Beautycounter: Gregg Renfrew. She Built Beautycounter to $1B… Then Got Fired From Her Own Company
How I Built This with Guy Raz
Guy Raz | Wondery
4.7 • 31.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2026
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Gregg Renfrew started a movement by making better-for-you cosmetics, then enlisted an army of women to build the business through direct sales. But after selling Beautycounter, she was pushed out of the company she created.
Then she got to do something almost no founder gets to do:
She bought her company back. Then lost it again. Then took the risky step of rebuilding it into a new brand, now called Counter.
This is a story about ambition, humility, and second chances.
Gregg learned her first lessons by launching an early online wedding registry and selling it to Martha Stewart. She briefly led a clothing company and was summarily fired—by messenger.
In this candid conversation, Gregg talks about the bold innovation she brought to the beauty industry, and the lessons she learned from working with difficult people—including, at times, herself.
What You’ll Learn:
How to build a movement—not just a product
The hidden risks of “growth at all costs”
Why direct sales (done right) can outperform traditional DTC
The emotional toll of being fired from your own company
How to rebuild your identity after losing your business
What it takes to come back—and do it differently the second time
Timestamps:
(00:06:15) – Selling Xerox machines and getting doors slammed in her face
(00:08:09) – The early inspiration for an online wedding registry.
(00:16:44) – The brutal lesson of the dot-com crash: “growth at all costs”
(00:21:58) – Standing up to Martha Stewart: “I was cocky.”
(00:23:51) – Getting fired as CEO… by messenger… in front of her team
(00:32:47) – The moment she realized the beauty industry had a massive gap
(00:35:25) – “Clean beauty didn’t exist”—and why that made it so hard
(00:47:04) – Building a 60,000-person sales force, scaling to hundreds of millions in sales
(00:46:40) – Selling Beautycounter for $1B… and losing control months later
(01:00:13) – The emotional aftermath of being pushed out—and what came next
This episode was produced by John Isabella with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Noor Gill. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keeley.
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Transcript
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| 1:19.9 | There was no such thing as clean beauty. |
| 1:24.9 | So for us to make the makeup or skincare products that I wanted would be the same as going to the fanciest restaurant in town, having the most |
| 1:28.7 | decadent chocolate cake, and saying, I want that same chocolate cake, except you can't use |
| 1:33.6 | flour, eggs, or sugar, and I want it done in six months. |
| 1:42.6 | Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. |
| 1:55.3 | I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Greg Renfrew scaled beauty counter to a billion dollar valuation, |
| 2:02.9 | lost the business, got it back, and then totally rebranded it. |
| 2:13.3 | For a lot of founders, getting acquired feels like the finish line. |
... |
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