- Emily Weiss founded Into the Gloss, a beauty-focused blog, in 2010 and later used its audience and content to launch Glossier, a direct-to-consumer beauty brand.
- Both Into the Gloss and Glossier focus on beauty as an element of personal style and encourage women to share their makeup reviews, product recommendations, and beauty routines.
- Into the Gloss attracts nearly 1.5 million unique visitors per month, indicating a strong resonance with women.
- Beauty is seen as a great conduit for women to connect, share, and develop their voices.
- Technology has democratized the beauty industry, allowing women to curate their own beauty routines and elect their preferred brands.
- Glossier listens to customer feedback in their product development cycle, allowing anyone on their team to propose new product ideas and gather opinions.
- The opinions of both influential women and everyday consumers on social media are taken into consideration, creating a collaborative and transparent approach.
- The beauty industry has taught Emily Weiss about the connected and shared nature of beauty routines, as well as the societal pressures and shaming around beauty and product usage.

- The speaker conducted interviews with high-profile women to gain insight into their personal self-care routines
- They were able to convince these women to participate by showcasing the quality of their work and the unique experience they offer
- Glossier, a direct-to-consumer beauty brand, aims to reinvent the traditional beauty experience by establishing a direct relationship with customers
- This direct connection allows Glossier to offer personalized experiences and gather data to improve their products
- Glossier also focuses on building a strong community through peer-to-peer recommendations and offline interactions
- The company plans to use their recent funding to continue creating high-quality products and investing in community efforts
- Glossier's retail experience is designed to be unique and create a sense of community, with a focus on making customers feel special.

- The speaker discusses the future of shopping and the importance of creating a unique and experiential environment.
- They express excitement about the power dynamics shifting in the beauty industry, allowing consumers to have more options and access to information.
- The speaker reflects on the challenges faced while launching Glossier but remains confident in the company's direction.
- They discuss their role as a CEO and manager, highlighting the importance of hiring and believing in people.
- The speaker emphasizes the value of taking big bets on individuals, even if they lack experience, particularly in fields like marketing where the landscape is constantly evolving.

- Emily Weiss founded Into the Gloss and used its audience and content to launch Glossier, a direct-to-consumer beauty brand.
- Both platforms focus on beauty as personal style and encourage women to share their beauty routines and product recommendations.
- Into the Gloss attracts a large number of visitors, indicating a strong resonance with women.
- Technology has democratized the beauty industry, allowing women to curate their own routines and choose preferred brands.
- Glossier listens to customer feedback and incorporates it into their product development cycle.
- Influential women and everyday consumers on social media are considered in the collaborative approach.
- The beauty industry has taught Emily Weiss about the shared nature of beauty routines and societal pressures.
- Glossier aims to reinvent the beauty experience by establishing a direct relationship with customers.
- The company focuses on building a strong community through peer-to-peer recommendations.
- Glossier plans to use recent funding to create high-quality products and invest in community efforts.
- The retail experience is designed to create a sense of community and make customers feel special.
- The speaker discusses the future of shopping and the power dynamics shifting in the beauty industry.
- They reflect on the challenges faced while launching Glossier but remain confident in the company's direction.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of hiring and believing in people, even if they lack experience.

Emily Weiss is the founder and CEO of Glossier.

Amy Buechler is Batch Director at YC.

Learn more at http://blog.ycombinator.com/emily-weiss-on-the-insights-that-grew-glossier-with-amy-buechler-at-the-female-founders-conference

I am Amy Buechler from Y Combinator, and I have the distinct pleasure of introducing Emily Weiss here.

So, Emily, you founded 2 brands that have a pretty beautiful symbiotic relationship.

Your first was Into the Gloss, which began as a beauty-focused blog in 2010 as a side project when you were a fashion assistant at Vogue and you later used the audience and the content that you built there to launch Glossier in 2014.

And Glossier is a direct-to-consumer beauty brand with a stunning line of products, which basically power the external appearance of all women who work at Y Combinator.

So thank you so much for making us all feel beautiful every single day.

So you've said that both Into the Gloss and Glossier focus on beauty as an element of personal style and celebrate women sharing their own makeup reviews, product recommendations, and beauty routines with 1 another and Into the Gloss now attracts nearly 1.5 million unique visitors every month.

So something that you're doing is really resonating with women.

How did you first identify that women needed a platform to have these kinds of conversations?

So the 1 common thread that still motivates all of us at Glossier today, and we're, you know, 95 people in Soho, in New York, we're actually 77% women.

