Joy Chen

Joy is a CEO, board member and advisor with over 25 years driving sales and profit growth through innovative brand building, global expansions, and digital transformation. She is known for both scaling businesses for accelerated growth and turning around troubled businesses in complex and demanding situations in small companies and large corporations. Joy transforms the retail and marketing landscape to online and digital, with extensive experience in brick and mortar retail across all channels. Her international expertise includes North America, Asia and European markets.

Most recently, Joy served as the Board Chairman and CEO of H2O+ Beauty, a leading brand in the premium skincare category. Joy turned around this global company that had lost relevance, made sweeping strategic shifts to its business model, revitalized its branding and launched entirely new, performance-based product line. She transformed its marketing strategy to online and digital. Additionally, Joy shifted retail strategy from relying only on branded stand-alone retail outlets to include online and prominent beauty distribution through Ulta, Amazon, Dermstore, Sephora Asia, and TMall. This resulted in reversing the declining business to +25% sales growth and +30% margin improvement.

Previously, Joy served as CEO and Board Director of Yes To, Inc., overseeing the global expansion and accelerated growth of its natural skin and bodycare portfolio. Amid the economic downturn, she scaled the start-up, catapulting the brand to the #2 ranking in the natural personal care category. She expanded the distribution of Yes To products globally and broadened the company branding to Yes To from the limited Yes To Carrots. Under Joy’s leadership, the business successfully grew +450% in revenue growth and the company valuation increased by 5x. During this time, the Yes To brand also won nearly 70 product and business awards including the top 100 fastest growing company. She launched the brand into mainstream channels, including WalMart, Target, Kroger, CVS, Ahold, Amazon, Sephora.

Before joining Yes To, Joy spent 17 years at the Clorox Company, serving as Vice President and General Manager of the laundry business, overseeing P&L for a $1B+ division, handling the company’s most valuable brand equity, Clorox, and managing a large multi-functional organization. At Clorox, she turned around the Laundry business to +4% growth, a +10% profit improvement in a mature, declining category, and securing Clorox’s market position as #1 brand in segment. During her tenure at Clorox, Joy also held other senior leadership roles including VP Marketing and VP Sales. In addition to her CEO roles, Joy finds time to support the community. From her immigrant upbringing, she values the importance of education to her own career. She has served as a board member on Junior Achievement, and most recently on Girls Inc, an organization whose mission is to help underprivileged girls to reach college. She is active on the Harvard Business School’s Advisory Council. Joy’s strong strategic and transformational skills have also led her to serve as a board member and advisor for tech and health and wellness businesses like Mezzetta and Visolis. She is frequently a judge for global startup competitions at Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. She is an invited keynote speaker at many conferences and has been a content contributor to ENTREPRENEUR magazine. She was awarded Most Admired CEO and named Most Influential Woman Forever Honor Roll in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was honored with Stevie Awards for Women in Business in both the Executive of the Year and Mentor of the Year categories, as well as Executive of the Year from Best in Biz awards. Joy received her BS from the University of California, Berkeley and a MBA from Harvard University.

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