Glossier: A Case Study in ‘Managing For Tomorrow’ & ‘Listening to Stakeholders’
Antoinette Iacullo
SUMMARY OF THE BRAND
New York-based ecommerce beauty startup, Glossier, launched online in 2014 with just four products. It has since expanded to a full line of skincare, makeup, body & fragrance products. It closed a Series C round of funding earlier this year, raising $52 million, bringing total funding to $86 million (Mandell, 2018). Rumors of an initial public offering began to simmer after the last funding round (Basin & Wolf, 2018).
Communication to Stakeholders (February 22, 2018)
Glossier’s valuation reached $390 Million this year (Olsen 2018).Traffic is heavy, both literally and digitally— Its flagship NYC store does more sales per square foot than the average Apple Store (Gingras 2018) and there are more than two million unique visitors a month to the brand’s beauty blog, Into the Gloss (Bhuiyan 2018).
Dear Tech People reports 79% of Glossier’s staff is female, including its CEO, Emily Weiss. Weiss, 33yrs old, went from Teen Vogue Intern to beauty blogger to the ‘Estee Lauder for millennials’ in roughly three years (Mandell 2018). You may remember Weiss from her cameo as Super Intern on the MTV series ‘The Hills.’
Above: Then, 2007.
Below: Now, 2018.
Photograph by Ben Hassett
Emily Weiss (Glossier) & Kirsten Green (Forerunner Ventures) | Disrupt SF
Another titan of retail, Katrina Lake, Founder and CEO of Stitch Fix, the youngest female founder to take a company public, joined Glossier’s board of directors in June. Lake is the first independent director to join the board, which includes Weiss, Glossier president Henry Davis and three venture capitalists (Del Rey, 2018).
Glossier is simultaneously innovating and disrupting ecommerce, with its tech-forward, direct-to-customer product and communication business model. It has a strong brand identity, synonymous with ‘Millennial pink’ and minimalist aesthetic, with a mission to serve as a conduit for connection. Glossier’s value is not in the sheer scale of its user base, rather, the social activity happening on its user network (Andjelic, 2018). And I would argue, much of Glossier’s value is its People Capital.
MY MUSINGS & REACTION
In a study of the 4-year old startup, via the lens of The Page Principles, ‘Manage For Tomorrow’ and ‘Listen to Stakeholders’ are seemingly embedded in Glossier’s core tenets. Meanwhile, ‘Conduct public relations as if the whole enterprise depends on it’ is a work in progress for this rapidly evolving Brand. And one I believe will only become more challenging, given Glossier does not appear to have a Chief Communications Officer; Instead, Weiss serves as the foremost voice and image of the Brand.
Manage For Tomorrow
Weiss believes “we’re really at the dawn of ecommerce,” which makes up just about 10% of global commerce (Olsen, 2018). “My job is to be thinking 12 months to two years ahead,” she writes in an ITG blog post (https://intothegloss.com/2016/01/meet-emily-weiss/).
Glossier quietly acquired Montreal Digital agency, Dynamo, at the close of 2017. Dynamo helped Glossier with its U.S. launch, developing its website and ecommerce platform. Following the acquisition, Dynamo Co-Founder Bryan Mahoney was named CTO at Glossier (Kolm, 2018).
With the additional venture capital funding injected in February, Glossier is preparing to enter “Phase Two,” creating a social-commerce site. Though Glossier’s Instagram account has roughly 1.5 million followers, Weiss wants to build her own version of a social media and shopping mashup and she hired Keith Peiris, a developer who led teams at Instagram, Facebook Inc., and Oculus, as Glossier’s product chief to spearhead the new site (Perez, 2018).
Listen to Stakeholders
Glossier launches a new product every six weeks, on average, and spends a lot of time working on its formulas and engaging in two-way conversation between product teams and its user community. For example, crowd-sourcing input to co-create its cornerstone product, Milky Jelly Cleanser and inviting 100 of Glossier’s top customers to participate in a Slack channel, exchanging thousands of messages weekly. “That’s the difference between a marketing tactic and actually having your customer engaged in your process and your brand,” says Weiss (Chapin, 2016).
How to not conduct PR as if the whole enterprise depends on it
Glossier has been criticized for not being particularly concerned with explaining the science behind its products, “Weiss just doesn’t think her customers care about ingredients if they’re happy with the results,” according to a spokesperson for Glossier (Larocca, 2018). But Glossier claims that its lack of transparency is a matter of safeguarding business assets.
Glossier received backlash in response to its Instastory thread, which promoted the benefits of Glossier’s Solution, a chemical exfoliating toner, while slamming competing products from industry-revered brands, like Biologique. Many felt Glossier was ill-positioned to opine on other acid formulas when the percentages of its proprietary acid blend are not disclosed. Further, Glossier’s authoritative voice on chemical products felt ingenuine, when fragrance, a known skin irritant, is a listed ingredient in Glossier’s Solution. Further hypocritical, Glossier threw shade at the same competitors that it previously lauded on Into the Gloss.
Luckily, Glossier’s brand image of inclusivity and transparency seems largely intact since its very off-brand misstep, but as Warren Buffet has cautioned, it takes significantly less time to ruin your reputation than it takes to build it.
SOURCES
Andjelic, A. (2018, October 19). Opinion: The ‘4 Cs’ of the modern beauty brand. Glossy. Retrieved from http://db.glossy.co/platform-effect/opinion-the-4-cs-of-the-modern-beauty-brand
Bhasin, K. & Wolf J. (2018, August 30). Inside Glossier’s plans to shake up your makeup routine. Bloomberg. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-30/millennial-makeup-brand-glossier-shakeup-makeup-routine
Bhuiyan, J. (2018, September 18). Emily Weiss wants Glossier to own the online beauty conversation. Recode. Retrieved from https://www.recode.net/2018/9/18/17869814/glossier-emily-weiss-makeup-beauty-engagement
Chapin, A. (2016, January 11). Emily Weiss explains why people are freaking out about Glossier. Racked. Retrieved from https://www.racked.com/2016/1/11/10749536/glossier-emily-weiss-into-the-gloss-new-cleanser
Del Rey, J. (2018, June 26). Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake has joined the board of Glossier. Recode. Retrieved from https://www.recode.net/2018/6/26/17501370/katrina-lake-glossier-board-director-stitch-fix
Gingras, M. (2018, April 18). While retail’s behemoths die, these 4 retailers are rising from their ashes. Entrepreneur. Retrieved from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/312112
Kolm, J. (2018, March 2). Glossier acquired Dynamo. Strategy. Retrieved from http://strategyonline.ca/2018/03/02/glossier-acquires-dynamo/
Larocca, A. (2018, January 8). The magic skin of Glossier’s Emily Weiss. New York Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/glossier-emily-weiss.html
Mandell, J. (2018, February 22). Glossier just got $52 million in fresh capital, bringing total funding to $86 million. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jannamandell/2018/02/22/glossier-just-got-52-million-in-fresh-capital-bringing-total-funding-to-86-million/#1a1dd56412b6
Olsen, D. (2018, September 2018). The changing face of beauty brands in an Instagram-obsessed world. PitchBook. Retrieved from https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/the-changing-face-of-beauty-brands-in-an-instagram-obsessed-world
Perez, S. (2018). Glossier CEO Emily Weiss on why the company won’t sell to Amazon. Tech Crunch. Retrieved from https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/07/glossier-ceo-emily-weiss-on-why-the-company-wont-sell-on-amazon/