How Glossier Hacked Social Media to Build A Cult-Like Following
On a Thursday afternoon in late spring, 32-year-old Glossier founder and CEO Emily Weiss rides the elevator to the penthouse level of her company’s downtown Manhattan headquarters. She’s a thoroughly millennial girlboss in jeans, sneakers and a royal blue sweatshirt with weiss embroidered in small white script. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and for the founder of a beauty products company, she wears notably little makeup -- just some mascara and possibly a swipe of Glossier Lip Gloss, a recent product release touted online as having a “fuzzy doe-foot applicator.”
A former teen model, Weiss is beautiful but not intimidating, either by nature or by design (probably a little of both). After all, her company’s popularity is directly related to her ability to cultivate a feeling of friendship with and among her customers. Just enough relatability is key.
In the elevator, a short woman in her 50s turns to chat her up.
“Do you work here?” she asks.
“I do!” exclaims Weiss.
“People really love it, I hear,” says the woman. “It’s my first visit. I work around the corner. I’m Elizabeth.”
On 6, the doors open to reveal Elizabeth’s destination. It’s the Glossier showroom, the brand’s only existing retail space, at least for now. It opened full-time in December of last year -- a floor-through, gut-renovated homage to millennial pink: pink-and-white packaged products arranged on pink lacquered displays, pale-pink-subway-tiled walls, staff dressed in pink mechanics’ jumpsuits, fresh-cut pink and white flowers and flattering lighting. It’s 5 p.m., and the space is buzzing with a few dozen devoted Glossier fans of varying ages, ethnicities and genders. We’re told that Hilary Duff, the actress, has just left. “People really do come here to hang out,” says Brittney Ricca, Glossier’s manager of communications. She means it. Last summer, someone had a pizza delivered here.
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If it weren’t already obvious, Glossier inspires a kind of devotion and intrigue unmatched in the traditionally fickle beauty space. In less than three years, and with. Weiss won’t share figures but says that revenues are up 600 percent year over year and the brand has tripled its active customer count over the past 12 months. Its flagship now does more sales per square foot than the average Apple Store, with lines out the door and a very impressive 65 percent conversion rate. And last November, Weiss announced on Glossier’s blog that the company had raised $24 million in Series B funding, representing a total $34.4 million in venture capital to date, which will go toward opening additional retail locations, and expanding product categories. In July, the company announced it would begin shipping to France, the U.K. and Canada, with more countries to come. And soon it will move its headquarters to a new, 26,000-square-foot space at the flashy One SoHo Square in New York (where MAC Cosmetics, an Estée Lauder company, also has an office) and add 282 new jobs to its current team of 85, funded in part by a $3 million tax credit from the state of New York.
