Glossier: from Beauty Blog to Billion-Dollar Brand Community

Abstract

Vogue trained Emily Weiss created a US$1.2 billion valued social media beauty business from
scratch, spun out from her side project blog ‘Into the Gloss’ (CNBC, 2019). Weiss spotted a
clear gap in the market for a fully integrated beauty advice community for real, rather than
idealized, women. The vertically integrated Glossier brand used data analytics and insight
gleaned from community posts and feedback to provide a powerful understanding of its
audience. This enabled the development of compelling and highly engaging advice content and
the capability to effectively identify unsatisfied product formulation needs.

A bottom up, customer centric launch strategy, using sophisticated search engine optimization
(SEO), a strong focus on user experience (UX) and a distinctive communications style, all helped
to differentiate the new brand of Glossier from its better known and better financed competitors.
Weiss recognized early on that her company needed to maintain her blog’s original voice and
brand identity, whilst simultaneously scaling up to fund investment in leading digital marketing
tech. Through the application of insightful user generated content strategies, the Glossier
management team were able to cut costs, build awareness, and maintain their voice in an
authentic way.

This student-academic co-created case study uses only publicly available information. It is
designed to encourage marketing students to appreciate how innovative SEO practice and a
powerful Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) business model was used to scale a passion blog into a
unicorn beauty community by leveraging user generated content and peer-to-peer
recommendation. But, as big brands wised up to community based social marketing techniques
and large influencers eyed lucrative D2C beauty product brand extensions, could Emily Weiss’s
Glossier continue to be a trailblazing success?

Learning Outcomes:

By the end on this case study, students should be able to:

 Explain how customer engagement can be used to enhance the user experience (UX)
  Appreciate a range of innovative SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices
 Consider the threat posed by Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) businesses to traditional,
established brands
 Describe the importance of peer-to-peer and influencer-to-consumer word of mouth
(WoM) and electronic word of mouth (eWoM) in the beauty industry
 Evaluate how founder Emily Weiss successfully scaled her blog into a unicorn
business and how it might counter the threat of future competition

Key Words

Direct-to-Consumer, Influencer Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Female

Entrepreneurship, Word-of-Mouth (WoM), Omni-channel, Big Data, Community Marketing.

Introduction

In 2019, Glossier’s founding entrepreneur 33-year-old Emily Weiss told her 450,000 Instagram
followers that she had successfully raised US$100m in venture capitalist funding. In so doing she
had propelled herself into a very elite group of female unicorn ($1bn+ valued business) Chief
Executive Officers (CEOs). Glossier, a ‘barely there’ skincare and cosmetics brand, was valued
at over a billion US dollars, just five years after its inception (Gross, 2019).

Initially, back in 2014, just four products (balm, mist, skin tint and moisturizer) were launched
by a tiny team that fulfilled 953 client orders on the first day of trading. But five successful years
on, this had grown to serve 3 million customers buying from a range of 30-odd products (Weiss,
2019).

The Glossier brand was born from the New York University art graduate’s blog: Into the Gloss
(intothegloss.com). Weiss had started writing in the early mornings before her day job as a full-
time fashion assistant at fashion publisher Vogue. Weiss’s blog sought to decipher the perplexing
aspects of the $250 USD billion cosmetics industry for everyday women (Hart, 2019). Featuring
interviews with influential women in the modeling, acting, and business world, Into the Gloss
quickly established a sticky, engaged community who generated more than 10 million page
views per month. A cult following where remarkably 60% of readers checked-in daily (Smith,
2015).
Weiss had identified that large, traditional beauty brands (e.g. Estee Lauder, MAC, Clinique,
L’Oreal, Maybelline, Covergirl, Shisheido, Lancome and Chanel (Shen & Bissell, (2013)) lacked
meaningful consumer electronic word-of-mouth (eWoM) support. Although they often
benefitting from being part of substantial, international firms and were backed by powerful
marketing muscle, these well-known legacy brand names, for all their advantages, struggled for
traction in social media (Bertrand, 2013). Additionally, after three years of hands on community
building by publishing celebrity ‘interviews, product reviews and more’ (intothegloss.com,
2019), Weiss was able to draw on an extensive body of curated audience feedback about
experimentation with products, insightful reviews and critiques of both cosmetic products and
application regimes.

