Where Glossier went wrong

In August 2022, a tweet from a writer named Carina Hsieh made the rounds after Glossier products were found in a TJ Maxx discount store: “I too am glossier makeup at tj maxx (hot and full of potential in 2017, not quite where I wanna be in 2022).”

Glossier was the beauty brand that defined the millennial generation and its consumption habits during the past decade, with affordable yet cool products that combined the excitement of Supreme merch drops and the straightforward skincare of Clinique. The rosy colour of its packaging came to be known as “millennial pink”.

Its founder Emily Weiss was poised, visionary and young. After internships at Ralph Lauren and fashion magazines as a teenager (one of which landed her a stint on reality TV series The Hills), she founded the beauty blog Into the Gloss in 2010, when she was in her mid-20s. Its candid reviews and intimate interviews with celebrities, models and media types felt like gathering in a friend’s bathroom to try on beauty products. It was a hit.

But Weiss didn’t just want to be a new-media whizz she wanted to make products. In 2014, Into the Gloss became Glossier, Weiss’s first company, and almost her first real job.

The company got off to a stunning start. Products such as the tinted gel-pomade Boy Brow, which launched at the height of the mania for a Cara Delevingne-style bushy brow, at one point commanded a 10,000-person wait list. Less than five years after its launch, in 2019, Glossier had a billion-dollar valuation and a possible IPO in the works.

But last year Weiss stepped down, as the company, struggling with sales and controversy, seemed to plateau, if not be in a steady downfall.

At Glossier’s height, Weiss was fond of fashioning herself in the vein of the tech founders whose books lined her living room. She wanted to establish Glossier as more than a beauty product company; she wanted to prove that it could be a disruptive tech company.

So Glossier tried to develop a beauty app around 2017, according to a dozen former employees who spoke to me for my forthcoming book, Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier. Unfortunately, no one could answer whether the app had been given an actual name, or definitively what it would do. All the while, the company poured money into aggressively recruiting talent from blue-chip companies such as Facebook, Instagram and Amazon. Few of them lasted long.

Glossier’s creative teams also had a high turnover rate, although it was for a much different reason: Glossier was a victim of its own success. Employees with Glossier on their CVs could get lucrative positions at established brands, or go on to consult or start their own beauty lines.

Glossier was also at a crossroads for product strategy. It had made its name on no-make-up make-up, the kind of sheer tints that were made to be easily applied with fingers. Outside funding came with the pressure to scale the company and expand its product offering.

The company chose to launch a line of colour cosmetics as a satellite brand called Play in 2019, teasing it with photos and videos that suggested a sexy night-time vibe, as if the products would be inspired by the refracted light of a disco ball. This was a huge departure from a brand whose reigning aesthetic had been barely there no-make-up make-up. The products were bold and glittery, anticipating the kind of graphic make-up popularised among twenty-somethings by American TV series Euphoria. But they were not a success, and after spending more than a million dollars in production costs and $100,000 in scrapped custom packaging, according to former employees, the line was quietly shut down after less than a year.

With its valuation of $1.8bn it was too big to sell for that kind of price in the post-pandemic market

If Play was a bit too ahead of the curve, the light pink signature packaging and dewy photos of slightly offbeat (freckles, bushy brows) models used in Glossier’s campaigns were so widely copied that what once felt fresh started to look like a cliché. Some large creative agencies were reluctant to take on Glossier as a client because of Weiss’s unilateral vision. Glossier’s rise and painstakingly neat aesthetic was roughly parallel to Instagram, launched in 2010, but by the end of the decade young people had moved on to being inspired by the messy, slightly chaotic “real” girls of TikTok.

The failure of Play was followed by the pandemic, which took a toll on the company whose stores were Willy Wonka fantasias of trying things on en masse, with skincare products lined up next to large mirrors on the wall and tubes of blush and Boy Brow roughly the size of adults. Temporary store closures in New York City and Los Angeles became permanent and furloughs became lay-offs in August 2020.

Around the same time, as the US was undergoing a massive racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd, a group of about 50 former retail employees at Glossier showrooms started an Instagram account called @outtathegloss. Some of the issues the anonymous group brought up included low pay, customers and managers making racist comments, and a general work environment that did not mirror the inclusivity that Glossier — a brand whose motto was “you can sit with us” — prided itself in. No accusation was levied against Weiss specifically.

Sales started to decline. For the 2021 holiday season, Glossier sales were down 22 per cent from 2020, according to Earnest Research. And according to data from Bloomberg Second Measure, Glossier’s US sales in 2021 were down 26 per cent from the previous year. (Glossier did not respond to a request to verify these figures.) In late winter 2022, more lay-offs were announced at the company.

Weiss wanted Glossier to stay on the path to IPO. And so while rival companies such as Drunk Elephant, Tatcha and Charlotte Tilbury were being bought for billions of dollars circa 2019, Glossier missed its moment. With Glossier’s 2021 valuation of $1.8bn it was too big to sell for that kind of price in the post-pandemic market, according to analysts. And the question by then was, was the company even worth that much?

So Weiss was sacrificed. On May 24 2022, Weiss posted a note on Instagram and to the Glossier blog that she was stepping down from the chief executive role, effective immediately. Kyle Leahy, an alumna of Nike and Cole Haan, would be replacing her.

Leahy opted for a reboot. No longer ambitious of becoming a tech company, Glossier has opened more stores, including a flagship in Manhattan with one room built to look like the New York subway in Glossier colours, a tile mosaic and a mirrored wall asking for selfies. And after so many years of being sold exclusively direct-to-consumer, the brand announced it would also begin retailing in Sephora, forcing Glossier to relinquish some of its creative control and margins in exchange for getting the brand in front of a new audience.

Can Glossier regain its momentum? The jury is still out. What it most needs is a suite of new, innovative products that delights its customers the way that Boy Brow or Milky Jelly Cleanser did seven years ago.

The last time I visited the Glossier flagship store, it was late August and Manhattan felt deserted. But inside the pink palace of products, young people thronged the store. They were gathering in groups trying on lip colours and taking gleeful selfies. The brand hasn’t lost all its magic yet.

‘Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier’ by Marisa Meltzer will be released by Atria/One Signal Publishers on September 12