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

I am Aimee Beger from Y Combinator, and I have the distinct pleasure of introducing Emily Weiss here. Thank you so much for joining us.

Emily: Thank you for having me!

So, did you see everybody? So, Emily, you founded two 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. You later used the audience and the content that you built there to launch Glossier in 2014. 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.

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 one another. 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?

Emily: Yes, it's a good question. So, the one 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 percent women. We have over 40 percent female tech team. And also, just before I divert into it, I walked in here when you guys were all lining up around the front, and first it was actually, unfortunately, probably all the women in San Francisco. I feel like we're all in this audience. Like, God forbid something happens, like, we're all human race is going to... But no, it's really cool. I mean, I go to a lot of these things, as I'm sure many of you do, and to see like this— just the whole thing flipped! The energy in here is so awesome, so it's 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. 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 hot thing that it is right now. Like, I had meetings just like a couple of venture capitalists yesterday, and it's a good time to be in beauty. But I think the reason why is because beauty is this great conduit. 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 a beauty editor at W Magazine for a really long time, and when I interviewed her, she was like, "Beauty's just a great connect equalizer among women." You can be, you know, meeting someone for the first time, really nervous, but if you're like, "I love your lip gloss! What color is that?" Like, you know, you're like, "Oh, I love this lip gloss! I have like ten of them! I've been wearing it for ten years!"

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

Really, you’ve got like, you know, 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, you know, whether that's, you know, what food you're eating or what blender you're buying. Like, I always use the blender analogy— that if you're going to buy like a Vitamix on Amazon, I'm never going to read what Vitamix has to say about it. I'm going to 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 to that— and sort of an aggregator and 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. What are your opinions? What do you all want? How would you describe the most ideal texture or fragrance or shade or price point?" How do you know whose opinions to listen to?

Emily: I don't know! How do you listen to your gut? What is that like for you?

Yeah, so it's interesting. I mean, you know traditionally, I'm not sure how beauty brands arrived at what products to make, but for us, there's really only one logical conclusion, which is: talk to people. Whether that's, you know— 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, you know, girls on the street who have like cool pink hair color and you want to know where they got it, I have certainly a lot of opinions.

But what's really interesting— more interesting— is again that like just having a lot of conversations. And what's better than, you know, posting something on Instagram and within like 20 minutes having a thousand responses about, you know, whether that red lipstick that we're working on is like skewing a little too blue or a little too red? You've got everyone from like a girl in her bedroom in Ohio with 200 followers to like Makeup by Mario— who's like Kim Kardashian's makeup artist— to, you know, 10 million followers writing, "I think it's a little blue."

So, I mean, someone's paying him like a lot of money to give that feedback, which is given to us for free on our Instagram. So I think it's nice that, you know, you can kind of sift through that. It's really an art, and it's more of an art than a science. Like, we don't one-for-one crowdsource. We don't say like, "Tell us exactly what to make," 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 percent of those people saying it's too blue, and then you're like, "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?

Emily: I don't think—I mean, beauty's so subjective. We were just debating this backstage. You got into a big fight over mascara, because I was like nobody needs a mascara to— someone said, "No, no! I really need one!" You can't be like, you know, underwear. It's like you can skip mascara! So you can't be right or wrong, so we haven’t been led astray, but we’ve definitely had to make some tough calls.

Like, you know, when we were making our priming moisturizer, a bunch of respondents said, "Oh, we really wanted 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 that. We explained to everyone, "This is why it's not in a jar," and you know, and now it's one 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. I think that goes a long way.

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

Emily: So much! I mean, again, I think, you know, personally, I love products. I mean, I grew up really liking like Stila and a lot of beauty products and trying a bunch of stuff. But beauty pre-Instagram, pre-YouTube, really— YouTube is like the number one or two category after like tech unboxing— or unboxing of other things which I did— but I think pre—that it was really this very solitary endeavor.

Like, if you in the morning, kind of like just you by yourself, doing your thing. And now, it's such a connected— like shared activity or, you know, like knowledge resource. But the one thing that I think overarching ly has been interesting is the number of women who like— I started to send in some of, you know, when I used to do these interviews in their bathrooms, and I’d be like, "Hey, can I come over and, you know, rifle through your medicine cabinet and, you know, ask you about your beauty routine?" You'd have these really powerful women from like, you know, Arianna Huffington to 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. What does that mean for you?"

You know, can I come over? And then you go there; you have the cabinets, like flowing. It's like, there's so many products. So I was like, why is there this weird like beauty shaming kind of like deeply ingrained thing? Or you have to be like, "Oh like, you know, no I don't really like makeup!" What? And I think that's really like funny, and I think it's because, you know, 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. And also, if you like products, then that means you're not just waking up naturally just looking beautiful. You're actually using many things, and you know, that's kind of like frowned on by society.

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

I'm curious about those inner interviews that you conducted, because, as you’re saying, you are asking really high-profile, powerful women to let you— 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, and that, as you mentioned, is usually a secret that maybe only a significant other or a really close family member might know what that woman does to take care of herself.

