How Glossier Changed Marketing Forever
“If you build it, they will come.”
In the past 4 years, Glossier has amassed more than 1.5 million followers on Instagram, raised over $84 million in funding ($52 million of that in just one round earlier this year), generated multiple 10,000-person wait lists for their products, and successfully disrupted the $445 billion beauty industry.
How did they do it?
Well, they started with a pretty dope blog.
In The Beginning
Emily Weiss began a beauty blog in 2010. She covered beauty tips and trends with an honest, stripped-down tone — notably, conducting some interviews on the floor of interviewees’ bathrooms.
Emily called it “Into the Gloss” (fondly abbreviated ITG).
And people loved it.
The blog was a breath of fresh air in an industry dominated by elaborate photoshoots, compulsive airbrushing, and marketing tactics designed to make women feel bad about themselves. Over the next 4 years the blog gained a cult following, amassing hundreds of comments on each post and over a million monthly visitors.
Glossier was born
In 2014 — building off of her relationship with ITG’s audience and the insights she had gained into their preferences — Emily launched Glossier, a cosmetics company offering makeup and skincare products.
Glossier has maintained the accessibility and honesty that made ITG so popular.
Their ads feature a diverse range of models wearing minimal, natural-looking makeup. The company talk openly about the trials of being a young company, honestly discussing their ongoing efforts to scale and meet the every-increasing demand for their products (hence the 10,000-person waiting lists).
And it is definitely working.
It’s estimated that Glossier has reached $17 million in annual revenue and operates a Manhattan showroom that generates more sales revenue per square foot than the average Apple store (even though the showroom is located on the 6th floor).
What Companies Should Learn From Glossier
With Glossier, Emily has both built a successful beauty company and proved the validity of a new business model — one in which you can use content to reduce risk.
Businesses can learn from the success that Glossier has had in doing the following:
- Create a distinct voice and brand
- Attract an audience that responds to that voice
- Get to know your audience
- Release a product you are confident your audience will enjoy
- Listen to your community’s feedback
- Make sure you remain authentic to the brand you initially established
- Repeat steps 4–6
Of course, that’s easier said than done. And it helps a lot if you are a great businesswoman and social media savvy-as-hell, like Emily is.
But no matter what, this model reduces the risk and uncertainty of launching a new product and a lot of the work in marketing it.
TLDR:
Glossier built the brand, connected with their audience and then created products that they were confident their readers would enjoy.
And brands should learn from this model.
Yes, by creating quality content you can organically increase user loyalty and exponentially grow your audience. It’s a great marketing tactic.
But it’s also a great business tactic.
By investing in content, you ensure that you have an attentive audience for your future products, get to figure out what their interests are, and test what they may or may not like in a product.
By investing in content, you can find your product-market fit before even finalizing the product.
Take it from Glossier — content creation and community building are not just the new, millenial way to market your product. They are the smartest and safest ways to develop, release and market any product.