And also just before I dive right into it, I walked in here when you guys were all lining up around the front, and at first it was actually, unfortunately, probably all the women in San Francisco, I feel like, are all in this audience.

So God forbid something happens, we're all, human race is gonna like.

I mean, I go to a lot of these things as I'm sure many of you do and to see like there's just the whole thing flipped and the energy in here is just so awesome so it's great great to be here.

But the conversation around beauty, it's a really interesting time to be in, not just in startups and in technology, but in beauty.

And beauty is something that, you know, when we were pitching, when I was pitching by myself, you know, our seed round, like, back in 2013, beauty was not, you know, this, like, hot thing that it is right now.

Like, I had meetings with, like, a couple of venture capitalists yesterday, and, like, and it's a good time to be in beauty.

But I think the reason why is because beauty is this great conduit.

So you asked like how did I recognize that there should be this platform.

Beauty is this great kind of like activator for women to connect with each other and share with each other and to really develop and hone a voice.

And that might sound silly, but everybody has something to share about beauty, right?

Like, I remember this woman, Jean Godfrey-June, she was the beauty editor at Lucky Magazine for a really long time, and when I interviewed her, she was like, beauty is this like great connect equalizer, like among women.

You can be, you know, like meeting someone for the first time really nervous but if you're like oh I love your lip gloss like what color is that like you know you're like oh I love this lip gloss I have like 10 of them been wearing it for 10 years.

So everyone has something to say so I think it's a really cool time to be in beauty because technology has just completely upended the traditional paradigm of brand to customer, kind of like these mega brands who have this perfect look and this whole range of products and you have to sit down at a counter and they do your whole face and then they make you guilt trip you into buying all the products and they expect that those are the only products you'll ever have in your bathroom, really you've got like an assortment.

And so I think it's really cool that right now you should be encouraged to be your own curator of your own life in every arena, whether that's what food you're eating or what blender you're buying.

Like I always use the blender analogy that if you're gonna buy like a Vitamix on Amazon, I'm never gonna read what Vitamix has to say about it.

I'm gonna go straight to like the stars and the reviews and everything.

And that's really cool that like commerce is being so democratized and beauty is just another, you know, category where it's all about, you know, the woman electing brands and electing her products and, you know, searching for the best.

And I think Into the Gloss is really just a reaction of that and sort of an aggregator and like an instigator of that behavior.

Yeah, Glossier is really well known now for listening to customer feedback in your product development cycle.

And essentially now anyone on your team can put a blog post up on Into the Gloss saying, we have this brand new product idea.

How would you describe the most ideal texture or fragrance or shade or price point?

And how do you know whose opinions to listen to?

I don't know, how do you listen to your gut?

I mean, traditionally, I'm not sure how beauty brands arrived at what products to make, but for us, there's really only 1 logical conclusion, which is like, talk to people, whether that's, I mean, I have my opinions about products that I like but having interviewed you know hundreds of the most influential women from you know politics to art to fashion to girls on the street who have cool pink hair color and you want to know why?

I have certainly a lot of opinions but what's really interesting, more interesting is again that just having a lot of conversations and what's better than posting something on Instagram and within 20 minutes having a thousand responses about whether that red lipstick that we're working on is skewing a little too blue or a little too red.

And you've got everyone from a girl in her bedroom in Ohio with 200 followers to Makeup by Mario, who's Kim Kardashian's makeup artist, who has 10 million followers writing, I think it's a little blue.

So, I mean, someone's paying him a lot of money to give that feedback, but he's giving it to us for free on our Instagram.

So I think it's nice that you can kind of sift through that and it's really an art and more of an art than a science.

We don't say like, you know, tell us exactly what to make and we'll shade match it and we'll send it to you.

We really kind of combine our editorial background as beauty editors with, you know, hearing, you know, 30% of those people saying it's too blue and then you're like, oh, okay, well, I guess it's a little too blue.

Was there ever a time when sort of the beauty hive mind was incorrect and you followed an opinion that in fact turned out to be wrong?

I don't think, I mean, beauty's so subjective.

We got into a big fight over mascara because I was like, nobody needs a mascara.

So you can't be right or you can't be like right or wrong.

So we haven't been like led astray but we've definitely had to make some tough calls like you know we when we were making our priming moisturizer rich we a bunch of you know respondents said oh we really want it in a pump instead of a jar but when we worked with our chemist and developed this formula that included a lot of their responses about ingredients.

We realized we couldn't fit the product into a pump it wouldn't come out so we had to go the jar route and that was but then we explained to everyone this is why it's not in a jar and you know and now it's 1 of our best-selling products.

