As chief marketing officer of Rare Beauty, Katie Welch has successfully and thoughtfully used storytelling to connect with audiences.

“It’s so flattering and wonderful and sort of hard to accept, because it’s a team,” she said, humbly, of being recognized by CEW as a leader shaping the beauty industry. “It’s not just me. I struggle with it, because everything with Rare Beauty, it’s the team, it’s the sum of everyone who has contributed to the success of Selena’s company.”

As in Selena Gomez, of course, the founder of Rare Beauty and its nonprofit affiliate Rare Impact Fund, which works to expand mental health awareness.

It was in September 2020 that Gomez launched the company alongside her team that includes Welch; chief executive officer Scott Friedman; chief digital officer Mehdi Mehdi; chief product development officer Joyce Kim; chief sales officer Kim Magee, and chief impact officer and president of the Rare Impact Fund Elyse Cohen.

They set out to not only create a beauty brand, but to bring positive impact. (More than $20 million has been collected to date for the fund, with 1 percent of all Rare Beauty sales going toward supporting 30 mental health organizations in five continents and reaching an annual average of 1.9 million young people. The goal is to raise $100 million.)

The brand has also been successful in terms of net sales, clocking in at around $400 million in 2024.

Welch has been instrumental of the brand’s mission and success.

“I said to my team just yesterday, ‘It doesn’t matter what level you are, we are all playing an instrument in this orchestra. We all need to make beautiful music,’” she continued. “Every level is so important.”

Welch grew up in St. Louis and studied English literature at Denison University in Ohio before moving to New York.

“I didn’t really even know that the beauty industry was something that you could have a career in, because it wasn’t around me,” she said of her childhood. “And they say, ‘If you can’t see it, how can you be it?’ But I always loved makeup. I’ve always been a makeup junkie.”

Her first job was an internship at Marie Claire under Glenda Bailey in the late 1990s. “I wanted to be a magazine editor and a writer,” she said.

But life took her on a different path, and she went on to accept a job offer from Macy’s after taking part in the company’s buyer training program. “I was not in cosmetics. I was in luggage and frames, super glamorous,” she laughed.

She then landed at various companies in retail and communication, including Victoria’s Secret Beauty, Weber Shandwick, Tractenberg & Co. — but it was as head of marketing communications at Bliss in 2010 that she stepped into a leading role in beauty marketing, followed by positions at Hourglass Cosmetics (as chief marketing officer) and The Honest Company, before making her mark at Rare Beauty.

“Twenty-five years ago, you would be able to push out a message and break through. Now it’s two-way. It’s push. It’s pull. It’s all of it. It’s truly a conversation with your community,” she said of notable shifts through the years in beauty marketing.

“You have to think about your brand as a human, and you have to listen to your community, listen to their feedback,” she added. “And I think speak in a way that’s unique to the brand…It’s interesting, because beauty is so personal that I think beauty is the perfect industry for today’s modern marketing mix.”

The digital world allows for marketing vehicles with the ability to personalize and share storytelling in a way that reaches customers authentically, she said. The industry used to be limited to print ads, commercials, billboards and physical retail.

“Social really does allow you to create a world within your brand that you can invite people in, tell them not only about your brand but educate about product,” she said. “Previously, the only way you could do that was at the department store counter. You could only really enter a world for beauty by going into a retail location or department store counter, whereas today you can do that virtually, 24-7, around the world.”

Critical thinking is an invaluable skill in marketing, she said. “To be able to ask a question, help solve a business problem…and having endless curiosity, paired with determination and decisiveness,” as well as “empathy and compassion.”

With Rare Beauty, Welch thinks about the brand in three ways, she said: connecting community, quality products and its greater purpose. “When you have a great product, a strong brand, you have the freedom to creatively tell that story, and that’s when the marketing job gets fun.”