In business and in life, Merit’s chief marketing officer Aila Morin’s number one rule is to always sleep on it; a philosophy she credits to her growth as an executive, and frankly, her mental health. “If I get hit with a problem, I have to be able to say, ‘thanks so much for sharing that with me and let me get back to you,’” she says. “[Realizing] I don’t need to provide someone with an immediate reaction in the moment [has honestly been the most important thing for my nervous system]. I have never regretted taking a step back.”
What becomes immediately clear in speaking with Morin is how decisive she is, again, both in professional and personal spheres. A self-proclaimed creature of habit, she’ll automate anything she can; though, she doesn’t try to systemize creativity. Her best ideas are formed on airplanes—at cruising altitudes with no working WiFi; on vacation when she’s off the grid, or in what she calls the in-between moments, like on her morning commute and at the dentist. “[Ideas] come together for me very quickly, say 20 minutes, but it’s hard to control when that happens,” she says. “Then I just write it down as fast as possible, and share with the team very early because I love to download an idea.”
Morin joined Merit as a senior vice president a year prior to its 2020 launch, when the brand was still in its inception stage; not yet the lineup of makeup essentials targeted towards millennial and Gen Z women that you might know and love today. Though she was technically promoted to CMO in 2023, the core focus of the job remains largely the same: “overseeing product development, creative, marketing, customer experience, everything end-to-end that you experience in the brand, as well as creating the business fundamentals of the direct-to-consumer and Sephora split,” she details.
As CMO, Morin has to straddle two worlds—the operational and the creative. she continues, because she lives in two worlds—one operational, one creative. “I live in the ‘building a P&L’ left brain of ‘how are we driving profit and how are we driving scale?’ And then I live in the deeply creative side of ‘what are we naming a product, what is the positioning, and how is this different and special?’” I ask her how she bridges? this split. The answer? Location and strategic scheduling.
Her home base in LA, she tells me, brings out her creative side. “I have a lot more space,” she says. “I have an office with all my bits and bobs, [so] I can think. When I go to New York, which is usually once, if not twice, a month, I’m there to work on a P&L, to externalize a project, to operationalize something through the business.” Over the last six years, Morin has shepherded Merit through far too many launches, campaigns, and milestones to count. In building the business and growing her team, her personal time has shrunk. In her 20s she was all career—all gas, no breaks when it came to taking care of herself. Now she asks, “What is the time that I’ve built for myself and what are the non-negotiables that I put in my personal life? How can I apply the discipline that I put into building a business to how I take care of myself?”
Eight hours of sleep and daily movement—be it Pilates, an hour walk, or tennis—are essential. To ensure she hits her goals, she schedules all her workouts at the beginning of the week, and plots them on her calendar with transit blocks for commuting. “It’s more like a commitment to get it done even if it doesn’t look perfect,” she says. “When I say I make it a priority, I adjust my life around making that happen as though it was my job.” Morin will even request walking meetings with team members, or squeeze in a quick 20-minute strength workout after a long flight if necessary.