When Glossier founder and CEO Emily Weiss first had the idea of launching a beauty startup, she began with a simple question: how could you make a beauty brand whose sweatshirt people would want to wear?
As founder of beauty blog Into the Gloss, which she started in 2010, Weiss had worked with household name beauty conglomerates on advertising and sponsorship deals, and found that many were struggling to engage with the new generation of millennial consumers. “I went through that exercise of looking across 20 or 10 beauty brands, thinking about whether or not I would buy that sweatshirt, wear that sweatshirt… I just kept coming up with the answer ‘no’,” she says.
We meet on a Thursday in December 2019, in a circular meeting room at Glossier’s headquarters in the SoHo district of New York. The office interior reflects the company’s broader design aesthetic, with trimmings all in white or pale pink. In the reception area, glass display cabinets hold installations crafted out of Glossier products: an artful scattering of eyeliner pencils, a sculpture made of lip-plumping creams. Next to conference rooms and an open-plan workspace is a small lab area where new products are tested.
Slouching on a cream sofa, Weiss wears a sporty hoodie and leggings accessorised with pointed Celine stiletto boots, epitomising the effortless “cool girl” image that has become associated with the Glossier brand. As she speaks, I spot an unbranded white tube on a shelf behind her with a makeshift printed label reading “Glossier hand cream”.
Weiss talks about the disconnect she observed between companies and consumers, which she puts down to a “seismic shift in power dynamic” within the beauty industry. By the time she launched Into the Gloss, she says, people were becoming increasingly interested in the idea of personal style, and using clothing and makeup as a means of creative expression. They no longer wanted to be told by a brand or expert how to pull off a full look; they wanted to see other people mix things up. In fashion, this gave rise to the growing trend of bloggers and street style photography; in beauty, too, consumers began looking to their peers for inspiration. Brands no longer had the final say.
When Instagram took off, the trend only grew stronger, yet Weiss recalls beauty companies telling her they weren’t planning to hire a social media editor at all. She pauses, incredulous: “Can you imagine?”
Rather than continue to play interpreter between old brands and new audiences, she decided the time was right to build a new beauty company from scratch that would lean into this changing dynamic. It would be digital-first, operate a direct-to-consumer (DTC) model, and emphasise communication with its customers, even involving them in the creation of its products.
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After raising an initial $2 million (£1.5 million) in seed funding, Weiss launched Glossier (pronounced, as if French, “gloss-ee-ay”) in 2014 with four products: a moisturiser, a face mist, a skin tint and a lip balm. The company now employs more than 200 people and has over 3 million customers. Products such as Boy Brow, its bestselling eyebrow pomade, have become cult favourites among the hip and well-groomed; in 2018, the company claimed to have sold the equivalent of one Boy Brow every 32 seconds. In March 2019, Glossier closed a $100 million series D funding round led by Sequoia Capital that resulted in a company valuation of $1.2 billion.
At launch, Glossier made a grey sweatshirt; model Karlie Kloss was photographed wearing one. When the company announced it would sell a second sweatshirt – a pale pink hoodie with the Glossier name across the chest – as part of its new GlossiWEAR merchandise line in 2019, 10,000 people joined a waiting list to buy it.
Walk up the red staircase at Glossier’s flagship shop on Lafayette Street, a short walk from its HQ, and it’s like putting on rose-tinted glasses. The walls, display tables – even the jumpsuits worn by the showroom’s sales assistants (officially titled “offline editors”) – are a soft baby pink. Glossier products are laid out on tables with the precision of the most carefully arranged Instagram shot. Each one is a tester, ready for visitors to try out. (Sharing pictures of product swatches – samples applied to the skin to show the colour – is popular on online beauty forums.)
As Glossier principally sells online, its offline presence is concerned more with creating a memorable experience than pushing sales. An anteroom at the flagship contains a mirror on one side and a feature wall with giant tubes of Cloud Paint – Glossier’s cream blush, which comes in what looks like a mini paint tube – protruding out of the other. The writing on the giant tubes is backwards – all the better to use as a backdrop for a mirror selfie. There is no cash register; to buy a product, I speak to a jumpsuited assistant who places my order and takes payment using an iPad. My purchase appears in one of Glossier’s instantly recognisable pink bubble wrap pouches, lowered from the floor above via a pulley system not unlike a vertical sushi belt. Another assistant reads out my name and I collect the package.
A key part of Glossier’s brand identity is simplicity. By January 2020, it had a total of 36 different products across skincare, makeup and fragrance – a minimalist offering by beauty brand standards. Weiss says this is because Glossier aims to produce “hero” or “best in kind” products that are easy to use and become timeless essentials. While another makeup counter may offer dozens of mascaras that all claim different benefits, Glossier just makes one: Lash Slick, available only in black.