Back in 2004, fast moving consumer goods (fmcg) brand Dove had successfully launched its
‘real beauty’ campaign, using groups of real women with diverse body shapes. It pledged to
feature only real women, not models, portrayed as they were in real life, without any form of
digital distortion. Dove’s overarching aim was to help girls build self-esteem and empower
positive body confidence (Unilever, 2017). Having undoubtedly been aware of this ground
breaking campaign in the mass market, Weiss had spotted during her time as a model and whilst
hobby blogging during her time at Vogue, that there was an important gap: the large, premium
beauty brands did not focus on real women, instead they profiled an idealized version of
perfection (Johnson, 2019).

Weiss, who had zero formal business training (Ellison, 2019), launched her brand Glossier to fill
this void with a compelling and authentic promise to “never cover you up, turn you into someone
else, or overcomplicate your routine” (CNBC, 2019). She created a highly curated line of
accessible products that focused on addressing fundamental skin issues, described as a ‘skin first,
make up second’ philosophy. Weiss had also engineered a peer recommendation and product
delivery network that fulfilled her clients’ needs appropriate for the new digital age (Siegal,
2015). At Glossier, customers’ feedback was at the forefront of product development and
business strategy, and Weiss had realized that social media had game changed consumers’
roles in brand storytelling, from listening passively to more active participation (Singh &
Sonnenburg, 2012).
Glossier’s innovative SEO practice and a powerful Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) business model
was used to scale a passion blog into a unicorn beauty community by leveraging user generated
content and peer-to-peer recommendation. But, as big brands wised up to community based
social marketing techniques and large influencers eyed lucrative D2C beauty product brand
extensions, could Emily Weiss’s Glossier continue to be a trailblazing success?

D2C Business model

By 2018, Weiss’s fast growing firm boasted 200 employees and turnover was in excess of
US$100m. It had essentially become a direct-to-consumer (D2C) web proposition that boasted
just two permanent shops (New York and Los Angeles), some semi-permanent pop-up stores,
and 2.2m Instagram followers (Ellison, 2019). The leap frogging of traditionally high cost
elements of the beauty value chain, notably by largely ignoring third party retail distribution and
deploying only a modest marketing spend focused on the web site, product packaging and micro
influencers, Weiss was able to offer quality cosmetics via a web enabled, convenient, fast
delivery service at a more affordable price point. This form of luxury promotion of
relatively inexpensive products has been dubbed ‘masstige’ (Kestenbaum, 2017).

Peer recommendations for high involvement purchasing categories, such as beauty, play an
extremely important role at the point of brand selection, known sometimes as the zero moment of
truth (ZMOT) for online transactions (Bertrand, 2013). Glossier was one of an increasing
number of marketing, tech-based, beauty start-ups who were tapping into and promoting the
content created by everyday people. Other beauty start-up examples include; Pat McGrath,
Mario Badescu and Milk Makeup (Mahoney, 2019). Weiss had created and effectively
leveraged a network of remunerated and unpaid influencers to amplify her brand’s proposition
(Mendell, 2018).

This system of influencing has been shown to be particularly effective; close friend referrals can
account for as much as 86% of purchase decisions (Lammertink, 2019). Glossier attributes 79%
of its sales from peer-to-peer sources (Wischhover, 2017). Using affiliate marketing, Weiss’s
team developed a powerful network of about 500 micro influencers (whose followers were
typically measured in tens of thousands). These influences were formal representatives paid to
endorse Glossier to their substantial social media following (Zerbo, 2019). Micro influencer fees
were cheaper than the big names and often delivered extremely high engagement rates,
typically 60% (Porteous, 2018). The micro influencers were given their own page to
endorse from, hosted on the Glossier website, where the well ranked blogs and high-quality
content captured from the influencers pages helped validate the Glossier website and
boosted its SEO performance, as well as increasing brand awareness (Montti, 2019).