So I think it's just about that transparency with the customer and like you know really letting people know that we're indexing on quality like always above everything else and I think that goes a long way.

Yeah, what have Into the Gloss and Glossier taught you about women and beauty over the past 7 years?

I mean, again, I think, you know, personally, I love products.

I mean, I grew up really liking like Stila and like, you know, a lot of beauty products and trying a bunch of stuff, but beauty pre-Instagram, pre-YouTube, really YouTube, you know, it's like the number 1 or 2 category after like tech unboxing or unboxing of other things, which I didn't know.

But I think pre that, it was really this very solitary endeavor.

Like it's you in the morning, kind of like just you by yourself, like doing your thing.

And now it's such a connected, like shared activity or, you know, like knowledge resource.

But the 1 thing that I think overarchingly has been interesting is the number of women who, like I start the sentence, you know, when I'm like, when I used to do these interviews in their bathrooms, and I'd be like, hey, can I come over and like, you know, rifle through your medicine cabinet and, you know, ask you about your beauty routine?

And you'd have these really powerful women from like, you know, Ariana Huffington to like Jenna Lyons being like, oh me, like no, I'm really low maintenance.

And I'd have to be like, well, like really, I mean, okay, like let's talk about it.

And then you go there and you open the cabinet, it's like flowing, It's like there's so many products.

And so I'm like, why is there this weird beauty shaming kind of deeply ingrained thing where you have to be like, oh, no, I don't really, me, beauty, what?

And I think it's because we're made to feel so much like we don't know like we can't have these opinions like there's some you know brand or makeup artist or someone somewhere who like knows way more about you know you and also if you like product then that means you're not just waking up naturally, just looking beautiful, you're actually using many things and that's kind of frowned on by society.

So I think there's a lot of cool anthropological things around beauty that are getting unpacked now thanks to things like Glossier and Interlost and YouTube.

And I'm curious about those interviews that you conducted because as you're saying, you are asking really high profile, powerful women to let them, you're asking them to let you into their house, like into their bathroom with them.

And essentially those interviews created a really beautifully detailed snapshot of that woman's relationship with themselves that as you mentioned is usually a secret

maybe only a significant other or a really close family member might know what that woman does to take care of herself.

And when you were first starting out, how other than pestering them, it sounds like, did you sort of get to the yes?

I mean, asking is something I've always, for better or for worse, I just always do it.

So I'm not very self-conscious about like putting myself out there and getting rejected.

I mean, I'm personally not doing the interviews anymore but we get you know turned down all the time.

I think you know especially with where technology is right now and social media is every you know there's it's double-edged sword this idea that everyone can start something right and you're all here because I'm sure you're many entrepreneurs.

And I think just like a product of quality, it really speaks for itself.

So I think when you're trying to get that yes, I mean for us a lot of it was like, look at this, here's a link to something we did with this person, like here's, you know, you could, you will also look and sound, you know, like hopefully, there'll be something you'll be proud of if you do this.

And so I think quality really begets quality and again in this kind of like fast fashion age where everyone can like put up an Instagram in like 10 seconds and you know, you can really make a lot of content quickly.

I think that kind of like premium attention to detail content or product is just goes a long way.

You've spoken a bit about how Glossier is really reinventing the traditional beauty experience.

Can you describe that and explain how you plan to transform it?

Yeah, so we're, I mean we're really a pretty young company.

It's like 2 and a half years old, almost 3 years old in October.

We are purely direct to consumers, so all sold through Glossier.com and have many hundreds of thousands of customers now in the United States and soon internationally.

And actually, my business partner and I, Henry, he's our president and COO, he came from Index Ventures in London and we've worked together since launching.

It was funny, so we were doing our board deck yesterday, we were in town for a board meeting, and he's always said, and we've kind of always said, you know, sometimes you just say things over and over and then you wake up sometimes you say you're like wait that's not true he said he said us being direct to consumer is the value proposition to the to the customer and and I was like I know we always say that but like she doesn't care that she's getting it directly from us.

Maybe she even wants to just go get it right at Sephora the next day.

But what is really interesting about how we're reinventing the beauty experience is that relationship she feels with Glossier because we have such a direct one-to-one connection with her.

So we have everyone's emails, we're able to you know offer special like access to things, promotions to things, we're able to make replenishment easier, we're able to ask her specific questions about what product she wants, all of which you know a brand that sold through Sephora or sold at the drugstore is unable to do because they don't know you, they don't you know they don't have any of your data and they can't make that experience really special for you.