Around the time Glossier launched, its pared-back “skin first, makeup second” approach tapped into a trend, concurrent with a new wave of popular online feminism focused on female empowerment, that saw people move away from the idea of using makeup to cover up perceived imperfections and towards a fresher, cleaner finish. The go-to Glossier aesthetic is one of effortless natural beauty, the coveted “no-makeup makeup” look that should not be confused with actually not wearing any makeup. The adjective to aim for is “dewy” – an effect that Glossier tried literally to bottle in its Futuredew product released in 2019, an “oil serum hybrid” designed to give skin that elusive glowy-but-not-greasy sheen. In beauty circles today, “Glossier skin” has become something of a catch-all term to describe a healthy, radiant look, whether achieved using Glossier products or not.
Andrew Stephen, L’Oréal professor of marketing at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, says Glossier is very much born in the age of the influencer, and has differentiated itself from incumbents that traditionally focus on aspirational images of luxury and glamour by, for example, featuring regular people in its ads. “It has a much more youthful look and feel than if you compared it to, say, a L’Oréal Paris or a Lancôme or a MAC, even, or an Estée Lauder,” he says. “It looks fresher, it looks more modern.” (Although L’Oréal helped fund Stephen’s academic post, it has no involvement with his work.)
Pricewise, Glossier products are more expensive than many pharmacy brands but not at the level of a premium brand; mascara and lipstick retail for £14 each. Weiss says she wants to challenge the idea that luxury products should have an element of exclusivity. She references the scene in Pretty Woman where Julia Roberts’ character is made to feel unwelcome in a high-end store. “I thought, that should never happen for anyone,” she says. “One of the things that we’ve always been really excited about was decoupling this notion of price and quality, where just because something’s more expensive doesn’t mean it’s necessarily better.”
From the start, Glossier has operated as a direct-to-consumer brand, meaning you can’t buy its products elsewhere. Aside from a few limited experiments, such as a temporary fragrance shop in some outlets of the US chain Nordstrom, it does not have a presence in department stores or beauty retailers, and online sales are conducted through its own e-commerce site at Glossier.com. Weiss says this decision was taken so that Glossier can stay in complete control of its relationship with customers, with no third-party intermediaries.
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Stephen points out that the direct-to-consumer model also gives companies the advantage of access to first-party customer data, which they can use in marketing and advertising campaigns but also to keep tabs on emerging trends. “In beauty, it’s really important to look at the products that are used together,” he says. “The bundles that are used to put a look together become really important for consumer insights, and a DTC model tells you that right off the bat.”
When Weiss was starting the company, some doubted that online sales could work for the beauty sector. Weiss compares this to scepticism in the early days of Amazon that people would buy books on the internet. “We face a very similar frontier, which is ‘Is anyone going to buy beauty products online?’,” she says. “I mean, that’s what every venture capitalist asked me when I was raising our seed round – and the answer seems to be yes.”
She believes the world is ready for a “third wave” of channel innovation in beauty commerce. First came the beauty counter, where individual brands would sell their own product through their own representatives – which she characterises as a “teacher-student” interaction. Then came shops like LVMH-owned multinational Sephora, which put hundreds of brands in one place, with the same salesperson selling them all. Now, she says, people want to put their trust in people like them, whether that’s reading online reviews before making a purchase, buying a lipstick on the recommendation of a YouTube influencer, or just messaging a friend to ask if they think something’s a good idea. “We’re in an era where people want to choose who they listen to, right?” she says. “We’re in an era where people are predominantly looking to peer-to-peer connection and community to make beauty purchasing decisions.”
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Glossier talks a lot about the idea of community and the importance of fostering a two-way conversation with its customers, whom it calls “Generation G” (also the name of its lipstick). Thanks largely to its Into the Gloss ancestry, Glossier had more than 15,000 followers on Instagram before it had launched a single product; today it has 2.5 million. Into the Gloss is still run out of the Glossier office, and features mainly interviews about people’s beauty routines and non-Glossier reviews (although Glossier products do appear).
Glossier SVP of Marketing Ali Weiss (no relation to Emily) says the team is constantly reading customer feedback in the form of Instagram comments, tweets, emails, product reviews on Glossier.com, comments beneath Into the Gloss articles or in the 17,000-member Into the Gloss Facebook group, and posts on the independent r/glossier subreddit. A few years ago, the company started a Slack channel for around 1,000 of its most engaged community members to chat directly with each other and the team. “You can have people on the Glossier team who are part of that Slack channel actually in there, listening, and saying ‘OK, the most requested product was a cream blush, so that’s what we’re going to do’ or ‘Here was the opinion on what the cleanser landscape is,’” she says.
The Slack channel is now defunct, but Ali Weiss says that the team uses feedback across all of its digital media to inform decisions, including “co-creating” new products with its customers. When Glossier was developing a cleanser, Emily Weiss posted on Into the Gloss and her Instagram account, asking customers what made their ideal face wash. What would it look like? Smell like? Feel like? Who would play it in a film? The result was Glossier’s Milky Jelly Cleanser, named for its texture.
