Inside the Rise of Emily Weiss's Glossier

I don’t believe I forwarded her any applications, because from what I remember we got, like, two. But I never forgot that email. Emily was so successful in her early years of entrepreneurship because she wasn’t afraid to ask —whether she was wrangling a celebrity for Into the Gloss’s most popular feature, Top Shelf, or convincing advertisers like L... See more

The company personifies this era.And this was more or less [Weiss’] first real job, opening Into the Gloss and starting in Glossier, and then it became this, literally, billion dollar company, which is remarkable.

You were never going to see her making any kind of public misstep or posting something reckless on social media, which is part of why she’s a bit of a cipher. It was hard to know who she really was or what she really thought. She worked really hard—that was always her personal brand from the moment she appeared on The Hills and that’s what, univers... See more

Glossier took pride in creating their own tech for things like point-of-sale and checkout, and perhaps the big irony is that recently, they moved over to Shopify.

Aesthetically, it was clean and crisp, but also felt fun. It ran in parallel to the rise of Instagram, and it photographed really well. And then they had the backing of Into the Gloss, which they crowdsourced ideas from. And built-in fans, since there was a culty excitement about the site and the people who worked there.

For a while, the DTC playbook was golden: Start with a commodity product, something like dish soap or underpants. Give it a modern design and wrap it in minimalist packaging. Include a pastel background in the impeccably staged product photos, which splash across a Shopify-powered e-commerce site flanked by sans-serif fonts, punchy copy and a messa... See more