Jue Wong took a 70 percent pay cut to become a beginner again. She had been a director at PepsiCo International, leading its countertrade division. After her family relocated to Scottsdale, Arizona, she joined the Dial Corporation as a brand manager. On a résumé, the move could look like a retreat. In a household budget, it would have been considerably less philosophical.
She still regards it as the right decision. That is a useful place to begin with Wong, now chief executive of Performance Beauty Group. Beauty careers are usually introduced with the names on the bottles. Hers becomes more interesting when you look at the decisions between the names: a lower title, a new discipline, a willingness to learn the business from another angle.
Before the lashes, shampoos and department-store counters came commodities trading. Wong learned to watch markets at Cargill. Years later, she would be explaining why an attractive brand needs reliable delivery, why a celebrated product must earn its shelf space, and why sales growth deserves a second question: what did it cost?
The expensive education of starting over
Born and raised in Singapore, Wong graduated from the Australian National University in 1987. Her degree was a Bachelor of Arts with honours in political science. She had also been an exchange scholar at UCLA. It was an education that left her with rather more career possibilities than a neatly marked route into cosmetics.
Her working life took her through Hong Kong, London, Geneva and Bangkok before she moved to the United States in 1996. She enjoyed trading’s speed and analytical demands. The move into consumer goods gave those habits a different object: brands, customers and the routes connecting them.
For Wong, the earlier experience remained useful. Trading had taught her a discipline she could apply to sales and international expansion. Changing industries meant acquiring new knowledge while keeping the ability to make decisions under pressure. The job title became smaller; the field of study became larger.
In 2014, ANU named her its International Alumnus of the Year. The recognition put a date on the distance travelled since graduation. By then she was running StriVectin, having moved through consumer products into beauty leadership. The beginner’s decision had become part of an executive career.
A shopping basket, before its time
Wong remembers asking a web designer in 1999 for an online store that people could move through as though they were shopping in person. They would pick things off shelves, put them in a basket and check out. The designer’s reaction, as she recalls it, suggested that the request was somewhat ambitious.
The anecdote has aged well. It reveals the sort of technology question she asks: what would make shopping feel natural to the customer? A website could reproduce a transaction, but she wanted it to reproduce an experience. The imagined basket mattered because it connected a new medium to a familiar habit.
That interest continued at Moroccanoil. Her brief included professional salons, travel retail and e-commerce. In 2018, she described a distribution plan in which each channel had a job: professionals supplied credibility, retailers built brand equity, and online and social commerce generated revenue.
“Optimise growth without mortgaging the future.”
Jue Wong, on her Moroccanoil strategy, 2018
She also separated digital work into five areas: e-commerce, the website, social media, innovation and media buying. It is an almost stubbornly practical breakdown. A company can pronounce itself digital in a single breath. Doing the work requires several budgets, several skills, and a customer who can actually complete a purchase.
The customer already had a hairdresser
Wong joined Olaplex in January 2020. The company had launched in 2014, building its business first among salon professionals. By the time she arrived, it had a community whose recommendations carried something a social advertisement cannot simply purchase: the familiarity of a person who knows your hair.
Her account of the business gave that sequence real importance. Professionals established authority. Retail expanded recognition. Direct sales created convenience and customer information. The order helped explain why the channels could support each other: customers who recognised the brand in a shop could also request it at a salon.
In a 2022 conversation, Wong described an affiliate programme that let stylists earn commissions from their clients’ online purchases while salons were closed. The relationship between professional and customer could continue even when the familiar place of business was unavailable.
There was commercial logic in protecting that connection. A recommendation comes from someone, and that person has a livelihood. A brand that benefits from the recommendation has reason to keep the recommender involved. Wong’s explanation placed the stylist inside the business model, with a way to participate in the sale.
She was equally careful about credit. Discussing her appointment, she emphasised the team already behind the brand. An incoming chief executive may bring a new plan; the people who understand the existing business bring knowledge that cannot be replaced by the appointment announcement.
