NOVEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 153
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Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies
Cause Great Firms to Fail.) Meanwhile, she
has recently whittled down the accounts she
follows on Instagram to a lean 555. One that
made the cut is Blue Zones, which rounds up
“happiness secrets from the most extraor-
dinary populations on earth.” Like all good
tech CEOs, Weiss is interested in longevity.
The Glossier agship on a Saturday after-
noon is a real scene. Since the permanent
location in SoHo opened last November,
some 50,000 visitors pour through its
doors each month. Today, in high summer,
the line to get in is running halfway down
the block. Editors, as the store employ-
ees are called (customer-service reps are
online editors), mill about on the sidewalk,
dressed in light pink jumpsuits with stick-
ers that declare their preferred pronouns.
They are offering hits of Invisible Shield
SPF 35 and Soothing Face Mist to help ease
the wait. Weiss hugs editor after editor as
we make our way inside, where a whole-
some scene is playing out: tweens teach-
ing each other how to apply mascara, a
mother-daughter pair comparing swatches
of eyeliner on their wrists.
The interior was designed to incite
maximum Instagram engagement, with
eight-foot-tall tubes of Boy Brow and an
undulating banquette in the shape of red
lips. At the opening party, Weiss, wearing
a tuxedo with no shirt underneath, led Ser-
ena Williams and her husband, the Reddit
cofounder Alexis Ohanian, on a tour of the
space. The next morning, Williams posted
a snapshot of the night with the caption
“Bossed up with @emilyweiss.” (Ohanian,
meanwhile, was a prime candidate for
@glossierboyfriends, among the several
meme accounts on Instagram. This one—
showing supportive, often bored partners
at the stores—is run by 29-year-old Dani
Barrett. “I get a lot of DMs asking, ‘How do
I nd a Glossier boyfriend?’ ” she says. Her
response: “You don’t just ¡ind them. You
have to work to shape them.”)
The Manhattan boutique—winning hearts,
generating content—is a microcosm of the
company’s success. The air is lightly scented
with Glossier You (a perfume that sounds like
millennial pandering but smells like warm
musk), and the mood is buoyant by design.
“The beauty industry historically won dol-
lars by making women feel like they weren’t
enough,” Weiss tells me. “When Glossier
launched, we made people feel good about
themselves and want the products.” Part
of that shift stems from Glossier’s cast of
models: diverse in every way, some with
gap teeth or bushy brows. More prescient,
by crowdsourcing imagery from its 2 mil-
lion followers—regramming seles of cute
20-somethings in face masks or Glitter
Gelée, part of the experimental makeup col-
lection called Glossier Play—the brand has
elevated its eager fan base to the (unpaid)
position of campaign star. You might as well
call it a propaganda machine. A glittery and
pink and pleasurable one.
Still, those dutifully abandoning plastic
straws can’t help but frown at the ubiquitous
pink bubble mailers, though customers can
now recycle them at retail shops. And in this
era of all-natural everything (ahem: Goop),
Glossier has resisted jumping on the so-
called clean-beauty bandwagon. Given that
some see ingredient vetting as a feminist
issue as much as an ecological one, what
does it mean to put brand fervor rst? Plenty
of companies tout their fair-trade shea but-
ter, while Balm Dotcom’s bedrock ingredi-
ent is petrolatum (a staple of Vaseline and
doctor-prescribed ointments but avoided by
green-minded shoppers). It’s telling that the
brand’s core demographic is years away from
planning for motherhood—a time whenso many women begin overhauling their
beauty routines with health in mind. What
happens when the Glossier girl grows up and
starts thinking about a family, or the cryo-
genically frozen possibility of one? When I
raise the subject of natural beauty, Weiss’s
labyrinthine response includes the fact that
Glossier creates experiences.
This fall marks the brand’s ¡ifth anni-
versary. Weiss’s team is tight-lipped about
future plans—even launches as soon as
this very month. But there are clues to how
far her ambition goes. During the Glossier
Boston meeting, Weiss describes the per-
fume room as “an experiment toward being
able to create a whole branded world of
Glossier You that you could then take into,
like, Heathrow.” Another time, Weiss shows
me a DM that she got on Instagram from a
girl who said—only maybe joking—that she
wanted a Glossier razor, a Glossier tampon,
a Glossier condominium. Weiss tells me
she’s always wanted to design a hotel. So
what would hers look like? “I’m not allowed
to think about that right now. That’s not
what the Series D [funding] is for,” she says,
ever responsible. “Mainly our business will
be beauty for the foreseeable future. It’s
just about reaching more people. We have
very, very low brand awareness, even in the
United States, but we’re still young.” (This
sounds like a slip of her perfectionism:
Relatively low seems more like it. But then
again, Weiss doesn’t strike me as someone
who grades on a curve.) “If you look at a
company like Nike, I mean, that’s what is
possible for our future,” she continues. “It’s
just about how quickly can we get there, and
in what order?”
Weiss is lord of her rosy kingdom, that
much is clear. But the surprise in tagging
along with her to the ̈agship isn’t the fan-
fare—it’s the lack. A few customers, like
the trio of teens studying at the School of
American Ballet, recognize the brunette in
the black dress and shyly ask for a sele. Yet
most people seem not so much to politely
leave her alone as to have no idea who she is.
Weiss takes that as a very good sign, survey-
ing the room and smiling at her anonymity:
“It’s more than me.”Glossier
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