← The Barefaced Podcast
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Lily Twelve Tree
And welcome back to the Bare Face Podcast, a beauty business podcast hosted by me. My name is Lily twelve Tree. I am a beauty marketer and data science student. In today's episode, we're going to be doing a deep dive into the impact Glossier has had on the beauty industry and the fight between brands to be Glossier 2.0. Glossier is one of those brands that, because of the level of success that they have had, they are one of, if not the most analyzed beauty brand ever. And if you're like me, you've probably consumed all of that content already. And so I don't want to just be regurgitating stuff that you've heard before. So I really hope that this episode is going to be different by being less of a history lesson and instead more of like a marketing prank that will go back and point out all of the things that Glossier did first, how that shaped brand social media and beauty culture in 2024. Not only did Glossier become a unicorn, which is a company that reaches an evaluation of a billion dollars in their first five years, but it also became somewhat of a cult. It has now been 10 since the brand launched, and there have been so many brands that have launched since that take clear inspiration from the brand. In my mind, I'm thinking merit, say, Tower 28, Summer Fridays, road, and Hailey Bieber. To me, the link between these brands is obvious, but if it's not to you, I'm defining these as what I call like a lifestyle brand. It's that element of a brand that the founder of Glossier, Emily Weiss, the main character of today's story, has always described as a brand name you'd want to wear on a sweatshirt. I'm paraphrasing because I can't find the exact quote, but I swear she said it all the time. But it was this idea of building almost a social club through beauty products. Markets itself is like a lifestyle. They sell you clothes, accessories, and above all else, an aesthetic. Obviously, I'm going to try and report on this neutrally, and for the most part, we're going to be talking pretty objectively. But the impact of Glossier on my life, I have. I have never felt more qualified to talk about something, ever. When I tell you that as an Australian teenage girl, this brand was my life, I really mean it. There was probably an element of fomo, fear of missing out as the brand only launched in Australia last year. But I ate up anything that Weiss touched when I flew to London solo at the end of 2019. I am not exaggerating when I say that the first thing I did once I dumped my bags in a hostel was walk an hour and a half to the Glossier pop up in Covent Garden to experience the brand irl. I am not kidding that happened. I had the sticker on my phone case from 2019 until a few weeks ago because it got mouldy. But what I think happens a lot when the success of Glossier is discussed is that a beauty startup that launched in the peak of the D2C movement direct to consumer meaning that you could only buy glossier products from their website or from their pop ups. The conversation, or at least Weiss's interviews I interpret as having to explain how all of it was possible. How was it possible that a beauty brand could have such high revenue figures? How was it possible that their social media could actually be that impactful? How was it possible that a female founder could be driving that ship? And while the brand has had a lot of change in the last four years, they were accused and somewhat proven to be racist towards retail employees. Why stepped down as CEO. They had mass layoffs. The power and impact of that brand has now been very, very well established and is now understood to understand the rise of the brand. Marissa Meltzer wrote a terrific book about it titled Ambition Beauty in the Ins Story of Emily Weiss's Glossier which I thoroughly enjoyed. But today I want to zoom in on the marketing first to articulate not just why Glossier has had the success it has, but to show some of the big it girl brands today and how they're using those marketing strategies to hopefully provide some insights to beauty marketers. So the episode is going to be broken down into three parts. Firstly, the impact of into the Gloss on social media. Then we're going to look at all of the marketing first glossier executed that are now common practices before finally part three where we'll look at how this has impacted the new age of it girl brands by connecting the marketing strategies of Glossier to the strategies of Merit, say Summer Fridays Road and Tower 28 Part 1 Blogs walked so Influencers could run if you're familiar with Glossier success then I am sure you are very aware that Glossier was founded off the back of the success of the blog into the Gloss. Founded by Emily Weiss, Nick Axelrod, Welk and Michael Harper. Into the Gloss was launched in 2010 when Emily Weiss was an intern at Vogue in New York City. The OG into the Gloss and Glossier teams have to be acknowledged right out the gate because what I'm calling The Glossier cinematic universe, the gcu. It's quite a wild web of a story and these characters kind of get lost in it. But what's insane about this OG team is the number of them that have gone on to start their own beauty brands. Firstly, a name I just mentioned, Nick Axelrod. Welkin founded into the Gloss with Emily and then went on to launch personal care brand Necessaire. Then Glossier's VP of brand development, Annie Craigburn, known for her unbelievably brilliant copywriting in the early days of Glossier. She went on to launch Soft Services with Rebecca Jo, who was Glossier's head of digital