Innovation in the Beauty Industry: Emily Weiss

Malin Phelan
Jan 2, 2022
3 min read

Author: Sara Chiang '23

In 2010, while working as a fashion assistant in New York City, Emily Weiss created a website called Into the Gloss, which would later grow into the Glossier cosmetics brand. Weiss graduated from New York University in 2007 with a studio art degree. During college, she interned at Teen Vogue and appeared on The Hills on MTV. Coworkers called Weiss the “super intern” for her hard work and well put together demeanor. Eva Chen, an editor in the beauty department of Teen Vogue at the time, described Weiss as “a college student who clearly had a plan, so pulled together and focused.” After graduating college while working at vogue, Emily came up with her idea of starting her website with the goal of empowering women to share their beauty routines. She tirelessly reached out to celebrities and fashion gurus to gather content for her blog. She started off with a $750 refurbished camera, bought the website domain for Into the Gloss, and began interviewing people to post on her blog. In the beginning, she produced content completely on her own, working on her site between 4am and 8am before going to work at Vogue during the day. Her website quickly gained traction, accumulating over 200,000 readers in 2012, and 1.3 million by 2016. The gain in popularity of Into the Gloss allowed Weiss to quit her job and pursue her website as a career.

Weiss saw more than just traditional beauty standards and wanted to create a platform for people to show off their own versions of beauty. She worked with different celebrities and posted their stories on her blog, giving readers a glimpse into their makeup and skincare routines. While personally interviewing these women in their homes and seeing their beauty products, Weiss noticed that many often felt insecure about their beauty routines. She saw the tendency of the beauty industry to only value the opinions of experts and large brands. With this realization, Weiss became driven to empower and value the opinions of individuals instead, so she created her brand that took a more “direct-to-consumer” approach. Most of Into the Gloss followers could comment and discuss beauty products that they wished to have, which provided useful market research for Weiss to build her first round of Glossier products.

In 2014, Weiss raised $2 million to launch her first four Glossier products. She was rejected by eleven out of twelve venture capital firms but persisted nevertheless. Weiss graduated from art school and had little experience in business but began building her brand. Weiss understood the importance of social media in the digital age and its capacity to allow her to make personal connections with her customers. Weiss directed Glossier towards its direct-to-consumer business model. She wanted to focus on her audience and ask followers what they wanted, instead of telling them what they wanted like most large cosmetic brands. Weiss also shaped her brand with a more natural and no-makeup makeup look in hopes of encouraging followers to embrace their own beauty. She wanted Glossier products to “enhance” the skin instead of “hide” it. The popular natural makeup look can be partially credited to Emily Weiss and her ideals as she built her brand.

Emily Weiss embodies the influence and success of female leaders. Her ideas were often different from typical brands in her field, but she dared to follow her dreams and built her brand on the basis of listening to customers and seeing beauty in a new way. Her degree in studio art gave Weiss the creative ability to keep her brand minimalistic while catering to the preferences of her customers. Weiss wanted to make people feel good when buying her products instead of forcing consumers to purchase them out of necessity to cover up their skin, seeing beauty more subjectively than most cosmetic brands that urge women to follow a certain beauty routine. She wanted to put the decision in the hands of each customer and give them the ability to decide what they wanted or what worked best for them on an individual scale. With her hard work and perseverance, Weiss built Glossier on the ideals of listening to the customers and validating unique appearances. Her understanding of the growing digital sphere helped Weiss connect with Glossier supporters on an incredibly personal level to give them a better consumer experience - from interacting with employees in the line at Glossier pop-ups to the iconic pink bubble wrap packaging.