Stila Cosmetics wants to become the beauty industry’s most talked about comeback kid after having lost its way over the past decade, but can the 31-year-old make-up player reclaim its place in a sector now dominated by very agile players?
CEO Michelle Kluz, known as the ‘fixer CEO’, believes Stila Cosmetics – which dominated prestige beauty in the 1990s and 2000s – can reclaim its "rightful place” as a major player in the colour category today, and has been working hard on a turnaround since taking over the helm in 2022.
Three years on and many changes later – which has included a mass C-suite shake-up, sku cut down, refocus on hero categories, and a new digital marketing strategy – and the brand is starting to show promise of a real comeback.
“In the domestic US market, we have been up every month this year, but it took two-and-a-half years to get to that kind of stabilising,” says Kluz.
“We are doing really well in Australia, Canada and the UK too… and I am happy to say that we have been able to raise the productivity of our gondolas in almost every region.”
We said: ‘Stila is still here, you know we are still around, and we are better than ever'
These figures support Kluz’s belief in the 1994 MUA-founded make-up brand, which counted actresses Blake Lively and Jennifer Garner as fans during its history due to its “innovative” formulations.
And that the brand’s playful focus on wearable maximalism products could pick up traction again, especially as the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic is falling out of favour.
“The thing I love about fixing [heritage] businesses, doing a turnaround, is that you do know what ‘good’ looks like, right?,” explains Kluz.
“There was a period of time where ‘good’ was the defective situation for Stila Cosmetics, so I knew what that could look like [again] because it had been there before.
“I researched the brand and discovered that it still had the number one liquid eyeliner [Stay All Day Waterproof Liquid Eye Liner, according to analyst Circana] in North America and Canada. It had a hero sku, and you can do something with that – there is value.
“People did not feel negative about Stila Cosmetics, they just had not really thought about it [properly] in a long time.”
Stila's Liquid Play range
What was wrong at Stila Cosmetics?
Revamping the legacy company has required hard but necessary choices, as Stila Cosmetics had fallen into the shadows of the colour cosmetics market.
Using her experience of leading multi-year turnaround projects for big companies – such as fitness brands Pure Barre and Kering-owned retailer Avenue – Kluz quickly went to work performing a deep data dig on Stila Cosmetics.
“When I looked at the marketing spend in the business, it had been incredibly diminished over
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