product. And then there's Melanie Mazarin, who was Glossier's head of retail and offline experiences, who went on to launch Gaia or Ghia, that non alcoholic alcohol brand with the really cool packaging. And then there's also Diana Cohen, former Into the Gloss intern that launched Crown Affair. But anyway, beauty blogs, or at least beauty content is everywhere in 2024. So it's really hard to picture the landscape at the time. But this was pre Instagram and there were very few beauty dedicated sites. Into the Gloss first rose to popularity through their series Top Shelf, which would go into the bathrooms of not only celebrities, but socialites, it girl cool girls. And they would photograph their very real beauty must haves alongside an interview with Weiss. She of course knew all of these women on a personal level through working at Vogue. One of the first viral interviews that Emily Weiss did was with Karlie Kloss, a very well known model who hilariously actually mentioned an Arbonne product in her interview, which for those that are unfamiliar, is now a brand that is a pyramid scheme. But anyway, the women that were profiled on into the Gloss were anything but random. They were it girls. Wikipedia Media, a hilarious source to cite, but they describe an it girl as an attractive young woman who is perceived to have both sex appeal and personality that is especially engaging, which I have to say I disagree with. To me, an it girl is more a public figure that has a personal brand that is welcoming but also unattainable. Like you want to be her, but you never quite can. They have impeccable taste and also a very distinguishable personal style. They give away enough information to be popular on the Internet, but withhold enough to maintain celebrity status to humanize this waffle of a description. To me, the ultimate it girl is devonlee Carlson. If the it girl was a brand or a website, it was into the Gloss the way that Vogue has Such a distinguishable brand that to be in vogue means high fashion, it means artistry, it means to be taken seriously into the gross wasn't that it was trendy, it was cool, it was mass, but in a way that was aspirational and for lack of a better word, it was cool. So everything that into the Gloss touched turned to gold. Before into the Gloss beauty product mentions were previously through the pages of a glossy magazine. Some of the most popular products that were mentioned by these IT girls were under $20 and found at drugstores and pharmacies. This transparency and supposed authenticity made into the gloss wildly popular among millennial women. Another major impact that the Top Shelf series had on the beauty industry was the Shelfie. When the team at into the Gloss would go into people bathrooms and photograph them. Most often this would include the photo of a medicine cabinet. The photo of the three or four shelves that were adorned with beauty products was nicknamed the Shelfie, an obvious play on the word shelf and selfie. Clinique actually did a campaign just like this in the 80s. But of course, being an advertisement, it was much more curated. The Shelfie was the first time that brands had to market themselves alongside other products. In department stores, they each had their own brand booths, and in retail stores, they each had their own gondola. Or beauty Editors would share beauty products in a way that was carefully designed and by using assets that had already been approved or provided by the brand itself. The popularity of the Shelfie meant that the only control the brand now had on their visual perception was their packaging. The Shelfie started a packaging obsession where the appeal of a product or brand became more about its appearance than the performance of the formulation. Suddenly, beauty was decoration. People would buy product purely to showcase them in their bathrooms. Really favored prestig and luxury brands that had the margins to be able to justify investing more into the appeal of their packaging. There are only so many products you can use in one day across skincare, makeup, body care and hair care. But suddenly you weren't necessarily buying a product to use it. You brought it to look cute in your bathroom or to look cute in a shelfie. The 2024 version of this is like a beauty lifestyle creator, where they don't even speak or give a testimonial on how well the product performs. They instead just show you how gorgeous their bathroom product. And which really highlights this huge shift in what we want out of beauty products. And again, favoring the prestige and luxury brands into the Gloss had a chokehold on beauty culture. And at the time was really building the perfect community to launch a brand into part two, the Glossier cult. So five years after into the Gloss launches, Emily Weiss launches glossier with the 2 million she had raised in seed funding from Four Run Adventures. Again it present day context, it's easy to see all of the elements of into the Gloss that made betting on Glossier such an obvious yes. Not only did they have a passionate readership that Weiss knew she could convert, but they also had scale. An insider told Glossy, the media outlet, not the book, that around the time of raising funding into the Gloss was pulling in 2 million unique visitors a month. This is pre social media. Those are insane figures. But of course it hadn't been done before. Emily Weiss invented the grow a following and then launch a brand pipeline. So her ambition to launch a physical product business was met with eye rolls from majority of the venture capitalists that she pitched. But anyway, she gets the money, she launches