When Emily Weiss, founder and CEO of online beauty site Into the Gloss, decided to create a cosmetics line from scratch, she didn't approach another company about doing a line of face creams and lip balms. She didn't even put up an advertisement to lure buyers. She just created a new Instagram account-@glossier -and started taking notes.
Into the Gloss has a million unique monthly readers. They are voracious and vocal, and quickly took a shine to the new account, which Weiss uses to post photos that occupy a kind of social media middle ground between your friend's pictures and brands' well-styled, but impersonal, pictures. It's fairly scattered stuff: images of Into the Gloss 's new office space renovations, a '90s-era Juergen Teller fashion shoot photo, and teaser shots of new logo and packaging design. 'We told fans we we were working on something'-but not what, exactly-'and started to create the brand and identity on Instagram by posting pictures we were inspired by,' she says of the stealth R&D tactics. The comments and likes flooded in, giving Weiss access to a real-time, grassroots focus group.
The first @glossier post went up 12 weeks ago. On October 6, the inaugural line of products became available on Glossier.com. And last week, the brand announced a $8.4 million Series A round of funding from Thrive Capital.
Editorial sites often take on aspirational personas, and the premise of Into the Gloss has always been about being the reader's savvy friend. Not her rich aunt-that would be Vogue-and not her well-intentioned but overwhelming sister-like Cosmopolitan, or Allure. Weiss was working at one of those magazines ( Vogue) when she realized that what she wanted to be reading didn't exist, so she left in 2010 and started Into the Gloss with a developer friend and $700. The then-25-year-old founder quickly convinced Lancôme to place an advertisement, and the business took off from there.
Weiss says creating Glossier was never about making Into the Gloss profitable. Instead, she wanted to create a luxury brand that redefines the traditional cosmetic purchasing experience, which typically happens in a department store, where she says beauty counters are 'aspirational to the point of alienating,' or in a drugstore, where consumers face a literal wall of products, alone. This kind of thinking-about how to avoid making yet another faceless product line-makes Weiss part of a cadre of other entrepreneurs who've zeroed in on ways to disrupt the gargantuan cosmetics industry. Warby Parker alum Jeff Raider started Harry's, a shaving brand for design-minded guys sick of macho packaging; Tristan Walker, the ex-Foursquare executive launched Bevel as a sophisticated skin care alternative to the traditionally un-sophisticated options for black consumers.
'Beauty is a quarter trillion dollar industry and it hasn't changed much,' says Henry Davis, Glossier's COO. 'We saw an opportunity to change the brand relationship through technology.' Glossier is an experimental answer to the question: how much is a like worth? Besides distilling four year's worth of interviews, articles, and product reviews into insights for product development, Weiss and Davis were able to include their readers in the package design process just by doing a few almost comically simple things, like Instagram-ing four colors of pink bubble wrap with eight pink emojis in the caption. That early post has 660 likes, and in the comments followers voted for their favorite hue. The favorited color is now park of Glossier's packaging. Weiss says she would even go down Instagram rabbit holes, looking at their active followers and seeing what pictures they post, or like.
All of this informed Glossier's branding, which is simple, like French drugstore products, but also girly and fun, with pale pink color blocks and tiny emoji-like graphics. By the time Glossier launched, the brand had co-conspirators eager to become shoppers. Weiss won't disclose sales figures, but says Glossier met its one-month sales goal in its first week and a half. 'We've trained an army of beauty experts,' she says.
Weiss describes Glossier as 'modern basic needs' for the 'minimal kind of women' that consume Into the Gloss's frank, curated content. Glossier will roll out new products every six to eight weeks, and already has a full line up through the end of 2015. 'Rather than the old model, where you build this big church, we're going to grow,' Davis says. 'For this generation now, that's not relevance. They want to direct message you and get a response and be a contributor to this brand.'
Shop Glossier here.
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