When Coty CEO Sue Nabi took the reins of the company behind Kylie Cosmetics and CoverGirl, she became the fifth CEO in five years at the struggling beauty giant. She was also the first in years to come from inside the beauty products industry, a background she credits with helping her halt Coty’s poor financial performance and return it to profitability.
Nabi is a French native and a rare transgender CEO at a large U.S. corporation. (There are no others on the Fortune 1000, but she has a peer in Martine Rothblatt, the founder and CEO of biotech company United Therapeutics.) When she became CEO, she inherited a debt-laden company riddled with problems: Coty was stretched too thin following its ill-advised acquisition in 2016 of most of Procter & Gamble’s beauty business. Moreover, the company had too small a roster of higher-end products, which typically boast better profit margins, and was a minor player in China, far behind competitors like L’Oréal and Estée Lauder.
