Joey Shamah says a fake Bloomingdale's buyout rumor sent e.l.f. from 300 orders a week to 18,000 a day

An e.l.f. Cosmetics panic buy began with the retail equivalent of a ghost story: Bloomingdale’s is coming, and the dollar makeup is about to get expensive. Joey Shamah tells How I Built This that a fake 2006 Bloomingdale’s buyout rumor took e.l.f. from about 300 orders a week to 18,000 orders a day for six weeks.

That is the kind of founder story that sounds too perfect, like somebody in a Stanford dorm room reverse-engineered scarcity marketing from a forwarded AOL chain email. Shamah insists he didn’t plant it. Honestly, the denial is part of the charm. If you were going to fake your way into beauty virality, you probably wouldn’t choose a rumor that also threatened to drown your tiny company in orders it had no clean way to fulfill.

So I always tell everyone, if I manufactured it, I would have done it over and over and over again.

The chain email did what the dollar stores wouldn’t

The delicious weirdness here is that e.l.f. Cosmetics was built for dollar stores, and the dollar stores mostly said no. Family Dollar and Dollar General, Shamah says, preferred quantity over quality. Retail buyers worried that a one-dollar lip gloss would trade shoppers down from a six-dollar CoverGirl product. A cheap beauty brand was apparently too cheap for the cheap aisle. Capitalism, moisturized and confused.

So e.l.f. backed into e-commerce because Glamour magazine wanted readers to be able to buy the product after a small mention. This was 2004, before every founder could duct-tape together a Shopify store before lunch. Shamah says the site cost $5,000, charged flat-rate shipping, accepted no returns, and required staff to manually process credit cards. Less Amazon Prime, more beauty brand with a printer and a prayer.

So honestly, we didn’t even think about logistics. We were just following Glamour Magazine’s lead.

That matters because the Bloomingdale’s rumor didn’t create e.l.f. out of nothing. It hit a brand that had already taught magazine readers a simple proposition: this stuff looks better than a dollar should. Then the email added a threat. Buy now, or the bargain disappears.

I just got an email that you’re being bought by Bloomingdale’s and that all your cosmetics are going up in price.

Virality is cute until it wants a warehouse

The numbers are the whole story. Not because virality is magic. Because virality, when it works, immediately becomes operations. Shamah says e.l.f. was suddenly taking in orders faster than it could make, pick, pack, or ship the product. He got on a plane to China to figure out production and fulfillment while the internet kept feeding the beast.

we went from getting 300 orders a week to 18,000 orders a day for the next six weeks.

The call here: Shamah’s claim is believable, but the lesson people will steal from it is probably wrong. The win was not that e.l.f. got lucky. Plenty of brands get lucky for an afternoon and then collapse into customer-service ash. The real hinge was that e.l.f. had a price position people understood instantly, a product people already liked, and enough stubborn retail muscle to turn a panic into shipments.

It also reframes the usual retail fairy tale. Shelf space was supposed to be the prize. Target was supposed to be the cathedral. But for e.l.f., the internet became the proof that the shelf buyers were wrong. By the time Target got serious, the brand had data, demand, and a wonderfully annoying argument: the one-dollar product wasn’t stealing from the beauty aisle, it was making shoppers buy more beauty.

we shipped 192,000 orders from China direct to customers in the U.S. And then that year we were projected to do $2 million for the year. After this spike, we did about $8 million. We were profitable. And we never looked back.

There is a neat founder mythology version of this story where a rumor floats down from heaven and blesses the scrappy entrepreneur. The better version is sweatier. A false email lit the fuse, but the company still had to survive the explosion. Shamah’s father, he says, gave him the only pep talk that fit the moment.

this is it. You either figure this out, or we pack up and go home. Like, this is what you built. This is what you wanted to do. This is your opportunity.