure it out before I launched my new company, but I think it’s really whatever works for you. What makes you happy? Your partner happy, your kids happy. However you guys thrive. That is what works for.
Speaker 3 (00:13:39) – You.
Speaker 1 (00:13:41) – And it’s important. It’s never judge anyone else. What works for you might not work for someone else, and I honestly think I’m not a mom. I have a lot of friends that are moms and I step back and women are really tough on each other. They’re very judgmental. They’re quick to throw shade, per se, at somebody that doesn’t look like them in terms of what their their structure or the life is where they live, what part of the country, part of the world, how big their family, how small their family is.
Speaker 1 (00:14:05) – And I truly think if we could just step back and say, we’re all individuals, we’re all unique and we’re all doing the best we can, let’s just almost hold hands and let’s make this a better place. Easier said than done. So I think that’s a good point of let’s stop judging no matter what point we’re at. If our moms or for 22 year olds just navigating the corporate world.
Speaker 3 (00:14:26) – Right, it could be a different place.
Speaker 2 (00:14:29) – I agree, and I think it’s tough, especially on women of our age and all ages, but I think our age really had that girlboss mentality driven into us. So we’re like, we have to achieve, keep achieving, never leave workforce. We’re just we’re so intense on that. And I think that’s amazing and great. And I’m the same exact way. I think we also need to think about. Holistically how we’re going to be happy, what makes just winning in a career or just winning at home or however you want to say it? I think it it needs to work for you and you shouldn’t really care what society has to say about it.
Speaker 1 (00:15:10) – I agree, I heard someone recently say I keep on forgetting who was being interviewed, but it was somebody went to a person with a lot of thoughts and opinions and in a leadership space, and they said, what is the definition of success? Thinking that it would be some type of monetary number, the size of the house or the size of the family, or the white picket fence, or where they went on vacation that summer. And instead, he said, the definition of success is finding your inner Zen, finding your inner peace. What makes you happy and not waking up with anxiety? Not waking up with these panics. Not feeling like we have to climb a corporate ladder. Girlboss ladder. What truly makes you happy inside, and just being able to wake up and feel at peace. And that’s something that’s not mentioned often. Yeah, on a barometer of success.
Speaker 3 (00:15:57) – I totally.
Speaker 2 (00:15:57) – Agree with that. And I think too, if you don’t want to have kids, that’s great too. And I super respect that.
Speaker 2 (00:16:02) – Sometimes I’m like, did I make a mistake? Just kidding. But no, it’s everybody just do what you want to do and stop being so judgmental towards others and just.
Speaker 3 (00:16:13) – You know, and.
Speaker 1 (00:16:14) – Help each other out too. And if someone and I think this is what this is about too, is giving each other advice and saying, maybe there’s a bin, there’s someone on here who’s a mom of teenagers, and she could say, this is what I was doing when I was building my career and raising my family, or maybe someone who’s thinking about starting a family. There’s ways that people that connect and share advice and that’s so powerful. And to remove the judgment and share advice, at the end of the day, it’s going to get us all farther in any aspect of life. So tell us about being a consultant. Starting your own company.
Speaker 3 (00:16:44) – More. Yeah. Yeah. It’s been.
Speaker 1 (00:16:46) – How did you get started beyond saying this is what I want to do, this is my work life balance.
Speaker 2 (00:16:51) – I will also say that I know that I am privileged and having been able to start my own company, I had a working partner that I could fall back on during this. And I think that’s not the reality for everyone, and I’m really aware of that. And I just want to note that before I continue, as I think it’s really important. And so as far as my journey, I got started, I knew I wanted to be in a marketing and growth position. I did always feel like in the corporate world, you by the nature of roles, you’re just putting a box in one area of marketing that you’re in charge of. And I’ve always been interested in the three 60s. Yes, the branding aspects, but also the growth aspects. What are the numbers looking like? How do we pull each lever to affect those on budgeting, etc.? I’ve really always been interested in in all realms. So when I started my marketing consultancy, Markowitz Marketing, I wanted to make sure that we offered all of those services and even some that I necessarily wasn’t.
