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Anna Claveria Brannan joined IPSY’s legal team as the company’s second in-house lawyer in 2016. Then, the Bay Area-native with experience at Symantec and VeriSign worked alongside her general counsel to manage the growing company’s IP portfolio and negotiate agreements with the company’s growing beauty brand partnerships and influencer talent pool. She also provided legal advice and counsel to the marketing, events, social media, talent, engineering, and infosec teams.
Prior to her joining IPSY, Brannan had expertise in international trademark and copyright portfolios while acting as the lead attorney for both enterprise and consumer marketing and advertising. IPSY presented her the opportunity to have greater oversight and use her strengths as a product and commercial counsel, allowing her to pave her own career path.
With an environment that emphasized innovation and inclusivity, IPSY had a near blank slate for the legal team, giving Brannan a platform to build up company policies, procedures, and operations from the ground up. She garnered her experience in previous in-house positions to establish a foundation and received encouragement from her general counsel to do so.
For Brannan, coming to the late-stage startup from a company with thirty thousand employees and a law department of two hundred at its height was a welcome change. “Working in-house at a smaller, more intimate company with a familiar product gives lawyers the chance to have a more direct impact,” she says. Brannan took advantage of the chance to work with talented visionary creators looking to improve and develop the technology behind a fast-growing subscription service.
“It’s like building your dream house from the ground up,” Brannan says of the process. “You add in all the features you’ve always wanted, but even when it’s complete, you realize you missed a few things. You can still add those features in, but at least you have a good foundation to work from.”
IPSY led in engineering and technical capabilities, and the company had strong marketing and user experience teams; it just needed the framework and processes required for a maturing organization. The internal legal team was brought in at the right stage to assist with legal and compliance matters from the inside out rather than just rely on outside counsel who did not have the in-depth knowledge of the internal needs of the company, Brannan says. “It was exciting, but it was also like the Wild West,” Brannan recalls. “People were moving quickly and signing contracts, regardless of authority, to get things going. This is not uncommon in young companies, but IPSY was at the stage where we needed to button things up.”
Brannan worked to determine how to grow compliance and regulatory functions. First, she established consistency by developing a formal contract review process complete with rules and limits regarding who is authorized to sign certain documents. Then, she implemented a compliance program, including a company-wide privacy and data security policy. Brannan launched an intellectual property filing strategy, a patent incentive program and started distributing quarterly IP reports. Soon, IPSY had the proper legal infrastructure to support its growth.
With these items firmly in place, IPSY was able to support the growth of its Glam Bag subscription service to millions of subscribers nationwide. As the company grew its numbers of subscribers and employees, its legal department remained relatively small. The team had to be strategic about operating with a limited head count and a tight budget while maintaining the integrity of the legal support the company needed.
“We know that beauty doesn’t have a specific look. We wanted to take it beyond glossy magazines and runway models to make it obtainable.”
Anna Brannan
In 2020, IPSY acquired BoxyCharm. The move was important and somewhat surprising—BoxyCharm helped IPSY reach several key goals. It brought notoriety to its full-size product offering, it gave the California company a second home on the East Coast, and it helped IPSY onboard new employees. Now, millions of subscribers have access to both the sample-size Glam Bag or the full-size BoxyCharm by IPSY subscription.
Earlier this year, Brannan became vice president and deputy general counsel. Studying high-tech IP law under the Silicon Valley lawyers at Santa Clara University prepared her well for life atop IPSY’s five-person legal team. “We are a tech-driven beauty subscription service, and it’s critical for lawyers here to understand both our product mix and our tech capabilities,” she says. Data is part of what sets IPSY apart as the company personalizes beauty by using member quizzes, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to send customers products they’re more likely to use and enjoy.
The name IPSY is taken from the Latin word ipse, which means “self,” and an early company motto was “express your unique beauty.” The original vision of IPSY’s founders involved democratizing beauty and building a community where each member is empowered to express their own individuality and unique personal beauty.
IPSY has addressed inclusivity with campaigns like Discover Yourself and continues to amplify and support Black-owned, Latinx, Asian, and LGBTQ+ founded brands through Beauty Amplified. These factors are part of what keeps Brannan at the popular company. “We know that beauty doesn’t have a specific look. We wanted to take it beyond glossy magazines and runway models to make it more obtainable,” she says. Brannan and her teams continue to bring beauty to the everyday person.
