Glossier

Emily Weiss was a fashion assistant at W Magazine and an intern at Teen Vogue when she started a beauty blog in September 2010 called Into the Gloss. Four years later she launched a beauty brand to a readership she had already built. Weiss founded Glossier in October 2014 with four products and an audience. The blog's signature column, Top Shelf, photographed inside the bathroom cabinets of working women and asked what they actually used. By the time Glossier shipped its first product, Weiss had four years of qualitative research on real customer routines. The structural move was sequencing. Most beauty brands launched with a product and then bought paid media to find an audience. Weiss built the audience first and turned the audience into the product brief.