So I think, you know, that's kind of the business case, but the impact case, which is, you know, why those 95, 77% of female employees are all doing this, is the impact with Glossier is that, you know, I was doing all these beauty interviews and I was realizing that there was this big disconnect between like the affinity for the beauty brand and the actual product.

So you might say, for example, like, I really love Maybelline Great Lash, but like, do you really have a relationship to Maybelline?

Like, are you, like, you know, do you like ascribe to their set of values?

Do you like understand like, you know, where they came from or like what they're up to, like in the background?

And so I thought there was just this great opportunity really to have this super connected really modern brand in every sense of the word.

So you know I guess we've reinvented it in the sense of direct-to-consumer online but we also are you know going into like our own retail and we have a showroom in New York that's more like an art gallery or like a clubhouse than it is like a you know Sephora.

There's actually barely any product in it.

We have 22 products so you know it's it's few and far between and it's become this meeting place for women to actually like meet up before brunch or like you know help each other kind of pick their shade and there's like almost a little need for actual salespeople.

So I think the opportunity to think about like what is beauty offline and kind of like, I think that's really interesting too, how it can bring women together.

Yeah, sort of in listening to you speak, it sounds like your starting point was having women create a relationship with themselves.

Then you're sort of sharing that outward with other women.

And there's sort of this big question is like, how do you scale that relationship?

That relationship that you have with your clients that they have with 1 another.

And I've heard you name a couple of things, but just like, how do you think about that?

Because again, it's such an intimate thing that you're hoping to scale to the masses?

Yeah, so we think about it all the time and my head of comms will kill me because I'm gonna say something really weird right now.

But I think about it a little bit like how are religions scaled, right?

Like you have, like we always say about Glossier like it's it's the first beauty lifestyle brand and the reason we say that is because not only are we like addressing like multiple categories and kind of like you know maybe there'll be a Glossier deodorant, maybe they'll be like a glossier lip you know like I don't know tampon like I it's our customers want kind of they trust us and they really want like the glossier version of X but the other thing is you know you're you're interacting with engaging with glossier throughout the day in ways that you choose.

So it's like, okay I want to follow on Instagram, okay I want like X number of emails, okay.

Or you're just like, just shut up and give me my moisturizer and I like don't want to talk to you.

But in how you scale that, like I mean technology certainly helps but I think like every woman can have whatever relationship she wants like with Glossier you know and whether that's like stickers on the back of her phone to remind her like throughout the day that she likes this like brand or you know like whether she wants to come every Saturday to like our showroom I think it's up to her to like really decide like what kind of how involved she wants to be in in the brand and in the building of the brand and I think that's what's really interesting too in terms of the relationship.

It's like the relationship to the customer in terms of creating brands I think is gonna be beyond just Glossier and beauty, like something that most of the great next generation, like, you know, CPG companies are gonna be built around this notion of like these relationships with customers and this real like two-way street.

Late last year, you raised $24 million Series B, late congrats on that.

How are you planning to take over the world with that?

Actually we're planning on keeping it all in the bank, like literally I looked at our balance sheet yesterday and it like was all there.

So we've raised, I guess, probably like 40 something million but we were actually like accidentally profitable a couple months last year, which was like cool to see.

I don't know if we should clap or not, that's the other thing, I'm like, is that good?

And my partner's like, well, it depends, we could always spend more on marketing.

So I went to art school, by the way, so I did not go to business school.

But to the point of someone on stage before, like that curiosity is really important, right?

That kind of like naivete of being like, huh?

Like explain this to me, that's served us well.

But in terms of what we're doing with the money, I think, I mean, we're really lucky we've had 600% growth in the last 12 months, 600% growth the year before that.

And it's really been a result of 2 things.

I would say, incredible focus and discipline.

We say no to way more things than we say yes to.

That's really hard, especially because we could put ourselves in a Sephora, you know, tomorrow and probably like 4x revenue, like, but I don't know that that would really help us achieve the long-term impact we want in women's lives.

And the other thing that's really driven that has had nothing to do with the money we've raised.

I mean, 79% of our growth last year was all based on peer-to-peer recommendations.

So it's not through paid, it's not through like an acquisition machine, it's just been through women telling each other how much they love our products and for that we're really grateful.

So we're investing much more in community efforts, much more in a little bit in offline, but really just on continuing to, you know, make amazing product that people want to talk about.

Yeah, and I know 1 of the things that you said is that you're opening some retail, and that's super exciting.

And when you think about the Glossier retail experience, in your own mind, what is your fantasy of that like?

What do you want it to look like in a dream Emily world?