the brand and Emily Weiss takes to into the Gloss where she for the first time articulates the aura of Glossier. She stated that Glossier is about living in and embracing the now, not the past and not the future. It's about fun and freedom and being okay with yourself today. It's about being nice to people and knowing that a smile begets a smile. Snobby isn't cool. Happy is cool, which to me sounds like a bit of a waft. And like any other brand description that's elusive and somewhat confusing, but that snobby isn't cool part was actually a pretty cool part of their strategy. But what made this launch so interesting was that Weiss documented the process of creating the products via the Glossier Instagram before the brand had actually launched. She showed the logo variation, mood boards, color swatches, packaging, design options, and was curating an aesthetic by reposting Tumblr imagery that aligned with how she saw the brand. Not to necessarily build a social media presence, but it was more a point of reference of what the brand wanted to emulate. Six weeks after products launched, Glossier secured their second round of funding. 8.4 million. Remember how we mentioned Kylie Kloss before as being one of the first top shelves at into the Gloss? That really took off well. This round of funding was led by her now husband, Josh Kushner, and his VC firm, Thrive Capital. So Emily Weiss's Vogue internship was really coming in handy and I'm going to put a pin in this mention of this investment because we'll revisit this later. But what was far more interesting than the dollar amount was the way that the Internet and pop culture as a whole reacted. A brand that had a wildly successful launch and two huge funding rounds, especially being a beauty brand, which at the time was pretty unheard of because remember pre the rise of E commerce and dtc, independent consumer founders never pulling in these higher numbers. So Emily Weiss became somewhat of a legend or better known as a girlboss. Dictionary.com describes the girlboss as any self made woman who started their own successful business. And it was popularized in 2015 when the likes of Emily Weiss was having a level of startup CEO and founder success that women had never been at least documented reaching before. Alex Abdad Santos wrote a terrific piece for Vox where she wrote the Girlboss is one of the cruelest tricks capitalism has ever perpetrated. Born in the mid-2010s, she was simultaneously a power fantasy and a utopian promise As a female business leader. Be she a CEO, an aspiring CEO or an independent MLM super seller, the girl boss was going to unapologetically will empires from the rubble of rejection and underestimation she faced all her life. The rise and fall of the Girlboss movement is a conversation for another day. But essentially what happened is that these female founders became faces of a movement that was wrapped up in both capitalism and feminism. They were platform so much that when many of these companies started to have problems, as many startups do, especially ones that have raised significant capital and also have such insane early growth that it becomes hard to maintain. That is not to undermine the very serious allegations many of these companies had mostly centered around workplace culture. But because women like Emily Weiss had been built up, they had so far to fall. They received insane amounts of hate that was significantly greater than their male counterparts. And while the Girlboss movement is believed very much to be dead, one thing it left behind was founder content, specifically female founder content. Founders documenting the behind the scenes of building a brand has become a strategy of many that are having a lot of success organically on social media. For example, one of my favorite people to follow on TikTok, Amy Smale, the founder of a fashion brand Oddmuse, credits growing her personal brand as a founder as a significant driver in the sales success of her fashion brand, which just as a snapshot had a 3,150,000 person wait list for their Black Friday sale last week. Which is insane. Aussie female influencer founded businesses like jewelry brand Jazz Handmade founded by influencer Jaz Hand or Remy by Riley founded by influencer Riley Hemson or Fate, the Label founded by influencer Brittany Saunders, have all built their brands by utilizing founder content. The trust that is built by taking your customers behind the scenes and making them feel like they know more about the brand than the average customer. It humanizes the brand in a way that so many others just aren't able to. And while Emily Weiss was never dancing through the Glossier warehouse or taking us through the Glossier paid ad strategy, the Girlboss movement laid the foundation of admiring the work that goes into creating a brand. I for one was really into Glossier because they simply were cool as fuck. But my obsession was with Emily. This concept of making a brand feel more approachable and fostering a level of community was Glossier at its core. And I don't think it's crazy to say that I think Glossier created UGC content. UGC content is user generated content. And in early Glossier days, what this looked like was the brand posting on Instagram photos that their customers had taken using the product again. It's so hard to recognize how revolutionary this was when we're looking back from the end of 2024, because now this is very, very common practice. But pre Glossier brands use social media like a website. Many big brands weren't even on social media yet, let alone have a social strategy. Most often what they were posting was just