Sephora’s North America csays DEI is ‘just smart business’

Her childhood has shaped the way she views beauty and her approach to her job. Patrick was named Sephora North America’s CEO just a few months ago, the first woman to hold the position.

“I often reference the fact that I grew up with curly, coily, textured hair,” Patrick told Michal Lev-Ram, host of Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast in a conversation that also touched on her journey to the C-suite, the comeback of in-person shopping, nurturing independent brands, and, naturally, AI. “You know, my foster mom was going to get perms, and I was trying to figure out how to iron my hair…there wasn’t a lot of product made for me by people who look like me, who had hair like me.” 

Now, she’s in a position to change that for her daughter and others like her. After a few stints at other retailers, Patrick landed at Sephora in 2006 as the director of dot com merchandising and has held various other roles in the years since, including as the general manager of Sephora’s partnership with J.C. Penney. She’s proud that the company has long nurtured smaller, indie brands, and worked to diversify the people it hires, the brands it partners with, and the products it can provide to consumers.

She says diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are baked into Sephora’s business at a time when other companies are running away from such principals.

“Every single person in the organization has an objective tied to diversity, equity and inclusion, and that’s actually been in the ecosystem for years,” she says. “It’s just smart business, especially in what we do, it would make no sense to walk away from that.”

Embracing differences also helps her be a better leader by shaping how she thinks about belonging and inclusion in the hiring process, she says.

“I think it’s critical that as a leader you hire people that have different points of view than you do,” she said. “You need to surround yourself with people who know things different from you, who know more than you on certain topics. And that’s always been a part of how I live my life; [it’s] just a curiosity.” 

You can listen to the rest of the conversation here.

Alicia Adamczyk
alicia.adamczyk@fortune.com

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