Emily Weiss

Weiss launched Into the Gloss, a blog featuring predominantly interviews with women, in September 2010.[5] She stayed at her day job at Vogue and worked on Into the Gloss in the mornings between the hours of 4 a.m. and 8 a.m.[5] A popular series on the blog is Top Shelf, where subjects are interviewed in their bathrooms and photos of their shelves and medicine cabinets are featured. Interviewees included Jenna Lyons and Karlie Kloss.[4] By early 2012, the site had more than 200,000 unique visitors per month. By May 2016, the site had had 1.3 million visitors.[7] After Weiss reached 10 million page views per month and acquired corporate partnerships for the site and a small staff, she quit her job at Vogue to focus on her own business.[5]

In 2014, Weiss started approaching venture capitalists with ideas for expansion, including a potential Into the Gloss-curated e-commerce platform.[5] Weiss eventually raised $2 million in seed funding, with the help of venture capitalist Kirsten Green, the founder of San Francisco-based Forerunner Ventures.[8] Weiss used this initial investment to hire a small team and launch Glossier.com.[5]

In October 2014, Weiss introduced Glossier's first four products on her Into the Gloss blog and announced the launch of Glossier.com.[5] The Glossier team launched the e-commerce site with an all-purpose balm, a facial mist, a sheer skin tint, and a moisturizer.[9][10] Glossier still sells three of these four products; they discontinued the face mist at the end of 2022.[11]

According to Polina Marinova of Fortune, Weiss, "Quietly turned Glossier into one of the most disruptive brands in beauty."[12] She initially pitched the company to 12 firms, with 11 not interested.[13] In February 2018, Weiss released that Glossier had successfully raised an additional $52 million in a Series C round of funding.[14] In March 2019, Weiss announced that Glossier had officially raised $100 million in a Series D round of funding and was valued at $1.2 billion.[15][16] The round was led by Sequoia Capital and Glossier announced at this time that it more than doubled its revenue in 2018, adding over 1 million new customers.[17]

Since its initial launch with four products, Glossier has expanded its product line to include skin serums, masks, shower gel, body lotion, fragrance, lip balms and several other beauty and skincare related items.[18][19]

Glossier released a clothing line, GlossiWEAR, in July 2019.[20]

In early 2019, Glossier added Glossier Play, which includes pigmented and metallic makeup products, such as eye shadows and eyeliners. In 2020, the company announced plans to suspend the line's production.[21] Weiss stated that launching a sub-brand was, in hindsight, unnecessary, "The realisation we had was, 'Huh, we could have just launched more make-up products'."[21] In August 2020, Weiss and the company were accused of failing to support Black workers at the organization.[22]

In May 2022, Weiss stepped down as CEO of Glossier, but stayed on its board as executive chairwoman. Kyle Leahy, Glossier's former chief commercial officer, took over as CEO.[23][24]