American cosmetics brand e.l.f. Beauty has grown its net sales for 21 quarters in a row and plans to keep that streak going by leveraging its popularity among younger consumers on social media.

That’s according to CEO Tarang Amin who broke down the company’s growth story in an interview with BNN Bloomberg recently, attributing the company’s success to several factors.

"First and foremost is our value proposition. We make the best of beauty accessible to every eye, lip, face and skin concern," he said. "Second is our powerhouse innovation. We have a unique ability to take inspiration from our community as well as the best products in prestige and bring them to market at incredible values. And the third is our powerhouse marketing engine.”

The company has been ramping up its marketing spend of late, from seven alsoper cent of net sales to 25 per cent in the past five years, targeting its core audience of Gen Z and Millennials. It was ranked the top brand among U.S. teenagers for the fifth consecutive season in a recent survey by investment bank Piper Sandler.

"The way we’re able to engage this audience is being able to live where they live," Amin said. "We’re one of the first beauty brands on TikTok, our latest hashtag challenge generated about 15 billion views. We have our own channel on Twitch, we’re the number one in brand experience on Roblox. We have the products and the ideas that they love seeing."

While the company started 20 years ago with colour cosmetics, it sees a strong opportunity in skincare as well. The company acquired skincare brand Naturium last year, and Amin noted that the “clinically effective, bio-compatible” brand had a higher price point than e.l.f. Skin and 40 per cent of its users are men.

e.l.f. Beauty saw a 115 per cent jump in sales in its international markets last quarter, driven by strength in Canada and the U.K. but the company still sees plenty of room for further growth.

“International only represents about 16 per cent of our business, relative to many of our global competitors that have about 70 per cent of their business outside the U.S.,” Amin said. In Canada, e.l.f. Beauty moved to the third rank in colour cosmetics, from the sixth spot a year ago.

Amin said the brand is currently available at Walmart, Shoppers Drug Mart, Amazon and on the website and is seeing strong growth. “We have a small team in Canada. We’ll continue to grow that team,” Amin said.

Earlier this year, Bespoke Investment Group released a report noting that the e.l.f. Beauty stock had beaten current market darling Nvidia, returning over 2,600 per cent to investors, compared to Nvidia’s rise of under 2,000 per cent in the five years until February 2024.e.l.f. Beauty is up nearly 30 per cent so far this year. Amin has been CEO of the company for the past decade, taking it public in 2016. Asked about his plans for growing the company in the coming years, Amin said the focus continues to be on the fundamentals. "We feel we can double our U.S. market share again in the next few years in colour cosmetics. Skincare perhaps is even a bigger opportunity as global skincare is bigger than colour cosmetics. Our eyes are really set on Number 1."