cuts of a broader campaign. Really high quality and ultra curated visuals. The early days of Glossier's Instagram was obviously curated in a different sense. Like they were really huge on flat layers where you would take a photo of a bunch of products, but from directly above, which many people still do for food. But it was very lo fi compared to traditional beauty imagery. The brand would encourage their community to post about their products. And there was this exciting possibility that if your content was good enough, it would feature on the brand page. This generated social proof at such a scale that the brand became inescapable. Hashtags like Glossier IRL or Glossier Girl trended not only on Instagram, but also Twitter. Boyfriends of Glossier, men that were photographed waiting for their girlfriends at Glossier stores or holding glossier products that were presumably not theirs became so popular in its own right that it got its own Instagram Boyfriends of Glossier. In a very similar vein, dogs too got their own Instagram dogs of Glossier. And while these accounts were unofficial and not run by the brand brand that only speaks to this cult like Vibes the brand had. People were obsessed. Glossier would also engage with their community relentlessly in the comments section and through their blog, the team asked their readers of into the Gloss what was their favorite heavy duty moisturizer. They then asked them what they would name their ultimate face wash and this level of involvement pushed that real feeling of connection and personal involvement which deepened the care you had for the brand. Before influencer advertising was a thing, the brand would turn to their most loyal customers into reps, offering them an individualized link that their following could get 10% off their first order, but who they selected was not based on their social media following size. There was believed to be a minimum follower count of 500, but it was mostly measured by how passionate you were about the brand. It's pretty safe to say that with the market saturation and establishment of social media now, no other brand has ever been really able to replicate this passion and community that Glossier had. There have been countless articles speculating which will be the next brand or platform or method to engage and build a community to this level. But now let's take a look at the brands that are trying to be the next It Girl Beauty brand. Are you signed up to the Bareface substack? If you work in beauty, then I'm sure you are very aware of the lack of data available in this industry. That was until Bare Faced, but Bareface is a research and insight company that specializes in beauty. We help beauty brands utilize data to understand the ever changing beauty consumer. Coming up this week we're diving into everything Sunscreen from how it went from a boring therapeutic good to a trendy beauty essential Free subscribers will get the full breakdown on the growth of the trend, its prevalence across seven major retailers, both prestige and drugstore in the US and in Australia. And it'll look at what consumers are signaling about the future of the category. Paid subscribers though will get all of that and access to the raw data which has over 15,000 data points. This will allow you and your brand total control to analyze and review the data any way you like. If that is data you're interested in getting your hands on, be sure to head to barefaced.substack.com and become a paid subscriber today. Part 3 the It Girl beauty brand Blueprint okay, so firstly, the brands I'm going to link to, Glossier are obviously successful in their own right and have built brands that are unique enough to have significant financial success. But what unifies all of them is this cool girl thing. They all have a distinguishable visual identity, yet they evoke this similar sense of skin first, makeup second, approachable beauty. The best way to describe it is again what Emily Weiss was known for saying all the time, a brand name that you'd want to wear on a sweatshirt. In that exact vein, Glossier have released and sold out several hoodies and sweatshirts over the years that they have called glossy wear. The hoodies currently retail for AU1 21 and Timothy Chalamet has been photographed around New York wearing their signature pink colorway. The first brand that followed suit was Summer Fridays, which released a line of sweatpants and sweatshirts aka hoodies and trackies for my Aussies back in 2020 and they went crazy. They called them the self care sweatset and launched during COVID which was extremely on trend. But to me at least it felt quite random for Summer Fridays. But wowee, was I alone? This first set sold out in minutes. Addison Rae was gifted the set and was papped wearing it. And the founders of Summer Friday Influencers Turned Brown founders Mariana Hewitt and Lauren Gordon Flores Ireland told Forbes that they believed it was a combination of surprise design, being at home and a sense of escapism through something unexpected that promoted the initial Sweatset to sell out nearly immediately. That level of brand desire is just unthinkable. On attack. Like it's just insane to me. If you think about 2020 as well. We had so many brands that were forced to almost beg for customers, they were spending heaps on ads for Summer Fridays to rock, stock up and sell out a product that was totally indirectly related to anything they'd done before. Wild on a massive tangent by looking into this I found that Summer Friday's website if your location is set to Australia, it practically doesn't exist. They just redirect you to Mecca