What E.L.F.'s CTO Told Me About the New Search

Hi there,

I recently sat in a small room with Ekta Chopra, Chief Technology & AI Officer at E.L.F. Beauty. She led the kind of conversation I don't get enough of. No decks, no selling, just a group of operators trying to figure out what's actually changing.

I left with pages of notes and two ideas I keep coming back to.

Your D2C site is your brief to the AI

Ekta's team ran an audit of their product feeds about a year ago and discovered that 60% of them weren't structured in a way that LLMs could actually read. That kicked off a company-wide effort to rewrite product descriptions, FAQs, and content -- not for search keywords, but for the way AI processes language.

Here's why that matters. The average Google search is around 5 words. The average LLM query is closer to 23.

Nobody is typing "red lipstick" anymore. They're typing "I want a long-wearing red lipstick for brown skin, I live in California, I want something that lasts all day. What should I use?"

Your D2C site is where the LLM goes to find that answer. And if your content is full of brand-speak and made-up language your team invented, the AI can't work with it. Ekta said it plainly: "The LLM doesn't know what 'elfing amazing' means." The fix isn't killing your brand voice; it's translating it. E.L.F. has been doing the work of taking their most brand-specific language and rewriting it in plain English, structured in formats LLMs can actually parse: MD files, clean text files, FAQs written the way a real consumer would ask the question.

Her words on what happens if you don't: "You will be disappearing."

That's not hyperbole. If you're not the brand authority in your category, if you're not showing up as a citation when an LLM answers a question about your product, someone else will be. And there's no paid placement to fall back on.

Most brands I talk to aren't tracking how they show up in LLM results yet. They're still optimizing for a search behavior that's already changing underneath them.

Your brand site was always your first impression. Now it's also your brief to the AI. Treat it that way.

Commerce can come from any channel -- stop calling it D2C

The second thing Ekta said that I haven't let go of: "I don't care where my consumer shops, as long as I can build a relationship with them."

E.L.F. sells in Walmart, Target, Ulta, and Sephora. They're on Roblox selling digital products. And over half of their online business now comes from TikTok Shop.

Let that sink in. Not their DTC site. Not their wholesale partners. TikTok Shop is generating six out of every ten online dollars for one of the fastest-growing beauty brands in the country.

And Ekta's response to that isn't to pull everything back to owned channels. It's to make the relationship portable. Their beauty squad loyalty program has 6.5 million members who can earn points by scanning a receipt from any retailer. Buy at Target, scan the receipt, get rewarded. The transaction happened at Target. The relationship lives with E.L.F.

That's the reframe worth sitting with. D2C implies a destination -- your website, your checkout, your funnel. Connected commerce implies a relationship that moves with the consumer wherever they choose to shop. The channel is incidental. The relationship is the asset.

If your loyalty program, your identity data, and your marketing strategy all assume the consumer is coming to you (rather than you meeting them wherever they already are), it's worth asking what you're actually building. The channel your consumer prefers will probably change two or three more times in the next five years. The relationship doesn't have to.

It's the same thing we keep building toward at Brij. Not a destination, but infrastructure for a relationship that travels.

How is your team thinking about building something channel-agnostic?

Talk soon,

Kait

A few extras:

On June 18th, we're co-hosting The Year of the Omnichannel Moat, a free half-day workshop with the teams at PostPilot, Klaviyo, Digioh, and OuterSignal.

The thesis: summer is your BFCM build window. The brands that win Q4 aren't the ones who panic-spend in November. They're the ones who spend May through August testing and proving every flow.

Ren Fuller-Wasserman from TUSHY is joining us, and we'll share the exact playbook for how they identified 15K+ retail buyers from Amazon and Walmart and converted them at a 33% email opt-in rate. You'll also hear from operators at Criquet Shirts and Mizzen+Main on retargeting and retention.

Some of my favorite brands are hiring…

1. Caraway - SVP of Marketing & Ecommerce
2. Kraft Heinz - Director, Amazon