Speaker 2 (00:17:53) – Feeling prepared for as even though I had experience in them, I think everybody has that imposter syndrome for sure. And so I was able to reach out to some friends that I knew were starting companies, or potentially kicking off brands and work for them at a discounted rate just to get some things on my my resume to start with. And I think a lot of people are what I’ve noticed in people just starting out when they’re consulting is that they’re almost afraid to offer their services at a reduced fee and or potentially work for free to get that experience or those like names in their roster. And I would, if you can advise against that and just start working, just start working with somebody, figure something out, just put some irons in the fire and just get yourself out there and just keep just reaching out to people throwing spaghetti against the wall. And that’s how I got my first few, my first few clients. I also applied to marketer hire, which I’m sure you guys have heard of, and I was accepted to that, which was huge and exciting.
Speaker 2 (00:19:01) – So that’s been a great way of getting clients as well. And it’s just been referrals since then, which has been really flattering and really exciting. So I’ve been super lucky and it’s worked for me in terms of at 1115, I have to go get my daughter from school and I can do that, which is really important to me. So it’s been a lot of hard work. I will be honest. That was a very nutshell. Answer a lot of hard work, stressful days of working after I put the kids to bed. But for me, I chose this and I know that this is what I want. So it’s been it’s been a pleasure to do.
Speaker 1 (00:19:37) – Do you work solely within the beauty vertical or do you work outside of beauty and consumer goods and beyond?
Speaker 3 (00:19:45) – I do work.
Speaker 2 (00:19:46) – Outside of beauty. I have found myself really in a niche of beauty. Skincare fashion is where I have found myself, which is a great place to find yourself if you’re into those industries. It’s been awesome, really exciting.
Speaker 2 (00:19:59) – So I’ve been working. Really. In that space. It’s been it’s been exciting. And also to see how that space itself has shifted over just even the past few years, with the pandemic, a constant looming recession, and how shoppers are shopping differently with a firm and all of these new offerings that they have with Amazon, we’re in a new, completely new world. So it’s been a really exciting learning phase two of my career as a whole. I think getting to work across different verticals has made me such a stronger marketer. I’m able to just be exposed to different people, thoughts, ways of shopping, ideas, um, plugins for Shopify, just everything has been has been really exciting to to be a part of.
Speaker 3 (00:20:49) – What would you.
Speaker 1 (00:20:49) – Say the biggest shift in marketing has been in the past eight, ten years? And how are you constantly consuming new information to always stay ahead of the curve and keep innovating within the world of marketing that seems to be growing at a faster pace and changing at a faster pace.
Speaker 1 (00:21:10) – I should say more now than ever.
Speaker 3 (00:21:13) – Yeah, I think number.
Speaker 2 (00:21:15) – One, just be open. And I know that’s a very broad answer. Be open. I think always be testing everything in terms of whether it’s creative imagery copy. For me, I think the biggest shift has been the consumer now tells you what they want. We don’t tell the consumer anymore what they want. They are with the age of internet and social media, everyone’s an expert whether they are or not. So you really need to be able to quickly, um, move towards those new trends of what they’re wanting in terms of ingredients or the way that things where, um, sizing colorways, um, and they, you can’t just be stuck in your ways. This is the brand. This is how we’re going to do it. It really is a balancing act between making sure that you’re true to yourself and your brand, and then also making it relevant to this consumer who is hyper educated in all things. They can Google literally anything.
Speaker 2 (00:22:14) – They have a computer at the touch of their fingers. So I think making sure that you’re constantly open to that, and I think to what I’ve, what I have really learned is that marketing constantly humbles you. What you think will work in terms of an ad could be a complete flop, and an ad that you think is so ugly will be by far and away your biggest return on ad spend. So I think you can’t ever think that you know it all because you don’t. You just can’t. And you need to be this nice balance again of like creative but also looking at the data.
Speaker 3 (00:22:48) – Yeah. And that’s such.
Speaker 1 (00:22:49) – An exciting thing because you can bring that confidence and courage and taking risks into your job. Like you said, what you think is you could put your biggest bet on a campaign and it’s not going to go anywhere. As this one random maybe UGC ad that you spent $75 creating and how that’s really going to drive sales on the TikTok shop. So how do you stay confident going into these marketing executions, knowing that what worked maybe three weeks ago for one brand might not work for the same brand today and this fast paced industry we’re in, how can we still bring confidence to AV testing, experimenting while staying humbled while still bringing confidence and saying we know what we’re doing? It’s an innovative time.
