Background Check: Kendo vs. Orveon

Very few beauty brands are their own entities. L’Oréal and Esteé Lauder own pretty much everything make-up, skincare, and hair care, but there are a few smaller groups that run really successful lines, and these companies compete fiercely in an almost-monopolized industry.

The challenge for holding companies like these, big or small, is that linking consumer-facing and candidate-facing brands is pretty close to impossible.

Consumers will not recognize the corporate brand, which is the employer, and the beauty brands in their portfolio are, by necessity, very different. So someone who wants to work for, say, Kiehl’s, probably isn’t looking for the L’Oréal brand. They may not even realize that the same company that owns Kiehl’s also owns YSL’s beauty line, Urban Decay, La Roche-Posay, and Essie.

Two of the lesser-known holding companies in the beauty world are Kendo and Orveon. Small(er) but successful, between the two of them they own some of the most popular cosmetics brands, like Fenty, bareMinerals, and Laura Mercier. 

In this edition of Background Check, we’ll compare the companies’ employer brands—which are more complicated than most. 

Orveon

Orveon is a new “collective” that owns just three brands: bareMinerals, Buxom, and Laura Mercier (LM always and forever, you guys).

Orveon’s strategy is to link the collective to the greater good. Its homepage includes environmental commitments and mission statements to better the beauty industry.

Most notably from an employer branding POV is the carousel of short clips featuring employees on loving the work they do and the people they do it with.

There’s a CTA for potential job applicants at the bottom of the home page.

Note that Orveon is using its corporate homepage, not just its careers page, to support its employer brand. That’s good news, because the company’s careers page, linked in the site nav, is . . . sad.

If you’re like me and you’d really like to work with Laura Mercier, you might go to lauramercier.com and click the “careers” link in the site footer. If you do that for any of the holding company’s brands, you’ll land on this very bare page, from which you cannot jump to the Orveon corporate site (sheesh).

So what have we learned about working for Orveon? Not much. Sounds like they’re into environmental responsibility and a few employees like working for their subsidiaries, but I don’t have a real sense of what their workplace culture is like and whether it varies across brands. I also don’t know what benefits they offer (it’s not in the job descriptions) or what kind of advancement opportunities I might have. Will I be required to work in the office? How will you make sure I feel respected in the workplace? How do you promote equity in your workplace?

There’s so much I’m left wondering. 

Kendo

Kendo owns small beauty brands, including OLE HENRIKSEN, KVD, Bite Beauty, and Rihanna’s Fenty lines (which isn’t small anymore).

Kendo’s brand is very editorial. Above the fold on Kendo’s homepage is a reel of the company’s Vogue-flavored offices.

Similarly, the company’s careers page uses the serif / sans serif font mix plus color blocking and photos of pretty people. It feels like a page from In Style. For a beauty brand, this works. Perhaps it’s a little anonymous, but it does nod to its industry.

Kendo gets close to an employer brand across the site, but it lacks focus. 

This CTA on the homepage promises real employee testimonials (these are on the careers page), but it links out to a text-heavy page of Kendo “kredos,” like, We believe in listening with humility and acting with courage. We recognize, seek, and celebrate the power of diversity across the full spectrum of personal identity.

The “about” page highlights corporate giving, and the homepage passively promotes career development opportunities with this quote from Kendo CEO Kristin Walcott: We have big dreams and big visions, but with our entrepreneurial spirit and can-do attitude we make our dreams possible. We will continue to drive differentiated and authentic stories to support brand growth. And as we grow, our people and their careers will, too.

Unlike Orveon, Kendo has built a careers page, which contains a handful of employee endorsements of the company and a list of open positions, though I don’t know what benefits I can expect from Kendo, either. 

So what have we learned about working for Kendo? Too much and not enough.

And the winner is…

Kendo. Simply because there is more information to be found.

What both employer brands lack is organization. Orveon’s site is without key details, and Kendo hides its company values on one page, employee endorsements on another, and culture factors, like career development, on another.

For both Kendo and Orveon, a lot of the information is there, but there’s no single place on either website where I can get a comprehensive feel for the company as an employer. These illustrate the fact that while there should be a natural relationship between company brand and employer brand, they are not the same. Sprinkling employee-facing information throughout a corporate site doesn’t do the work.

These problems might be remedied in the short term by gathering all the candidate-relevant information and consolidating it in one place. From there, the brands can develop an employer brand voice, employer value propositions, and cultural experiences.

Build an employer brand with the same care, attention to detail, and organization you would a consumer brand. 

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza writes about workplace culture, DEI, and hiring. Her work has appeared in Fast Company, From Day One, and InHerSight, among others.

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