This summer, I paid $22 to make my face look like a freshly glazed doughnut.
For weeks, Glossier, an online-only beauty startup with a fanatical following, had been hyping a face highlighter called Haloscope by referencing Krispy Kreme’s straight-out-of-the-oven look (“warm on the inside, a little wet and sculpted on the outside”) in its ad copy. How had I never noticed that Original Glazed has a come-hither glow?
The desired effect is less glistening carb than Karlie Kloss on her way to barre class — i.e., someone more likely to Snapchat fried food than to eat it — but the analogy was endearing nonetheless. Twenty days after Haloscope was released, Quartz, the pearlescent pink shade, sold out. That’s nothing compared to the waitlist for Boy Brow, Glossier’s eyebrow pomade, which famously climbed up to 10,000. Before restocking last month, Glossier had 60,000 names on waitlists for its nine skin care and makeup products, which the company releases in limited collections every few months.
In the two years since Glossier launched, it has hired 44 employees (many of whom double as models) and raised $10.4 million in venture capital financing over a seed and series A round. Revenue, meanwhile, is on track to grow 600% in 2016, and the company expects to grow several hundred percent next year as well. Fashion and beauty blogs now cover the company’s font choice, packaging, product launches, and inevitable product sellouts like Apple fanboys awaiting WWDC. More than 267,000 people follow the brand on Instagram. Its signature washed-out pink has become so iconic that fans use the hashtag #glossierpink when they see the color in the wild: on a surfboard, a San Francisco Victorian, a mural in India, “aura crystals,” a rosy cocktail at a rooftop bar in Chelsea. According to Emily Weiss, Glossier’s 31-year-old founder, most customers come from word-of-mouth and fall into the enviable 18-to-35 age bracket. Glossier has fans in Kloss (whose Instagram selfie sporting a branded sweatshirt got 27,000 likes) and in Eva Chen, former editor-in-chief of Lucky and current head of fashion partnerships at Instagram (who calls the brand “phenomenal”), and, probably, in the most effortlessly luminous young woman in your office, group text, or Twitter feed.
The brand quickly ascended to cult status through a curious alchemy of market research, calculated intimacy, and the ineffable coolness of its founder, figurehead, and often model, Weiss. A magnetic former fashion assistant at W and Vogue, she had a brief but memorable stint on The Hills as an uptight “super intern,” flown in from New York as a foil to Lauren Conrad’s West Coast casual work ethic. While she was still at Vogue masthead, Weiss started the beauty and fashion blog Into the Gloss, known for a column called "The Top Shelf," which features interviews with up-and-coming It girls, revered magazine editors, future street-style muses, models, entrepreneurs, and the occasional heiress, some of whom spilled the secrets of their beauty routines while Weiss sat on their bathroom floor. Glossier used the community that formed around the blog to create a dossier (hence the name) of skin care and makeup for consumers to build out their own top shelves.
MTV
“It was never a pivot,” Weiss told me during a recent visit to her office in lower Manhattan. The move from Into the Gloss to Glossier, she explained, was “a total evolution of the same mission, but with tactile content.”
Sure, but not every blogger’s move toward "tactile content" could be so seamless. In order to make her pitch to the masses, Weiss has had to reposition herself not as the super intern who knows the makeup secrets of the stars, but as your best friend or benevolent big sister. In her letter introducing the company, Weiss said she wanted to welcome everyone. “Snobby isn’t cool, happy is cool,” she wrote. Part of the thrill of being a Glossier girl is the proximity to Weiss, her model-employee workforce, and her company’s hella ’grammable Soho headquarters. She is one of a cohort of aspirational founders of women-centric startups in New York City — including her good friends Leandra Medine of Man Repeller and Sophia Amoruso of Nasty Gal. Sitting in a glass-walled conference room wearing a pair of vintage white Levi’s that she picked up on her honeymoon to Tokyo, she resembles a Nancy Meyers version of a millennial girlboss: beautiful but not too intimidating, appreciably ambitious but almost always smiling, neurotic — but in a charming way. After sitting down to our interview, Weiss got up immediately to straighten a rack of postcards behind me. "Sorry," she said, "it’s going to drive me crazy if it’s crooked."
Part of the thrill of being a Glossier girl is the proximity to Weiss, her model/ employee workforce, and her company’s hella ’grammable Soho headquarters.