I mean, well, that's a hard, That's a really scary question because I want like birds and like candy.

Actually, we just had a kickoff meeting about this and I referenced Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory and like the wallpaper that you can lick.

So I'm not saying we should have lickable wallpaper, but I like the excitement and the energy of like going into something that's like this mecca and this kind of like, because who needs stores anymore?

You know, like why are you opening like an offline store if you can just order it and it'll get there in an hour or, like, the next day?

Like, truly, like, that is the question we should all be asking ourselves because if we really take a hard look and think about, like, you know, what you're doing in shopping this weekend, it should be cool.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's gonna be birds, but I think it should be more, it's much more experiential.

And so I think more about hospitality than I do about sales per square foot.

When you think about the beauty space, what is it that sort of makes you the most energized thinking about the future?

I'm most looking forward to the customer just always being right.

I think it's so cool and she's always been right and that's why that phrase exists but I think it's the phrase has never been truer than it is today.

So it's actually not even from like the CEO founder perspective, but just from like a consumer perspective, like how cool that there are so many options, but more importantly, because there's always been so many options, that's been the problem, like there's too many options.

More importantly, it's like, there's just so much great information.

There's so many ways to cut through those options.

There's like, you know, so many ways to connect.

If you want to know how to do a black cat eye, you know, you can find like, you know, 50,000 videos in like 10 minutes on how to do that.

So, I love that the power dynamics in beauty have just completely shifted.

And I think they're gonna shift more and more and more.

And maybe it's like some weird anarchist streak that like I didn't know I had.

I just think it's really cool that women are really like the authors of their own lives when it comes to beauty and many other things.

Around the time that you first launched Glossier, you were sort of launching into a hardware space, like a company that had now a physical product, which is traditionally very difficult.

Was there ever a time that you thought you wouldn't make it?

So you asked 2 questions, like is it the wrong thing?

Like sure, I mean there's a million things you know we like scraped by for.

I mean Into the Gloss was totally bootstrapped.

I spent like $700 of like my own money to you know get it get it off the ground and then we just relied on advertiser dollars and you don't know when, it was basically like freelancing, you don't know when the next thing is gonna come through.

And of course when we first launched Glossier, we pressed, I'm not an engineer, but whenever the site went live, I don't know what we pressed, it was 6, it was 6 in the morning and like We didn't know who was gonna come or if anyone was gonna order anything.

So there's definitely been those moments.

So yeah, it's been scary, but you just keep going.

I don't know what I would be doing if I weren't doing this.

What has it been like for you, sort of your evolution as a manager and a CEO?

Presentation right before was saying, so she was saying you know, sometimes the best creators are not the best managers.

I'm not a good manager but I'm a very good hire, hirer, is that a word?

And it's because I love people and I really believe in women and I really believe in people and I love when women especially like really surprise themselves.

Yeah, and so my job changes every, I would say like 3 months as a CEO like I really go focus on something else so for example the next like 3 months I'm gonna be really focused on opening our European headquarters in London and I'll be over there all the time.

But as of now and probably for the last 12 months I've spent over 50% of my day on HR people and hiring.

So that's everything from interviewing every single new employee from intern level to COO level, to taking people out for coffee.

I have probably 2 to 3, I probably have 3 to 4 job interviews a day and 1 to 2 coffees a day with different members of our team from associate level graphic designers to our senior engineers in tech.

And I think that's just really important.

Like I sit with everybody, sometimes I say I'm like the mom in Mean Girls who comes in, she's like, you kids need anything?

But I think it's good to, some of the best, there's no hierarchy in ideas, you know?

So you can be an intern and have some great observation about workflow management, and your idea really needs to be listened to.

So, and the other thing I would say, we do really well at Glossier, and I don't take credit for this, this is really ingrained in our culture, is we take big bets on people.

So our SVP of marketing, Allie Weiss, no relation, although I always wish there were, because she's really smart, she graduated HBS 2 years ago and had never worked in marketing.

But given the nature of marketing today and how quickly it's evolving and the playbook, people with playbooks, it's not so much about a playbook, right?

You have to say what matters right now, what matters today and what matters for your product and your company, and which social channel matters and which social channels don't matter.

And Allie had never done marketing, but now she's our SVP of marketing, and she's crushing it.

So we take really big bets on people, and I think given, especially in fields like marketing, it's changing so much that experience is Sometimes not even the most important indicator of success

Thank you so much for sharing that all with us today.

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Emily Weiss on the Insights That Grew Glossier - With Amy Buechler at the Female Founders Conference