Different products require different strategies, Ali Weiss says. ”If you rinse and repeat, it stops feeling authentic.” Glossier’s Solution exfoliator, launched in 2018, came out of a less overt collaboration: the Glossier team had noticed that chemical exfoliators – a more niche product category than a face wash – were popular among its fans, and considered how to make one that was easy to understand and use. They involved customers in the launch by giving 60 people the product in advance and using their stories and feedback in the marketing campaign.
Consumer feedback has also informed decisions beyond product development. Glossier products are shipped in pink bubble wrap pouches inspired by electronics packaging that can be re-used as cosmetics bags – but some customers complained that getting a new bag with every order was wasteful. In 2019, Glossier introduced a “less packaging” option that ships without the plastic pouch.
While being selective about which products to release has become a key part of Glossier’s brand, Emily Weiss says that the one thing she constantly hears from customers is that they want more. “They want more makeup. They want more merch. They want things we had never considered that we should even have any business making,” she says. In 2019, the company pushed the boat out into more colourful waters with its first sister line, Glossier Play, which includes makeup products such as coloured eyeliners and glitter gels for a more dramatic look. People have also asked for non-beauty products: Glossier candles, Glossier lingerie, a Glossier-designed apartment. Weiss once wrote a post on her Instagram Story asking her 500,000 personal followers what they thought the company should make next. “Someone asked us if we could make Milky Jelly lube,” she says. “And I was like, that’s actually a really good idea.”
As Glossier expands, it will need to grapple with how to grow its customer base without losing the cool factor that comes with a cult-like following, and to scale its technology to deal with a larger community. Ali Weiss says that the company already uses social media listening tools to glean data and insights from customer feedback, but that it will need to build new systems to deal with greater volume. “Technology is the key to building one-to-one relationships at scale,” she says.
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In September 2019, Glossier hired COO Melissa Eamer to help focus on growth. Eamer had spent 19 years at Amazon, most recently as VP of sales and marketing for Amazon devices, and says she was attracted to the beauty company because of its customer obsession and brand. “I also loved Emily’s vision, because in the years at Amazon, Jeff [Bezos]’s ability to say ‘Hey, this is where I’m leading the organisation’ was really important when we had a lot of naysayers and doubters,” she says.
Eamer sees Glossier’s potential as a direct-to-consumer brand to create a new kind of digital retail experience. “I think because we own that relationship with our customer, we really have the opportunity to reinvent how consumers, and beauty consumers in particular, think about e-commerce,” she says. “It’s kind of the e-commerce v2, if you will, where it’s less about making a transaction easier and more about having a relationship with that company.”
She is not yet sure exactly what that will look like, but says it will be something of a “mash-up” between Glossier’s website, social media channels, Into the Gloss blog and offline experiences. “I think it becomes a hybrid,” she says. “It’s not really a social networking site, it’s not really an e-commerce site, it is a beauty site that you go to to have beauty conversations, buy beauty products, learn about routines – it’s combining those concepts together in a way that feels very organic to our community, versus sort of forced.”
In the past year, Glossier has also hired a new CTO, CFO, chief people officer and head of supply chain to expand its leadership team.
In terms of growing its reach, Ali Weiss says the company’s primary aim for now is to become “more Glossier to more people”, reaching new customers in the US and globally. Glossier currently ships to the US, Puerto Rico, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark and France, and has a bricks-and-mortar store in LA as well as its New York flagship. It has held pop-up experiences in various locations, including London’s Covent Garden. Even in existing geographies, she says, there is plenty of opportunity. “Our brand awareness is still relatively low compared with Estée Lauder or L’Oréal, or, outside of the beauty industry, a Nike or an Apple.”
Danny Rimer, a partner at VC firm Index Ventures who has invested in Glossier since 2016, says the company’s challenge moving forward will be one of execution. “Clearly product-market fit has been validated; now it’s a question of how you build a global, word-class company on the backside of that,” he says.
In the beauty sector, it is common for companies to be acquired by incumbent multinationals such as L’Oréal or Estée Lauder. Rimer says that, though acquisition offers are flattering, Index does not invest in entrepreneurs who plan to build a company that will be acquired. “We want to back entrepreneurs who are creating companies that are going to define an era in the respective sector they’re going after, and we think Glossier and Emily are a great example of that,” he says.
Emily Weiss would not be drawn on whether Glossier is currently profitable, nor if or when the company is planning an IPO, responding only that “we’re thinking about building a very big, long-term, enduring business and company”.
While she insists that beauty is Glossier’s business for the foreseeable future, she says that she could see the company going beyond this category. “I mean, we already are making sweatshirts.”
The Glossier playbook
Listen to anecdotes: Qualitative feedback can help to illuminate what’s going on behind the quantitative data, says Ali Weiss: “An anecdote can come from one singular situation, but sometimes they speak really loudly about truly what’s happening v what the data might say.”
Connect your customers: Glossier aims to foster what it calls “C2C” (customer to customer) as well as “G2C” (Glossier to customer) connections. It does this by running a referral programme, sharing fans’ social media posts, and keeping its physical stores open-plan so shoppers can see each other