Weiss tapped into changing consumer decision making trends that put less emphasis on rational
product evaluation and objective measures of service quality, in favor of emotional engagement
and social experiences (Tynan, McKechnie and Chhuon, 2010). The CEO of QVC (television
shopping channel) Mike George highlighted a “collapse of institutional and brand authority”
caused by four key factors; a less trusting society, e-commerce fueled price race to the bottom, a
desire for authenticity and a change in influence sources (Kestenbaum, 2017). In this dynamic
context, Weiss defined Glossier as an experience company that transcends mere physical
products and digital interfaces to rather enable offline experiences (Ellison, 2019).

People Powered Ecosystem

When Emily Weiss launched Glossier as a separate entity from Into the Gloss, a team of salaried
staff editors, dubbed the gTeam, became central to Glossier’s people powered digital ecosystem.
The gTeam grew to comprise 30 editors who were carefully chosen to compile and reflect the
opinions of customers and determine how to market products effectively
(CustomerThermometer, 2019).

Functioning as a part of the marketing department, Weiss claims the gTeam was much more than
just a standard customer service team. Acting as the beating heart of a customer centric
organization, a people-powered ecosystem, editors worked in real time to gather insights from
customers, and provide authentic customer voice input for product development. Each editor had
hundreds of conversations daily, spanning a range of social channels; focused on creating salient
conversations about products in a highly personalized manner and distilling the market
intelligence into key actionable insights (Schiffer, 2018). The gTeam played a critical part in the
company’s feedback loop, enabling it to intimately source ideas from a wide array of individuals
through digital information feeds.

Weiss was convinced the gTeam enabled insights and customer care was invaluable, delivering
Glossier an important edge. The editorial team successfully created a true community,
transcending the initial status as a single person hobby blog. gTeam editors were able to identify
a range of customer stakeholder perspectives, for example; where item descriptions on the
website were deficient, what customers expected from particular products, evaluate catchy, new
product names, and evaluate new formulations (Danziger, 2018). Curated user-generated content
(UGC), in the form of reviews and testimonials, was augmented with exposure provided by a
group of paid micro influencers. Forbes (2016) notes that when combined together these
opinions and thoughts can be more persuasive than brand manager messages. Leveraging this
authentic user-generated content, Glossier was able to develop an enduring portfolio of 30-odd
affordably priced products that shoppers often categorized as automatic repurchases. However,
from a business ethics perspective, Weiss was undoubtedly aware that her grass roots business
relied on the unpaid, good will of the Glossier community of contributors. The majority of
content generators and influencers are unlikely to see an equitable return on their efforts. Duffy
(2017) calls out this exploitation of immaterial labor, an inequity that sees many passionate
individuals not getting paid fairly to do work they love, whilst some ingenious individuals, such
as Emily Weiss and others, have been able to create lucrative businesses by harnessing the
opinions and influence of the crowd.

Glossier’s Optimization

According to Weiss, Glossier views all of their product, packaging and names as content, and
their digital feeds reflect this. The brand’s signature pink color theme, carefully orchestrated
photos and benefit boasting, superlative descriptions are carefully curated to communicate the
brand in a way which is easily shareable. Web content uses succinct headlines that telegraphs
benefits and body copy that identifies problems, whilst then adroitly emphasizing how each
product solves them. Reviews, presented in reverse chronological order with most recent first,
are easy to access and use the popular and familiar five-star evaluation grading system. They are
filterable by skin type, age range and skin shade, enabling customers to quickly access just the
feedback and comments from ‘people really like me’ should they wish to. Pared back metrics
show the volume of community-generated reviews to inspire trust. Low comment volumes may
indicate poor customer engagement and are more likely to be biased by fake reviews. Simple
star rating graphics are augmented with clearly labeled customer and paid influencer
testimonials, which, when woven together on the uncluttered web pages, create a powerfully
credible peer-to-peer endorsement. Weiss is clear in her mind that word-of-mouth is more
influential than anything a brand can say, and this philosophy underwires the direct-to-consumer
business model in bypassing the need to invest substantially in traditional advertising channels
and retail distribution. When tagged in social media, Glossier gTeam editors incorporate user-
generated content (UGC) on their channels (Hart, 2019). This is important, not only because the
beauty brand’s feed reflects its users in an authentic way, but because it can substantially
increase exposure at low cost. UGC has been proven to increase rankings on Search Engine
Results Pages (SERPs), as people co-create relevant content (Union, 2017).

