Meet Emily Weiss, Glossier founder and the woman out to simplify your make-up bag

‘British candy is just the best.” Emily Weiss, the 32-year-old American CEO of Glossier, one of the world’s fastest-growing beauty brands, walks up to me in Carousel restaurant in London’s Marylebone wearing a white leather boiler suit picking happily from a bag of Maltesers.

Weiss has captured a generation with her functional, covetable products that leave you wondering how you lived without them: glossy highlighters for a pre-teen skin sheen, rich moisturisers for drier mature complexions and an eyebrow pomade that, quite frankly, works for everyone in-between. Since the launch, Weiss has secured $34 million (￡25 million) in funding from San Francisco-based venture capitalists and sales have soared: revenues are up 600 per cent year-on-year.

When Glossier launches online in the UK on Monday, we Brits will finally be able to experience why.

It all started with a beauty blog, Into The Gloss, which Weiss set up in 2010 while still working as a fashion assistant on American Vogue.

It was an online magazine that shared insider beauty secrets from celebrities and industry experts, and quickly garnered a fan base and advertising that allowed Weiss to quit her job and concentrate on beauty full-time. The site was a phenomenal hit, and even today garners a monthly audience of 1.5 million. Through charting what really interested the loyal Into The Gloss readership, it became apparent to Weiss that there was a gap in the market for good quality, affordable products in chic, modern packaging.

In 2014, she launched Glossier, which she describes as a “beauty lifestyle brand”, online in America. Glossier didn’t have a marketing team until a year into the business; it was Instagram, and the brand’s near-800,000 engaged followers, that have made it such a success. “What we’re seeing through social media is the democratisation of the beauty industry,” she says. “The customer is becoming the marketer, she’s electing which brands win by posting what she’s using on social media – whether she has 200 followers, 2,000 or 2 million. Your opinion as a woman in beauty has never been more valuable.”

So valuable was the social media site to the company that they launched an Instagram account before they even had a website or any products to sell. “A month before the website went live, we started posting photos of the products being developed and of the branding,” Weiss tells me. “By the time the website went live we had 15,000 followers on Instagram – and those were a lot of our first customers.”

That customer base has continued to grow at a rapid rate. The clean pastel pink and white branding, subtle pops of colour and functional tubes and pots are the opposite of the flashy, celebrity-fronted make-up products that populate the rest of the Instagram beauty scene. The prices range from a reasonable ￡9 to ￡29, since in Weiss’s opinion, a high price doesn’t often equate to the best quality. The most expensive product is a rich, buttery face cream that easily rivals much more pricey alternatives. It’s great for more mature, dry skin.

Glossier's US flagship, a penthouse in New York, generates more sales per square foot than the average Apple store.

Glossier’s campaign images feature genuine fans of all shapes, sizes, races and ages. (“We have someone at Glossier,” she says, “who goes through all of the tagged photos on Instagram and so we’ll just direct message girls who have a cool look and we’ll be like ‘hey, can we fly you to New York to be in our campaign?’ ”) It’s of-the-moment, but for a beauty editor in the sometimes fickle industry for over 10 years, it’s a brand that stands out.

Currently only sold by its own website and stores, though there’s no bricks and mortar space in the UK yet, Weiss is scouting for the best location. The US flagship, a penthouse in New York, generates more sales per square foot than the average Apple store.

So what should we be buying? One of the best products in the 28-strong collection is the Milky Jelly Cleanser (￡15), a creamy gel face wash lightly scented with rosewater that leaves the skin comfortably clean (but not stripped). “To create it,” Weiss says of the cleanser, “we asked on Into the Gloss ‘what’s your dream face wash?’. We got over a thousand comments about it. We only launch one product every two months so we’re taking the time to ask our community for involvement. Everything is a real labour of love,” she says.

As we come to the end of the interview, Weiss tells me about a new lip gloss she’s working on, in a ‘your lips but better’ shade. “Can I try it on you?” she asks me, and so I nod: Weiss reaches over with a tester tube of a browny-pink gloss that isn’t too shiny, or too sticky. “I want to see how it looks on you as I’m trying to get feedback on it.” I have a feeling this is how many of Glossier’s products are developed. Organically, through conversations and over shared make-up bags. And over a packet of Maltesers, of course – well, you couldn’t take Britain without them.

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