Glossier’s office looks like its Instagram account come to life. The white walls are covered in ethereal mood boards in dreamy pastels. Wooden chairs are outfitted in chic fur shrugs. Floor-to-ceiling arched windows look out safely at the cityscape below. The lacquered conference table is long, lean, and high-gloss. And on every floor, employees radiate good health and subtle highlighter. This is the kind of office where an administrative coordinator or front-end engineer can, and does, double as a model for the company’s Instagram account, FaceTime tutorials, and Facebook Live videos. On YouTube, Glossier hosts a feature called “Get Ready With Me,” where the person (often a Glossier employee) walks the viewer through their morning routine.
On a recent summer day, the office was buoyant over big news: The company had just restocked its lipsticks and concealers, which combined had a waitlist 30,000 would-be customers long. They celebrated for a few minutes with cupcakes covered in stiff pink frosting with miniature replicas of the sleek Generation G tubes on top, as well as breakfast parfait cups and foil-wrapped breakfast sandwiches. The cupcakes got Instagrammed, but not the sandwiches. Perfect for a Snapchat story, one employee told another as they walked away from the table, fancy cupcakes untouched.
Joel Barhamand for BuzzFeed News
To understand what makes Glossier popular, start with its sales pitch. The line promises a barely there, lit-from-within effect that plays up features instead of masking flaws, though of course this works better when your “flaw” is a cute scar, winsome snaggletooth, or freckles — not cystic acne, purple under-eye bags, or a hirsute chin. Words like “imperceptible” and “sheer” pepper the site’s ad copy, and aside from its lipsticks, a newer addition, Glossier’s products aren’t really meant to be noticed at all.
“We always err on a light touch versus a heavy touch,” Weiss explained, meaning “there’s never going to be some kind of explosion: ‘Oh my god, I’ve overdone it! There’s too much product — I have to wipe some off.’”
Haloscope definitely can’t be overdone, I told Weiss — believe me, I'd tried. “It’s hard!” she replied, smiling. “It’s so subtle. If anything, the criticism would be that our products are too subtle than too intense. But I think that’s so important to be able to build. So few of us are makeup artists. We want the products to be universally flattering, to be very intuitive, very easy.” None of the products require brushes; it’s all designed to be slapped on in the back of the cab. “Glossier is makeup for the truly lazy” was The Frisky’s assessment, but make no mistake — laziness in this case means studied effortlessness, not puffy and greasy-haired, six hours deep into a Netflix binge still caked with the remnants of last night’s mascara.
The look is “trying hard but not trying to look like you’re trying hard,” said Munachi Ikedionwu, a blogger and Vanderbilt University premed student. Palm trees and hollowed-out coconuts are a recurring motif on Glossier’s posters and stickers, which come free with every order. Packages arrive in a brown box with that baby-pink interior, plastered with slogans like “SKIN FIRST. MAKEUP SECOND. SMILE ALWAYS” and “SKINCARE IS ESSENTIAL. MAKEUP IS A CHOICE. (MAKE GOOD CHOICES).” Inside it, the makeup itself comes in a bag made of pink bubble wrap that doubles as a clutch so cute the company sells them à la carte, three for $12.
If the references are familiar to you, it feels whimsical as fuck.
Website copy is just arch enough not to sound too 13 Going on 30: “The lip-smacking, 11-year-old in you is freaking out right now,” declares the description for Generation G; Boy Brow’s implores you to “Brush your teeth, brush your brows, and then maybe brush your hair.” Packaging channels the hopeful futurism of the ’80s (“as opposed to the the whole ’90s heroin-chic thing,” executive editor Annie Kreighbaum said, “which is not so cool for us”). To hype Haloscope, Glossier flooded its Instagram with pics of a shimmering tulle skirt cascading down a runway, a flaxen-coated horse on a beach, and of course, doughnuts. If the references are familiar to you, it feels whimsical as fuck. A teenage daydream, elevated and commoditized. A series of coded signals for a certain kind of girl.
“The people seeing Sofia Coppola movies, they’re also buying Glossier,” said Natalie Guevara, a 29-year-old who works in communications for the Brooklyn-based startup Genius. “It’s very much taking the Coppola aesthetic — the dusky pink and supple skin — and making it something tangible that you can buy.”