The graph has more than one direction
Olaplex’s annual net sales rose from $282.3 million in 2020 to $598.4 million in 2021. All three channels grew. Professional sales reached about $259 million, specialty retail about $175.8 million, and direct-to-consumer about $163.6 million.
The company went public in 2021 during Wong’s tenure. In 2022, annual sales reached $704.3 million, an increase of 17.7 percent. The totals show the scale of the business she helped lead. They also show why the next year belongs in the same account.
In the second quarter of 2023, net sales fell 48.2 percent from the same quarter a year earlier, to $109.2 million. The company identified slower demand in its professional and specialty retail channels, along with customers adjusting inventory. It lowered its outlook for the year.
Wong left in October 2023. Olaplex announced that Amanda Baldwin would succeed her, with executive chair John P. Bilbrey serving as interim chief executive during the transition. The growth and the reversal both belong to this chapter. Leaving either out would make the business look easier to run than it was.
The numbers also distinguish two tasks that can look identical from a distance. Expanding a business means reaching more buyers. Keeping it expanding means understanding what changes when buyers, retailers and competitors respond. A successful year supplies evidence of what worked. It cannot promise the next one.
Six brands, and the work behind the bottle
Performance Beauty Group appointed Wong chief executive on October 22, 2024. Its portfolio included Grande Cosmetics, BondiBoost, Babe Original, FlutterHabit, Lilly Lashes and Velour Beauty, alongside Nutraluxe manufacturing capabilities. Gauge Capital backed the group. This time, Wong was taking responsibility for several consumer identities under one operating roof.
The company describes itself as vertically integrated, with offices, manufacturing facilities and distribution centres. Its locations include the United States, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. For a leader with a background in moving goods across markets, the less photographed parts of beauty were once again close to the centre of the job.
Her opening priorities were deliberately selective. She wanted to strengthen the existing portfolio and deepen retail relationships before pursuing more acquisitions. She also distinguished awareness from relevance: recognising a name does not guarantee that a customer thinks of it when deciding what to buy.
“Relevancy means top of mind,” she said. That is a demanding definition because remembering happens at the customer’s convenience. A launch calendar belongs to the company. The moment of choosing belongs to the buyer.
The expert’s recommendation.
The encounter on the shelf.
The relationship after checkout.
A synthesis of Wong’s channel descriptions at Moroccanoil and Olaplex.
By June 2025, she was discussing supply chain as a growth concern and the discipline of keeping a product assortment manageable. One line from that conversation carried the plainness of her trading background: “If you’re not making money, it’s a hobby.” The beauty of a product and the economics of selling it still had to meet.
The boss learns to leave room
Wong has been candid about learning to lead. Looking back at her first CEO role, she said she had tried to know everything and do everything. Her later view gave the chief executive a different task: help other people do their work on a larger scale, and provide support when they take a risk.
That position makes room for ambition without pretending that every attempt will succeed. It also changes what the boss needs to notice. Someone’s uncertainty may require encouragement; a failed attempt may require help; someone’s expertise may require the boss to stop talking.
In December 2025, she returned to these questions in a leadership podcast about ownership and accountability in teams. The subject was consistent with an earlier lesson: a chief executive receives authority with the position, while trust has to be earned through working with people and delivering alongside them.
A little distance from the shelf
There is another Wong away from the product assortment. She has described choosing songs for Instagram content during morning runs in Central Park, then dancing on her terrace. Music supplies ideas before the post supplies a caption. The executive interested in consumer attention also enjoys making something people might watch.
In 2019, she completed a 300-mile Camino de Santiago hike via Portugal and Spain. She has spoken about planning adventures outside her comfort zone. It is a useful detail in a career that began one of its important chapters with an uncomfortable change.
As of July 2026, ANU’s alumni profile still listed her as chief executive of Performance Beauty Group. The work ahead is to help its brands become more relevant to the people buying them. Wong’s route there has included trading desks, a costly restart, salon relationships and a public-company reversal. She knows how much can sit behind a small bottle. Her job is to make sure the customer has a reason to remember it.