Speaker 1 (00:23:36) – And isn’t that more exciting than, you know, stagnation?
Speaker 2 (00:23:40) – Yeah, that’s a great question. Maybe the best question, I think.
Speaker 3 (00:23:46) – For marketers.
Speaker 2 (00:23:47) – It’s always very hard to prove worth, I think, with everything that they’re doing. But I do think, too, there’s this stereotype of the marketer, Emily in Paris, I’m just going to shoot content and upload it to Instagram. I cannot tell you how many times I have been treated as such in the workplace, and I think a lot of people don’t know that there is a ton of experience in data analytics. Knowing how consumers shop, knowing when they shop. There’s just there’s so many touchpoints and data points that go into a marketing campaign. And then it’s the testing. How are you going to allocate the budget across each channel? How are these customers spoken to across each channel? But at the same time, it all has to be on brand. There’s a lot that goes into it. So I think number one, making sure that you have the confidence when you’re going into a meeting with founders or the C-suite at your company, that you.
Speaker 2 (00:24:48) – Can deliver a plan confidently and say, okay, here’s what’s worked before. Maybe let’s try it again. Here’s a certain percentage I want to test with to potentially grow by x percent and just be really up front with the fact that anything in marketing is never promised. It’s we’re figuring it out. It’s an art form as much as it is a data driven field. So it’s going to be a constant up and down. Consumers are constantly changing. The world isn’t stagnant. So marketing moves really fast. And I think just constantly being up on what the newest things are getting on all of the mailing lists, email lists, keeping up to date with new social media apps, not letting your ego ever get in the way of this is what marketing is like, period. End of story. These are the only channels you have to just constantly be open and flexible and learning. As the world changes, which it does every.
Speaker 3 (00:25:43) – Day, it does.
Speaker 1 (00:25:44) – That’s a really good point to stay up to date with those marketing newsletters and it might seem overwhelming to wake up every Monday or now they’re coming every Wednesday, Friday of all this extra email in your inbox.
Speaker 1 (00:25:54) – Not that we we need any more things flying at us, but there’s so much information there. And it’s a way to say what’s going on. What worked for this company or what worked for this vertical might work for the beauty vertical. So that is that is a very solid point I agree with. So two more questions as we wind down this podcast. At least we love to ask the question of where do you sit in the stands in your life? And it is a question that is parallel to sitting at your favorite sports game. Maybe you’re watching a football game and someone throws the ball and they’re yelling from the stands saying, why did you throw it to him? You should have run it down the sideline. And what does that person know? They’re sitting in the stands or not on the field. And at the end of the day, if they were on the field, they would understand all the different angles coming at it. So many times in our life, we sit in the stands and we’re watching ourselves saying, I wish we could stop doing something, or I wish we could start doing something.
Speaker 1 (00:26:48) – It might take us another two weeks, it might take us ten years, and not everyone is sitting in the stands in their life. Is there any place where you feel that you are sitting in the stands in your life? And if so, what is it? It could be personal. It could be professional. And what would you like to commit to?
Speaker 3 (00:27:04) – This is a really deep question. It’s a good thing to extract.
Speaker 1 (00:27:10) – I was like, I think so many times, especially now, where we move so quickly. And something that we were talking about before we got on this podcast is the overwhelming nature of cell phones. I personally, I definitely could live in a world without a cell phone, and I think that’s a good thing. And it’s a very bad thing when it comes to marketing, because you should be glued to your phone. And I definitely am not the first one to take five weeks to respond to a message, sadly. But it’s a way of saying, who are we and what are we committing to? We write down these to do lists, whether they’re grocery lists or this is what we want our career or this is that one vacation we want to take, or that one hike we want to go on with friends on a Saturday.
Speaker 1 (00:27:46) – And sometimes we go years without it ever happening. And so I think it’s a good way of. Of pulling back both professionally and personally and saying, what do we want to do? What is something we can commit to? And sometimes if you say it out loud, like you said, the beginning of the interview, you said it out loud. I want to work at Sephora and you made it happen. And now look at your career and how it’s blossomed.
