Entrepreneur

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nobodies into style stars.) She sketched out a logo—a blot of nail
polish—came up with a few regular features, and spent $700 on
a camera and a website built by a friend of a friend. She called it
Into the Gloss.
Into the Gloss launched in September 2010 with a post about
fashion publicist Nicky Deam and a banner ad from beauty giant
Lancôme. The cosmetics brand had explored partnerships with
bloggers but struggled to find one that matched its taste level. Then
Weiss spent a week pestering its then-PR director, Kerry Diamond,
for a meeting. When Weiss finally got in the door, “she opened up
her laptop and, like, unicorns and rainbows and sunshine shot out
of it—just, like, wow,” says Diamond. The writing was cultivated
but conversational, light but not silly; the graphic design, sophisticated
and inviting; and the photography, beautiful. “It was everything
we wanted but didn’t know we needed,” says Diamond. The
brand signed on to advertise.
Weiss kept her day job and ran her site every morning between
4 and 8. Her audience grew swiftly—a combination of Weiss’
appeal and the fact that she produced genuinely compelling content
that was often far more revealing and smart and personal
than your average beauty coverage. Columns like “The Top Shelf,”
which she often conducted while sitting on the subject’s bathroom
floor, featured insider-y interviews in which supermodels,
magazine editors, and beauty and fashion execs revealed their
daily routines, preferred products, and, in a plot twist, quite
candid struggles with insecurities (supermodel Karlie Kloss on
acne, J. Crew’s then–creative director, Jenna Lyons, on aging and
ice cream). Beauty at Into the Gloss became not something that
divided women but something that united them, offering a sort of
catharsis, companionship, and assurance.
After a year of this, Weiss had amassed 10 million page views
a month, several successful corporate partnerships, and a small
staff. She quit her job at Vogue to focus on the site full-time. But
she sensed there was a wider audience to reach. Into the Gloss
had succeeded in democratizing beauty, in a way, but it was still
undeniably prestige. The women profiled weren’t always relatable,
zits or no; the products they suggested weren’t always readily
available or affordable. “That wasn’t helping the mission,”
Weiss recalls, “which was really about creating your own idea of
who you want to be and using beauty as just one way to do that.”
Which led to her next question: What would help the mission?
IN 2013, Weiss started approaching venture capitalists with a
vague idea about products, or maybe an Into the Gloss–curated
e-commerce platform. She told them that for three years, she’d
been spending her days in conversations with women who had lots
to say about what the big beauty brands weren’t doing for them.
Beauty consumers, she said, were overwhelmed by offerings, and
brands weren’t helping themselves—“launching the craziest things
that aren’t user-friendly, or don’t really work, or don’t help you
replace anything,” says Weiss. The cabinets under women’s sinks,
her own included, were full of ziplock bags of stuff they never used.
Weiss wanted women to have products that would never let
them down or see the inside of a ziplock bag. She was more interested
in something being good than being new. But she struggled
with what to do next. For one, she didn’t have a clear business
plan. For another, she was schlepping all over New York talking to
“mostly dads” who couldn’t appreciate the problem, or her simple
solution. She didn’t have, as she says, “some huge technological
advancement or patent that differentiates my beauty product
from another person’s beauty product.” She didn’t even have a
product, really. She had a mentality.
Still, she kept at it. After 10 or so rejections, a meeting at Thrive
Capital—which liked what she had to say but told her to come
back once she had a product—led Weiss to venture capitalist
Kirsten Green, the founder of San Francisco–based Forerunner
Ventures. Green needed no convincing. She agreed that there was
plenty of room in the $428 billion beauty industry for improvement.
“Emily knew nothing
about supply chain or customer
experience or building a team,”
she says. “There were no products,
no business plan. But
Glossier
when I saw what she could do
fans live on
on her own with no resources,
how compelling she was, I
social media,
knew I wanted to be in business
which means,
with this person.”
Green helped Weiss raise
with the right
$2 million in seed funding,
tools, Weiss
which she used to assemble a
small team, including creative
can use it
director Helen Steed, a beauty
as an R&D lab.
industry vet who’d helped build
Bumble & Bumble, and COO
Henry Davis, who came from
the London office of venture capital firm Index Ventures. Davis
was brought on specifically to help turn Weiss’ almost unending
list of creative ideas into actionable items. “One of Emily’s
greatest strengths was in recognizing the need for a business
partner and charging her staff with the right responsibilities,”
says Green. “So many entrepreneurs view their companies as
their babies. They micromanage, and they stall.”
With Davis’ help, Weiss settled on launching a product line.
She believed she could make a better beauty product, with the
feedback of her readers. “You don’t need most beauty products,”
she says. “They’re an emotional purchase. That’s why the conversations
are really important. What choice do you have but to ask
your customer what they want?” She partnered with a Californiabased
chemist to create an initial line of high-quality basics—
essentials that were easy to use and affordable, and encompassed
all she’d learned from her readers. For example, a moisturizer that
wouldn’t cause breakouts, didn’t interfere with makeup, wasn’t
superexpensive, and smelled nice: literally what she’d heard
women asking for time and time again.
Then there was price. The beauty industry runs on prestige
pricing and equates high cost with high quality. That left a space
open for Glossier to make a statement with low pricing. “A dirty
little secret of the beauty industry is that Chanel No. 5 costs, like,
$150, but to actually make the Chanel No. 5 costs, like, nothing,”
Weiss says. “Making a bougie, expensive beauty brand wasn’t
helping the mission, or very fun for me. We can all be united
by that $12 coconut balm. You don’t need to charge an arm and
a leg.” The packaging was also designed to inspire conversation.
Glossier’s bottles would be Instagram-worthy, with a lot of
white space, and each purchase came with a sheet of emoji-like
40 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / September 2017