It’s a far cry from the heavy colors and oozing lipstick logo for Kylie Cosmetics(™) or even Milk Makeup, which goes by the slogan “cool girls get ready quick,” and traffics in high-pigment, high-shine products that offer effects like “an iridescent, hyper-lavender sheen” or “super-intense color in one swipe.” Glossier never explicitly says whether these are the bad makeup choices it warned you against, but its aesthetic is subdued and refined, more Connecticut (where Weiss grew up) than Calabasas. Glossier girls probably keep up with the Kardashians, but they don’t want to look like them.
The products themselves tend to be hit-or-miss. Glossier's concealer feels impossibly light and looks incredibly natural, even if it settles into fine lines. Milky Jelly is a space-age treat, but doesn’t remove my mascara. I’m not entirely sure Haloscope is visible on me, but when I put the products on in the morning I feel destined for a compliment. Surely all this radiance will turn some heads.
At any rate, the Coppola comparison is real: Weiss gave the director one of her lipsticks and then Instagrammed a handwritten thank-you note. Coppola loved the shade Crush.
@Glossier / Instagram / Via instagram.com
Glossier typically gets lumped in as a startup because it “launched” on Instagram, but that was just a savvy promotion strategy. People had to leave the app to buy the goods, and the company still had to set up a website, buy dynamic online ads, and advertise in the subway just like every other e-commerce hopeful. Glossier’s real innovation was optimizing for the internet at every step: using the tools of the social web to turn readers into followers and followers into brand evangelists, unpaid product advisers, and, maybe, something like a community, albeit one that buys things from you.
“We really want to listen very closely to our audience across all our channels,” Weiss told me. That means talking to customers through FaceTime videos and Instagram comments, and using Into the Gloss’s robust commentariat as an updated take on a focus group: The formula for Milky Jelly Cleanser, a nonfoaming, ultralight face wash, came largely out of a post titled “What’s Your Dream Cleanser?” in which Weiss encouraged readers to answer that question, “anecdotes/paragraphs/love stories encouraged.” “We will do our best to compile what you tell us into one helluva Glossier cleanser,” Weiss wrote; 382 comments and almost a year later, Milky Jelly was released.
Glossier girls probably keep up with the Kardashians, but they don’t want to look like them.
Power users are invited to sign up for a special, confidential Slack group. New York–area ones are invited to the Glossier penthouse for “a night of mystery product testing, pizza, rosé, and g.IRL talk with other members of the Glossier community and CEO and Founder Emily Weiss!” If in 2016 brands are your friend, Glossier wants to be your BFF. (Or at least talk like her.) The nondisclosure agreement doesn’t come until later.
“Copy plays a huge part,” explained Kreighbaum. It’s important to be “personable and down-to-earth. You can have 'real girls,' but if you’re not being casual with your language, it gets lost.”
Kreighbaum became a social media star in her own right after her lush, unrepentant eyebrows were featured prominently in campaigns for Glossier’s Boy Brow product. “Maybe my eyebrows are more famous than I am? I hear they do well on our paid ads,” she told me. She was a beauty blogger before Weiss recruited her through a Twitter DM. “I think they thought I was funny. A lot of beauty writing didn’t have as much personality,” said Kreighbaum. “It kind of comes naturally to me to overshare.”
Indeed, there’s something intimate and cliquish, almost conspiratorial, about the brand. “You’re part of this crowd and you don’t want to stray from it too much,” said Claire Carusillo, a 24-year-old beauty blogger who puts out a charmingly unhinged newsletter called My Second or Third Skin. In other words, even if Balm Dotcom, Glossier’s petroleum-based salve, is essentially nice-smelling Vaseline, pulling a tube out on the subway still feels good. “When you get really hyped about something, you kind of lie to yourself,” Carusillo told me. “Like, 'This is the stuff!’” Perhaps tellingly, Glossier sells nine beauty products and four items of merch, including an enamel pin in the shape of the company’s signature gothic “G” ($14) and the very sweatshirt Kloss took viral ($60).
“Ordinarily, I just buy stuff off of Amazon and the drugstore,” said Guevara, the Coppola fan. “In many ways, Glossier is one of the first brands that I’ve subscribed to. When Boy Brow runs out, I order more.”
Glossier / Via Instagram
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