Speaker 3 (00:28:07) – I don’t know, I’m blinking and I.
Speaker 2 (00:28:09) – Have no good answer for this. I told you I did something.
Speaker 3 (00:28:12) – In your company.
Speaker 1 (00:28:13) – Is there an ideal company you want to work with? Is there a certain part of marketing you want to experiment with? It could be even something as I want to experiment more with the Tick Tock Shop, knowing that it’s in its early stages, and I’m going to get a brand to 40% of their AI products on it by the end of this holiday season. It could.
Speaker 3 (00:28:36) – Be something as.
Speaker 1 (00:28:37) – Fun as that.
Speaker 3 (00:28:37) – No, I.
Speaker 2 (00:28:38) – Know what you said. Definitely that ring a bell for me? For me, I would love to. Focus on growing my agency even more. I think. That is, that will be big for me. It’s hard to know the balance between when you have small kids, how much you can take on, and I definitely don’t want to feel like I have felt in the past in my career where I’m feeling at both. So I think I’m feeling good about the balance right now. But I think in the future I definitely would love to grow it more and have a true like multiple full time people agency.
Speaker 1 (00:29:17) – So the final question on the podcast, another favorite, which I know you have a lot of good points for, is what advice would you like to leave with somebody who comes up to you and says, Elise, I want to go into the beauty industry, whether it’s marketing to product development, to pricing strategy, how do I get my foot in the door? How do I start? If you were in your early 20s looking to make that pivot or grow within that industry, what advice would you give to them and why?
Speaker 2 (00:29:45) – Yeah, I would say do it.
Speaker 2 (00:29:47) – It’s really exciting industry to be a part of. It’s not slowing down anytime soon. I just read an article of how they found makeup from like ancient Rome or something that was like still around. So it’s been around the beauty industry. It’s going to be around, and I think it’s only growing and becoming more inclusive, which is awesome. So it’s going to be really exciting to be a part of. For example, I have this awesome tinted moisturizer that’s actually for men that I use, and it’s amazing. And I love that we have products now that are for everybody. It’s really awesome. It’s called Apostle. You guys should definitely go shop it. And I think I would say definitely go into the industry and don’t be afraid to take risks. And by that I don’t mean anything crazy. If you want to work for a company, feel free to send the CEO an email directly. Send them your resume. Tell them you want to be in the beauty industry. Give them a little bit of information about you.
Speaker 2 (00:30:39) – I think after knowing David’s Latino, I think he’s somebody who would have loved to receive those. He’s a really open guy, loves go getters, so doing those little things that almost seem a little crazy, they’re not that crazy. Reaching out to somebody on LinkedIn. Maybe you go to a brand’s website and you notice something that could be that could optimize conversion, shoot them a note, shoot the marketing team a note and just say, hey, I was on the website. Notice XYZ. Those things are really great ways of showing your worth to somebody that you don’t know, and they may like what they see, but they will never know if you don’t reach out to them or do something. So I think just make it happen in whatever way, with the exception of stalking someone that you can.
Speaker 1 (00:31:22) – This is great advice and thank you, Elise. Where can brands find you if they want help with marketing, growth, marketing, brand marketing, PR, strategy, etc.? How do they get in touch with you and learn more about your services?
Speaker 2 (00:31:36) – Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2 (00:31:37) – So Markowitz Marketing dot com is my website, so feel free to to give it a visit. Reach out. I would love to chat or if you just want to talk about marketing, I’m always here for that. If you’re a mom, please reach out. I love to talk to other moms or if you’re not a mom, just whomever.
Speaker 1 (00:31:55) – Amazing. Thank you Elise. Thanks for sharing your story as a mom, as a consultant, as an entrepreneur, as someone who has grown such an amazing career within the beauty industry. And thanks for your time and we’re excited to see Markowitz marketing grow.
Speaker 2 (00:32:11) – Likewise. Thank you so much for having me, Ann. It’s so great to see you.
Speaker 3 (00:32:15) – It’s good to see you too, Elise. Have a good rest of your day. Okay. Bye.