Emily Weiss is the Founder and CEO of the cosmetics company Glossier and the blog Into the Gloss. In 2019, she was included in Time magazine's "Next 100."
Early life and education
Emily Weiss was raised in Wilton, Connecticut. Her father worked as an executive at Pitney Bowes and her mother stayed at home. In high school, Weiss interned at Ralph Lauren for two summers and briefly had a modeling career. While interning at Teen Vogue in college, she appeared on The Hills on a three-episode arc with Lauren Conrad and Whitney Port. Weiss graduated from New York University in 2007 with a degree in studio art. She was a fashion assistant at W Magazine and an on-set styling assistant for Vogue where she assisted Elissa Santisi.
''Into the Gloss''
Weiss launched Into the Gloss, a blog featuring predominantly interviews with women, in September 2010. She stayed at her day job at Vogue and worked on Into the Gloss in the mornings between the hours of 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. A popular series on the blog is Top Shelf, where subjects are interviewed in their bathrooms and photos of their shelves and medicine cabinets are featured. Previous interviews include Jenna Lyons and Karlie Kloss. By early 2012, the site had more than 200,000 unique visitors per month. By May 2016, the site garnered 1.3 million visitors. After Weiss reached 10 million page views per month and acquired corporate partnerships for the site and a small staff, she quit her job at Vogue to focus on her business ventures full-time.
Glossier
In 2014, Weiss started approaching venture capitalists with ideas for expansion, including a potential Into the Gloss-curated e-commerce platform. Weiss eventually raised $2 million in seed funding, with the help of venture capitalist Kirsten Green, the founder of San Francisco-based Forerunner Ventures. Weiss used this initial investment to hire a small team and launch Glossier.com. In October 2014, Weiss introduced Glossier's first four products on her Into the Gloss blog and announced the launch of Glossier.com. The Glossier team launched the e-commerce site with an all-purpose balm, a facial mist, a sheer skin tint, and a moisturizer. Six weeks after the first product launch, Glossier announced $8.4 million in Series A funding led by Thrive Capital. Glossier has since gone through three rounds of funding and raised $186,400,000. According to Polina Marinova of Fortune, Weiss "quietly turned Glossier into one of the most disruptive brands in beauty." She initially pitched the company to 12 firms, with 11 not interested. In February 2018, Weiss released that Glossier had successfully raised an additional $52 million in a Series C round of funding. In March 2019, Weiss announced that Glossier had officially raised $100 million in a Series D round of funding and was valued at $1.2 billion. The round was led by Sequoia Capital and Glossier announced at this time that it more than doubled its revenue in 2018, adding over 1 million new customers. Since its initial launch with four products, Glossier has expanded its product line to include skin serums, masks, shower gel, body lotion, fragrance, lip balms and several other beauty items. Glossier dropped GlossiWEAR on July 17, 2019. They released limited edition products in addition to their original grey Glossier crewneck sweatshirt. They are set to release more GlossiWEAR products in the near future, according to glossier.com. In early 2019, Glossier added Glossier Play to its product umbrella. The line includes pigmented and metallic makeup products, such as eyeshadows and eyeliners.
Retail space
The majority of Glossier sales are digital and its business is mainly online but it has three permanent stores in Los Angeles, New York, and London. Glossier pop ups and stores have become famous for their fun mirrors with gentle sentences such as "You Look Good", encouraging clients and visitors to take pictures and post them online. Glossier staff are known as “offline editors”, and sport utilitarian pink boiler suits, wearing their preferred gender pronouns on badges.
Known for their many pop-up experiences, Glossier opened their first permanent showroom in 2017 located at 123 Lafayette St., New York
On May 15, 2018 Glossier opened their second permanent store location in Los Angeles
On March 27, 2019 Glossier added a pop-up shop in Miami. It was designed to embrace the bold colors of Miami and art-deco. The shop opened in August and ended in early October, 2019.
There has also been a pop-up in Seattle, Washington. This pop-up opened on May 22, 2019 and closed on July 7, 2019. The Seattle pop-up featured a particularly lush set up with moss covered mounds surrounded by glossier products.
Glossier has also done a collaboration with Rheas Café for a Café meets Glossier pop-up shop in San Francisco. Guests could purchase Glossier products while also grabbing a bite to eat. This pop-up was open March 14 through April 15, 2018.
Glossier also had a pop-up in Chicago in August, 2018.
Since December 2019, Glossier has a temporary store in Covent Garden that will go on throughout 2020 in London, representing their first overseas store.
In March, a pop-up will happen for a limited time in Scottsdale, Arizona.