As a direct-to-customer (D2C) company, Glossier owns the entire sales funnel. The company
thus has complete, interconnected data sets and the ability to track consumer behavior throughout
the five-step awareness-consideration-trial-repurchase-advocacy customer journey (Willits, n.d.).
With very limited offline sales through its modest retail footprint, Glossier’s majority online
business model can reliably measure marketing effort and efficacy at each step of the consumer
journey (also known as the user experience or UX). This provides a major advantage over other
legacy beauty brands, whose retail distribution is often in the hands of third parties. This
knowledge-is-power big data enables Glossier to corroborate the qualitative comment posts,
creating a powerful, positive feedback loop. Each step of the user experience can be then
optimized based on this heady blend of rich qualitative attitudinal information and actual
quantitative behavioral data, combined to help drive changes aimed at enhanced customer
satisfaction and all important sales growth (Rodgers, 2018).

In 2019 Glossier was ranked 23rd worldwide for SEO in the beauty and fitness sector, and
averaged 2.4m visits per month. This high rank is impressive for company that is younger and
offers less products than its lower ranked competitors like Tarte, which ranked 27th with 2.3m
monthly views, and Estee Lauder which ranked 46th with only 1.1m monthly views (SimilarWeb,
2019). Particularly notable was Glossier’s social media engagement rate (comprising;
comments, likes, shares, retweets) which was more than four times the rate experienced by Estee
Lauder. In part the lower rankings of its competitors may be due to a failure of utilizing
keywords in URL structures, a practice that Glossier has deployed successfully. Glossier URL’s
are clear, succinct and uncluttered, appending the suffix ‘products/milk-jelly-cleanser’ to the
stem web address. Glossier appears slick and intuitive when compared to beauty conglomerate
Estee Lauder’s address naming convention, which uses a much longer and complex format, such
as this example for its sychronized recovery complex; stem web followed by
products/681/26959/product-catalog/skincare/advanced -night-repair/synchronized-recovery-
complex-ii.

From inception, Glossier had been attentive to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Their URL
(universal resource locator) structure has contained key words placed near the front of the URL,
a hierarchy that places product search first (Ryan, 2017). They have also utilized other forms of
optimization:

 Breadcrumbs (key word summary of the route through a web page) to build internal links
and define their link architecture;
 Title tags for user clarity on the search engine results page (SERP), smaller compressed
files to make photos load faster,
 Alternative (ALT) descriptive names so both people and bots can understand the content
(Doiron, 2017), and
 Rel=canonical tags, which consolidates multiple links to pages but count all the different
versions as links, increasing SEO relevance (De Valk, 2019).

In addition, regularly updated product review content has kept pages fresh with new content
optimized for long-tail (secondary) keywords and added microdata (Smith, 2018). Glossier’s
SEO strategy also extended to YouTube, the world’s second largest search engine, a platform
also owned by Google (Davies, 2018). Here, UGC videos and reviews are linked to the Glossier
website, educating and inspiring community members on ways to use Weiss’s products (Ho,
2018), while providing content that Google could index with Glossier and be paired with the
metadata encapsulation to increase search results relevance (Ryan 2017).
Glossier Investing in Big Data Technology

At launch, Glossier had relied on Into The Gloss’s vocal community of voluntary commenters to
provide inspiration. However, over time, this voice was augmented with an employed team of
data analysts and the gTeam to filter and distill the myriad of ideas emerging out of an ever-
larger community. From inception, images of diverse women, product shots from consumers,
and the signature millennial voice from Instagram had been the focus of core community
content. However, over time the company began to rely more heavily on the in-house tech
(technology) department to engineer tools to create new user experiences centered around the
sticky community it had created, to discover ideas for future products, and to optimize the
website.

