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The Rich Roll Podcast

Gregg Renfrew Is Making Counter Moves in Clean Beauty

111 min episode · 2 min read
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Gregg Renfrew

Episode

111 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Career Growth, Health & Wellness, Relationships

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Private Equity Blind Spots: Carlyle hired an old-school beauty CEO who immediately canceled meetings with Renfrew, ignored the 60,000-woman sales force that built the business, slashed commissions without transition periods, and expanded into Ulta stores—destroying community trust within months and causing foreclosure.
  • Founder Identity Crisis: After termination in 2022, Renfrew experienced severe identity collapse, feeling unwelcome in professional circles and spending months on therapy, energy work, and reading business biographies to separate self-worth from CEO title before deciding to fight back rather than retire.
  • Clean Beauty Standards Erosion: Major retailers now create conflicting definitions of clean beauty with no consistency between Target, Sephora, Ulta, and department stores. Less than 10% of tens of thousands of chemicals in commerce have been tested for human safety, yet consumers assume FDA oversight protects them.
  • Community Commerce Model: Counter eliminates team-building MLM structures that concentrated income among top recruiters. The new model pays individual sellers directly, personalizes compensation beyond money to include advocacy opportunities and wellness goals, and maintains direct customer relationships impossible in big-box retail distribution.
  • Foreclosure Buyback Strategy: Bank of America's syndicated debt team offered Renfrew the failed company for minimal cash, recognizing her industry impact. She liquidated family savings, secured investor wires without paperwork within 48 hours, then shut down operations completely for three months to reimagine the business model.

What It Covers

Gregg Renfrew details losing Beautycounter after Carlyle's billion-dollar acquisition, navigating foreclosure when revenue dropped from $400M, buying back the company for minimal cash within 48 hours, and relaunching as Counter with revised commission structures and retail strategy.

Key Questions Answered

  • Private Equity Blind Spots: Carlyle hired an old-school beauty CEO who immediately canceled meetings with Renfrew, ignored the 60,000-woman sales force that built the business, slashed commissions without transition periods, and expanded into Ulta stores—destroying community trust within months and causing foreclosure.
  • Founder Identity Crisis: After termination in 2022, Renfrew experienced severe identity collapse, feeling unwelcome in professional circles and spending months on therapy, energy work, and reading business biographies to separate self-worth from CEO title before deciding to fight back rather than retire.
  • Clean Beauty Standards Erosion: Major retailers now create conflicting definitions of clean beauty with no consistency between Target, Sephora, Ulta, and department stores. Less than 10% of tens of thousands of chemicals in commerce have been tested for human safety, yet consumers assume FDA oversight protects them.
  • Community Commerce Model: Counter eliminates team-building MLM structures that concentrated income among top recruiters. The new model pays individual sellers directly, personalizes compensation beyond money to include advocacy opportunities and wellness goals, and maintains direct customer relationships impossible in big-box retail distribution.
  • Foreclosure Buyback Strategy: Bank of America's syndicated debt team offered Renfrew the failed company for minimal cash, recognizing her industry impact. She liquidated family savings, secured investor wires without paperwork within 48 hours, then shut down operations completely for three months to reimagine the business model.

Notable Moment

When Renfrew's daughter held up their vitamin C serum on spring break, pleading with her mother not to let the brand die after years of family sacrifice, Renfrew made the decision to buy the foreclosed company back. Her son had been posting on Instagram trying to sell perfume to his friends' mothers to save the business.

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Episode Transcript

How do you arm people with enough information that they can make an informed choice without fear mongering, without scaring them to death? And how do you show financial and business success when you catch the attention of those that are still using the old school practices and seeing, well, they're actually winning. What would, you know, some of these great leaders that have come before me, what would they have done if they had been afforded this opportunity? And can I look at this as a gift, and can I give myself the space to really think? I think our health is worth fighting for. I think women are worth fighting for. And we say there's no better way to change the world than lighting a fire under the asses of a bunch of women who care. If I'm being completely honest, it's still hard that there are people that hate me or angry with me about things that I didn't actually do, and I have to just live with that. What's up people of Podcastlandia? Good to be with you today. I've got a feeling that today's guest, my friend, Greg Renfrew, back for round two, might have attracted at least a few people brand new to me. So if that's you, my name is Rich Roll. I'm an ultra endurance athlete. Got a few books to my name. I'm also a husband and a father of four. And this show, which I started way back at the 2012, is basically in service to becoming our best selves. For the diehards out there, you might be looking for a little bit of a life update on that note. The back is continuing to heal slowly. Slowly. I've been able to ride the indoor bike. I've been able to get a little bit of swimming in, and it's been a busy few weeks. I was in Florida where I was able to get in the ocean, which was fantastic. And I was there to speak at this conference called Eudaimonia, which was my first time attending what is a fairly new wellness event, but appears to have quickly become like the event, a sort of Sundance meets South by Southwest meets Expo West for the health and longevity set, and that has left me reflecting on the state of the wellness industrial complex movement. And I think I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, it is kind of astonishing how much this movement has grown over the last decade. There were literally thousands of attendees at this event, hundreds of vendors, dozens and dozens of speakers and presenters, just a ton of energy. And while all of this is great, people more invested than ever in up leveling their lives, it is also a bit bizarre and and somewhat disorienting because when there's so much to take in, it can be paralyzing for the average person because it becomes more difficult to identify the signal amidst …

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