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Emily Weiss
She turned her online blog into Glossier, the cult beauty brand for the Instagram generation
The young Vogue columnist turned her social media followers into a community of beauty lovers, and the world’s fastest growing C2C cosmetics business.
Emily Weiss is intent on disrupting the $250 billion cosmetics industry, which is still dominated by traditional brand owners like L’Oréal and Estee Lauder. “Women today have different needs than we had in the past, but beauty companies haven’t responded to that,” she years.
Her journey started when she was a 25-year-old fashion assistant at Vogue magazine and started her own blog in the evenings “Into the Gloss”. She wanted to connect with real people like her, and rapidly built up a following by taking her followers into the bathroom cabinets of women she met.
An early adopter of Instagram, she focused on photos that were rapidly shared by her community. She soon became far more significant than Vogue. It became the must-read for beauty fans, with over 10 million page views a month, and she realised she needed to focus on it full time.
She launched Glossier as a socially driven online cosmetics business in 2014, that grew rapidly with the help of $2 million venture funding. She focused on creating content and cosmetics products for women like herself, “useful and affordable, for girls who work hard but want to have fun”.
Glossier became the cult beauty brand for the Instagram generation.
Product development was driven directly out of discussion forums, sales multiplied through peer to peer recommendations, and the brand spread rapidly. The pink and white branding rapidly spread across a range of products from cleaners and moisturisers, to skin tints and eye liners, caps and sweatshirts too.
The combination of content, editorials and forums, and co-created products drove rapid growth. To the millennial audience, the brand became far more relevant than traditional retail-based cosmetics brands with scientific formulae and Hollywood endorsees.
She has worked with distribution partners around the world, including online retailer Net-a-Porter and pop-up stores in major cities to bring the online community together in physical places, with added cupcakes and prosecco.
“Our message has always transcended borders and cultures and is central to who we are as a brand” she says.