To track users who were not active commenters, the company had initially used cookies (a
record of an individual user’s visit to a website), which allowed the computer server to recognize
customers when they returned to a page (Riermer, 2019). However, cookies were found to be
blocked by 64% of browsers (Benes, 2018) and changes to data privacy laws have also
subsequently affected how the company was allowed to gather data (Article 5(3), 2002). To fix
these unscalable issues, and drive further growth, the company started using Customer Data
Platform (CDP) segmentation and cross-domain analytics to connect the movements around and
across Glossier and the Into the Gloss blog. The move from a wide network of site information to
a richer data lake meant that the company could start to use machine learning to automate and
quantify the information (Milnes, 2017). From this, Glossier has been able to build a fit for
purpose data warehouse to house the large amounts of information used to run analytics on user
experiences at an extremely specific level and to learn what factors really impacted customer
behaviors (Heintz, 2019).

Glossier worked to integrate its in-store experiences into its online presence and built its own
point-of-sales system to synchronize payment methods from both online and in-store purchases
(Tom, 2018), creating a more seamless experience. The approach of attempting to offer a
consistent and fully integrated customer journey, that are platform and channel neutral, is often
referred to as omnichannel marketing (Manser Payne et al, 2017). Weiss hoped to extend this
even further by developing a social-selling platform, to serve different archetypes of customers
and create a centralized place where consumers could build relationships with each other to
discuss products instead of relying on traditional sources like publications to make purchase
decisions (Bloomberg, 2018), essentially retrofitting word-of-mouth marketing ideas into digital
first channels, essentially helping people meet in an accessible way (PRNewswire, 2019).

Summary: What next?

Entrepreneurial founder Emily Weiss successfully leveraged authentic customer engagement and
powerful user generated reviews to scale her side project blog into a highly successful,
disruptive, direct-to-consumer, community beauty business. The billion-dollar brand was
founded to address a profound, unmet need: beauty advice from real women, for real women.
Emily managed to scale her founder empathy and industry expertise by hiring a 30-strong team
of editors, ensuring that a powerfully customer-centric culture was retained through growth. The
gTeam successfully engaged with and listened to customers, and used these insights to carefully
engineer expansion of the product range and design an appealing, slick online customer journey
experience. Always adept at digital marketing, Glossier’s early trading success was built on
increasing sales and sticky, engaged customers. As part of this strong growth, additional venture
capitalist funding was invested to build a powerful data warehouse and create an omnichannel
analytics capability.

Whilst accepting that Glossier had become a community-centric, marketing tech-enabled

unicorn, Weiss refused to frame the company she had birthed as merely an authentic online
cosmetics firm, or just an excellent digital journey provider. Instead she hoped it would be a
highly successful brand that enabled high-value offline experiences. However, with a range of
similar, high profile entities emerging in the beauty industry (e.g. Fenty Beauty), this hope was
in question. Furthermore, because the fundamentals of influencer-enabled D2C business models
were becoming better understood, the question of how much longer Glossier could be at the
forefront of digitally-enabled success needed to be considered. Incumbent beauty brands would
surely start responding and other potential new entrants (e.g., globally renowned influencers such
as entertainer Rhianna) were particularly well placed to follow with a similar model. What
would you recommend Emily Weiss to do next?
Discussion Questions

1. How is consumer engagement used to optimize Glossier’s user experience?

2. What techniques does Glossier use to enhance its chances of being found online?
3. Describe as concisely as possible the Glossier business model.
4. Evaluate the triple threats faced by Glossier from traditional beauty brands, emergent
D2C beauty brands, and new entrant influencers with a large audience.

Further Reading:

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Brion, B. (2019) People are ditching iconic makeup brands and flocking to buzzy skincare
companies like Glossier, and that’s terrible news for Ulta. [Online} Retrieved from:
https://www.businessinsider.com/cosmetics-industry-struggles-to-keep-up-in-age-of-glossier-
2019-8
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