Oct 18, 2024

Sign Up Enter your email to receive editorial updates, special offers and breaking news alerts from Vogue Business. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please see our privacy policy for more information. Close Emily Weiss recounts the highs & lows of building the Glossier empire Her journey from intern to billion-dollar brand queen is the stuff of corporate legend. But, as Glossier founder Emily Weiss reveals a decade on, building a beauty behemoth is not for the faint of heart. At 10 years old, I leant against my grandmother’s modest bathroom vanity, watching her ‘apply her face’ and waiting for the moment she’d reach under the sink and offer me her latest Clinique gift-with-purchase goodie bag. Ten years later, I spent my nine-to-five inside the halls of 4 Times Square, then Condé Nast’s New York HQ, an ambitious, lowly intern at Teen Vogue — with dreams of being editor-in-chief of any Vogue. Not long after that, it was lunchtime on a Tuesday when a tattoo artist on Bowery Street inked the number “10” on my forearm: a bet lost, or won, with my comrades at Into the Gloss, my beauty blog that had, in no time, amassed 10 million page views per month. Now, it’s August 2024 and I am at a dinner in the Hamptons, hosted by sisters Margaret and Katherine Kleveland, founder-friends of the nouveau boho-chic fashion brand Dôen. It’s a balmy evening and my only night out from a summer (two years, really) of laying low with my toddler. Around a heavily hydrangea-ed garden I spot a who’s who from my past across the nexus of beauty/fashion/media. Next to me is the venture capitalist Nick Brown, Natalie Massenet’s now business partner, who was one of the original investors when I launched my beauty brand, Glossier. He’s reminding me of some of our early conversations, when I was repeatedly asked if the brand would still be relevant in 10 years. I remember it well: our financial backing depended on the answer being yes. As a 28-year-old, with immense entrepreneurial bravado, I was nothing if not confident and fiercely ambitious in what we were building. “Yes,” I answered, again and again. And while I’ve always dreamt big, the truth was I never imagined that Glossier could have come this far. But, of course, like all good things, it wasn’t always a smooth path. The road to Glossier started less with a grand business plan and more of an unignorable gut feeling. Let’s start with ITG (Into the Gloss). It was 2010 and I was 24, working as a fashion assistant at Vogue, the job of early career dreams. I was calling in impossibly gorgeous clothes for shoots with models and celebrities, surrounded by endlessly driven and inspiring people. I was in my element. A mood board created by Weiss in 2016. Courtesy of Emily Weiss The daily roster of talent that came through Vogue’s door sparked an idea: perhaps there was an editorial angle to be had in breaking down these women’s beauty routines — what products they actually use — and bringing their real stories to life. At a time when beauty content was served by experts or long-form YouTube tutorials, there was something telling me that a dose of realism and authenticity in the space was needed — and that was Into the Gloss, Glossier’s editorial predecessor. With my art school background and love of journalism, I bought a digital camera, a dot-com domain name, and shot subjects on weekends and edited transcripts from 4am to 6am on weekdays. Some of my first interviews for ‘The Top Shelf’ — a franchise in which I would enter people’s homes, photograph the insides of their beauty cabinets and then get them to talk through its contents — were with Karlie Kloss, Julia Restoin Roitfeld and Emily Ratajkowski, who I somehow persuaded through a combination of charm, references and a lot of photo approval promises. I always vowed to, and always did, make the women I featured look (and sound) good — it was my favourite part. And in an era of internet round-ups, the top magazine websites and editorial platforms gobbled up the all-access looks into familiar faces and hyperlinked with glee. It took off immediately, validating my hunch that women wanted to experience beauty in a familiar, authentic way. Most Popular By Lucy Maguire One year into juggling my job at Vogue and building ITG, I decided I needed to pursue it full-time, but not before one of my biggest beauty heroes decided to throw me a curveball. I got a call from Bobbi Brown — the Bobbi Brown — who had seen ITG and wanted to offer me an editorial director position running her brand’s site and content (which she was still leading at Estée Lauder ). To go from being an assistant to being offered a senior role at Lauder was honestly the stuff of dreams, but something told me that I needed to pursue ITG, so with trepidation I turned down the offer and got to work. I started by building a team. We got an office on the fringe of New York’s SoHo (OG Glossier fans might remember it was the site of our first pop-up store) and we set about creating top-tier beauty content not just onsite but on Instagram, which was in its infancy and not a tool yet tapped into by brands. Its capability to build community (a word that is now banded around too easily, but at the time was so authentic) dovetailed perfectly with my next idea: a physical brand, but one with a difference. We were going to democratise beauty, by selling the highest quality products at affordable prices, and build a lifestyle brand in the process. This was more than just products. We wanted to build a brand on the internet, for the internet, and Instagram would be our test bed for how to make it work. Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures believed in our idea to the tune of a $2 million investment — a match made in female-founder, female-backer heaven. We built Glossier — so-called in homage to my love of glossy magazines and the word “dossier” — in real time with our followers (which was only around 15,000 at the time), sharing everything from possible packaging, Pantone swatches and landing on the soft pink that was to become synonymous with the brand (as well as an entire generation), to office moves, product categories and type fonts. It sounds obvious to say now, but we felt driven to build the brand through content online, the idea being that by the time the product was available to buy, you felt like you actually understood everything about it. This wasn’t just a marketing ploy, it was building trust and having transparency from day one. We were a scrappy startup, and everything felt alive, urgent and incredibly important for the world. We used my living room to mood board the personality of the brand, brainstorm product ideas and development, and figure out how to scale this thing we were building. It was chaotic, but it was also insanely exciting. Most Popular By Lucy Maguire With the dozen or so founding team gathered around one computer, on the morning of 6 October 2014, we pressed “Go live” on the Glossier website and the next chapter began. We launched with four skincare products designed to enhance, not hide, who you are. A concise edit in a realm of giant brands with endless SKUs. It felt radical. Then came Boy Brow pomade, Cloud Paint blush, Glossier You fragrance — first-of-their-kind products that launched 10,000-person waitlists — flagship stores with Serena Williams at the opening and Beyoncé revealing our eyeshadow at the Grammys. What began as an internet brand with 900-odd orders on launch day, was, by 2019, a cultural phenomenon valued at $1.2 billion. Slowly, at first, but then quickly and all of a sudden, I went from being the photographer to the photographed, stopped in the streets of SoHo for a selfie by well-meaning fans. I went from being the odd-duck-out in high school to a celebrated touchstone of female entrepreneurship and beacon of brand-building. My friend circle increased to the tune of nearly a million Instagram followers. And I could finally afford the clothes that I used to style models in at Vogue. It didn’t come without challenges. My first marriage came and went in under a year. Back at the office, as the stakes — and our, and my, star — rose, I was less and less ‘a part of the team’ and felt more and more alone at the top. And then came the pandemic. It hit us like a tonne of bricks. Our stores, which had become community hubs, where people would congregate not just to buy products but to also connect with like-minded people, were suddenly forced to close. We had to make the tough decision to lay off all of our retail ‘editors’, as we called them. It was devastating. But for the business to survive, we had no choice. Having held ourselves up as a community brand always in constant dialogue with our audience, we knew that they weren’t happy with our decision, and after the death of George Floyd in May 2020, in the swell of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, an open letter from our employees published on the internet detailing racist and toxic experiences in our stores hit me harder than anything before. We had always, always prided ourselves on being inclusive, but we fell short. We didn’t just upset our community, we let down our friends, our employees. These were people who had put their trust in Glossier, in our team and in me, and I had to face the reality that we had failed them. Most Popular By Lucy Maguire Trust in relationships is built through happy times and sharing in successes, but it’s more importantly built through the process of rupture and repair. I’d watched other companies — much larger than ours — hide or go silent in reaction to mistakes. This was not our style. I called 20 of the editors myself to understand what happened and how to make it right. We hired a new head of HR and completely rewrote our playbook for retail training and management. We’ve doubled down on supporting Black-owned beauty businesses, committing more than $2 million to date and hundreds of hours of mentorship from our top executives. Our work to build a more equitable ecosystem inside and outside our four walls is never done. In 2021, aged 36, nearly 10 years into building Glossier and now with my new partner, Will, I became pregnant with my first child. It was going to be a huge, seismic, life-changing event and I knew in my gut I needed to create space for it, so I decided to bring in a CEO and take a step back from day-to-day operating to allow room for pause. It was a tender moment for me, leaving a job that has been my life’s work, stepping into a new role as executive chairwoman and a new era of my life as “mom”. All of the major beauty founders I know who’ve shared their stories of functional change told me how emotional this would be — but none could’ve prepared me for the media’s reaction. The ensuing flurry of negative press chronicling my stepping down was another intense wave to ride. Weiss and her daughter, Clara, in 2023. Courtesy of Emily Weiss I am now executive chairwoman of the board for Glossier, and Clara, my daughter, is now two. A few months from 40, I am now embracing a quieter life, putting family first. Sometimes I look at the from-to and get vertigo, swapping 12-hour meeting days and red-eye international flights for 12-hour co-sleeping, breast-feeding nights. Her arrival initiated and inspired me to realise that in those slower moments, that’s when huge expansion can still occur. And I’m a believer that life has many chapters. ‘Motherhood’ is one of mine — and I intend to go all in on this one as much as any of the others. Back in the Hamptons that evening, second margarita in hand and kid pictures exchanged, Nick asked where I saw Glossier in the next 10 years. As a founder, this isn’t an unfamiliar question — and no matter when it’s asked, my answer has always been the same. “Remember why you started,” in big black letters, was, in fact, Glossier’s very first Instagram post. And that’s because our mission has and always will be the same. “Glossier is about living in — and embracing — the now, not the past, and not the future,” I wrote at our launch. “It’s about fun and freedom and being OK with yourself today.” And, in that, I hope our perfectly pink brand stays consistently evergreen.