Ron Gee, President & CEO Shiseido Americas

A Play to Win Strategy

Make no mistake, this CEO plays to win—and he is focused on personalizing the future of your health, beauty, and wellness experiences.

Shiseido is a diverse, hybrid kind of company with family roots, that has seen a great first quarter in 2023. With sales up 6.6% in Q1, largely due to “carrying on some great momentum” since the second half of last year, the company is really focused on the “luxury segment”. A play to win strategy in an area that’s resilient to economic conditions has helped them see tremendous growth from their brands. Shiseido Americas is home to not just brands in this geography, but stuff managed at global scale; helping them grow with brands like NARS, Drunk Elephant, Tory Burch Beauty.

Understanding where customers resonate, and amplifying execution on these bigger brands has seen the tremendous shift whilst other brands wrestled with post pandemic, and the dynamics of online, offline sales. Showing an immense sense of turning mistakes or failures into “learnings and applying them”, and an attitude of “building to win” is Ron’s formula for continued success and his overall mindset near to long term.

Accentuating Beauty – Accelerating Innovation

Having run a bunch of companies and seeing competitors across verticals including the food space, this CFO turned CEO has transitioned into his new role rebooting both on the business and personal fronts.

A change management philosophy based on the demands of the pandemic driven market became imminent, as he embarked on this large and in charge position.

“From a business dynamic standpoint, we had to relook our portfolio and understand where our focus brands were and we made some tough decisions. We’ve divested some brands that’s public and we made those very careful strategic decisions. That was critically important because we couldn’t try to achieve everything for every brand that we had in a difficult environment. We had to reboot our thinking around focus and prioritization, over a pandemic environment to a post pandemic environment.

I feel we were really successful. For me, going from a CFO seat to a CEO seat was super interesting. I think the benefit for me on the business side is that, I was able to bring a lot of the financial decision making in conjunction with some of the marketing decisions, sales decisions, manufacturing decisions – consistently and coherently at the same time. We saved a lot of time and energy and review; discussions over, hey, is that a good financial decision? No, it’s one business decision with all of those players in there.”

Lending a new perspective to a CFO background, Ron Gee has brought a whole different, results oriented trait, helping faster decision making.

Data, Metrics and Speed-to-Market 

With the power of a optimized house of brands, Shiseido has kept their momentum going with a determined approach to analyzing what’s needed, yet being action oriented to yield faster turnaround times.

“I think what made me unique as a CFO that helps me as a CEO is that, I didn’t overanalyze. That sounds counterintuitive to people who are CFO background, where everything is data, data, data. That’s really important. I do believe in data and data analytics, but am in the game of luxury beauty where there’s a consumer insight, an emotional connection, and then a speed to market that really has to come to making decisions in a more timely manner. One of the best things I was able to do over the past couple years is, change the talent allocation, elevate certain people’s positions to have additional and more appropriate responsibilities for that speed.

We were able to recruit some talent as well. A hodgepodge of the best of the best with sales experts going deeper in the sales organization rather than going wider; some people who have more strategic marketing capability were more trade oriented. Rather than looking at the brand love aspect of what we were doing, they were more engaged in what we were doing at retail. We are able to actually segregate and put leadership that can encompass that in a much more meaningful way, helping me to make decisions faster.”

A consumer centric approach is the pivoting factor for Ron and team, to look at innovation and growth, accentuating self-care, and viewing beauty as a wellness component in their journey, to becoming a “personal wellness company”. A conjunction of consumer insights and incorporating science led to NARS ‘Light Reflecting Foundation™’, that was “only twice as large as we expected, it was the largest in its history, and people are continuously talking about it. We believe we have mastered that for several of our brands, and we continue to foster that for some of our brands we are incubating further.

It’s really important in luxury that you have an emotional connection- the real lifetime value, the real brand love. We want to be in that journey of life with you. If we do that and we have the right retail partner who can be in that Omni-world with us, we’re gonna win.”

Identifying and working with a set of retailers focusing on Omni channel post COVID era, using acceleration of digital space, AI to look at the convergence of beauty and wellness, offer personalization and a “self-care ability” and “set that definition and path for us and our consumers” is what Ron Gee wants to be part of, paving the way for a future for Shiseido and the global health, beauty, and wellness industry.