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

Emily: I mean, asking is something I've always— for better or for worse— like I just always do it. So I'm not very self-conscious about like putting myself out there and getting rejected, and we still get turned down! 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 in social media, there’s— Everyone can start something, right? And you’re all here because I’m sure you’re many, many entrepreneurs. And I think just like product quality is— it really speaks for itself. So I think when you’re, you know, trying to get that "yes," I mean, for us, a lot of it was like, "Look at this article! Here's a link to something we did with this person! Like, here’s— you could— will you? You will also look and sound, you know like, hopefully, it'll be something you'll be proud of if you do this."

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— 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?

Emily: So we’re, I mean, we’re really a pretty young company— like two and a half years old, almost three years old in October. We are purely direct-to-consumer, so all sold through Glossier.com, and have many hundreds of thousands of customers now in the United States and soon internationally. We're launching in October in the fall. Actually, my business partner and I— Henry's our president and CEO.

Oh, he came from Index Ventures in London, and we've worked together since launching. It was funny— so you're doing our board deck yesterday or in town for board meeting, and he's always said—and we’ve kind of always said—he has an idea. Just say things over and over, and then we’ll wake up sometimes you saying, “Wait, that’s not true!”

He said, "Us being direct-to-consumer is the value proposition to the customer." And I was like, "I know we always say that, but like she doesn’t care that she’s getting it like directly from us. That’s not like the value proposition. Like maybe she even wants to just go get it, right? You know, that’s the— for like the next day!”

But what’s, you know, 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 ninety-five, seventy-seven percent 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 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. And it is like, you know, Sephora. There’s actually barely any product in it. We have 22 products, so you know 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 how to pick their shade. And there’s like almost little need for actual salespeople.

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

Yeah! Sort of in listening to you speak, it sounds like you're starting— 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: it’s like how do you scale that? That relationship that you have with your clients, that they have with one another. And I've heard you name a couple of things, but just like, how do you think about that? Because it's, again, it's such an intimate thing that you're hoping to scale to the masses.

Emily: Yeah, we think about that all the time. And like, my head of comms will kill me, because I’m going to say something really weird right now. But like, I think about it a little bit like— like how are like religion scaled, right? Like, you have— like we always say about Glossier like, it’s the first beauty lifestyle brand. And the reason we say that is because not only are we like addressing like multiple categories— kind of like, you know, maybe it'll be a Glossier deodorant, maybe there’ll be like Glossier— you know— I don't know— tampons.

Like, 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 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 a moisturizer, and I like don’t want to talk to you!

But 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 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 going to be beyond just Glossier and beauty. Like, something that most of the great next generation, like, you know, CPG companies are going to be built around this notion of like these relationships with customers and this, this real like two-way street.

Late last year, you raised a twenty-four million dollar series B. Congrats on that! How are you planning to take over the world with that?

Emily: Let’s just be—in plan—actually we’re planning on keeping it all in the bank. You like it? Literally I looked at our balloting yesterday and it like was all there.

This is good! We’ve been really conservative, actually. So we’ve raised, I guess, probably like 40-something million, but we were actually like— accidentally only profitable a couple months left last year, which was like— yeah— 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— if Joy's like, spend more on marketing like that!

So I went to art school, by the way, so I did not go to business school! But to the point of our…someone on stage before was saying, so she was saying you’re the best. Sometimes you— the best creators are not the best managers. I’m not a good manager, but I’m a very good hire— hire-er. That’s a word! Yeah, hire.

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. So my changes every, I would say like three months as a CEO, like I really go focus on something else. So for example, the next like three months, I’m going to be really focused on being our European headquarters in London, and I’ll be, you know, over there all the time. But as of now and probably for the last 12 months, I’ve spent over 50 percent of my day on HR, people, and hiring.

So that’s everything from interviewing every single new employee from intern level to CEO level to, you know, taking people out for coffee. I have probably two to three— I probably have three to four job interviews a day and one to two coffees a day with different members of our team from, you know, entry level, you know, 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 and she’s like, “You kids need anything? Condoms?” Like, they’re all like, “We’re good! We don’t— we believe this alone!” But I think it’s good to— some of the best—there’s no like hierarchy in ideas, you know? So you can be an intern and have some great observation about, you know, workflow management, and your idea really needs to be listened to.

So, and the other thing I would say that we do really well at Glossier, and I don't take credit for this— this is really like ingrained in our culture—is we take big bets on people. So like our SVP of marketing— Ali Weiss, no relation, although I always wish there was— she’s really smart. She graduated HBS like two years ago and had never worked in marketing.

But given the nature of marketing today and how quickly it's evolving, and you know, the playbook with people with playbooks, it’s not so much about a playbook, right? You have to say like what matters right now? Like, what matters today? And what matters for your product in your company? And which social channel matters and which social channel doesn't matter?

And Ali had never done marketing, but now she's, you know, 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, you know, it’s changing so much that experience is, you know, sometimes not even the most important indicator of success.

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

Emily: Thank you!

Thanks, everybody! [Music]