and nothing comes up under shop other than a daily planner, a beanie, a tube key and a gift card. I thought this was such an interesting insight into the brand's relationship with Mecca. But anyway, we then have other non beauty products that became uniquely glossier but were not merch and that was their iconic pink bubble mailers. Since Day Dot Glossier has been delivering products inside this pink bubble mailer. It's incredibly flimsy and has this plastic zip and is the most basic quality you have ever seen. But these mailers possibly became more iconic than the products themselves. People were using them as makeup bags, travel wallets and in some cases, I kid you not, they were being used as clutches. The bubble mailers became so big that Glossier began selling them on their own. In 2016 you could get three of these mailers for US $12. They were everywhere on Tumblr and became a type of if you know, you know product as they were completely unbranded, but they were that shade of Millennial pink, which Glossier actually tried to trademark by the way, but the Internet just adored it. Fast forward to 2024 and we now have Merit Beauty doing a very similar thing, although significantly more upmarket. They call it their signature bag and it's described on their website as reusable, washable and made to last. You receive one free with your first order from them via their website. This bag, if you haven't seen it, is a pretty interesting design as it's kind of just like a giant piece of fabric that flops open, but it's long enough at both ends that you can loop them together and tie them in a sort of half knot. But there are no buttons, there are no zippers. It's just this giant piece of a brown fabric that looks halfway between a suede and a corduroy. It's wildly impractical but incredibly chic. And the Merit bag actually is what the Glossier bubble mailer was awkwardly forced into being, which is a chic clutch. I had seen this bag well before I'd heard of Merit. Traditional gift with purchases are often minis or weird beauty tools that you never would have considered buying. So having a gift with purchase that is sought after is unheard of. Merit don't have an option for you to buy the bag on its own, forcing those that want to be a part of the trade trend to buy and try a Merit product. Another element of the Merit product lineup that feels really glossier influenced to me is their single fragrance. It only launched about five weeks ago at the end of October and it's in this super cute bottle that looks like a tone back version of Bella Hadid's or Bella Body fragrance oils. If you've seen those. The bottle also has a divot for your thumb in it, just like the Glossier you fragrance. And while of course Glossier have now launched two new scents for seven years, Glossier had the winner, $0.01, which of course as you can now get the gist, was crazy popular. But having that one cent was so interesting because it became the smell of the brand. Glossier had built out this visual world through their packaging and content and store visual merchandising. But now that world had a smell. Instead of your interaction with that brand world being through looking at the packaging or applying the product, you could now experience that brand all day through scent. For any brand that wasn't Glossier the single fragrance idea would have made no sense in the mid to late 2010s because the product was so popular that they were essentially leaving millions of dollars on the table. Which is why I'm not surprised at all that the new CEO Kyle Leahy likely went straight to developing new fragrance skus when she got brought in. But the single fragrance was damn cool. Mera repeating this says so much about how they're trying to position themselves. They take the guesswork out of picking a scent you're either interested in smell like the brand or you're not. I also think there's a less marketing and more logistical strategy here too, with Merit really focusing their business on D2C via their website. Instead of trying to describe the differences between scents online, the customer just has one option. Another brand we have to talk about is Rhode. While most of these brands are doing the skin first, makeup second, and your Facebook better, easy to use formulas, etc. Etc. The way that RDE launched the package brand with their skin essentials that consisted of a moisturizer, a serum essence and a lip balm screamed glossier to me to refresh a memory. Glossier launched with a moisturizer, a face mist and a lip balm and also a skin tint which very controversially only came in five shades for like six years. But not only that, Rhode also lent into this idea of glazed skin while glossier made their brand very early on all about being dewy skin skin. Also, I don't mean to accuse anyone of copying glossier because these are all marketing decisions that make so much sense and were entirely reflective of the zeitgeist. I just mean to point out the impact of glossier that has gotten lost in the saturation of lifestyle beauty brands. Rhode first got the basics right, then they built the community and then found a marketing strategy that worked before launching blushes like hello, that is so glossier. And then there's also say with a tagline make up a skincare. There say really feels the most glossier out of all of these brands to me. Like Merit is cool, but I'm kind of scared of her. Summer Fridays and Road are stunning, but in a magazine kind of way. And then say is just I I don't know. One element of the sabre and I really want to speak to though is is how much they post about how much they posted about the election. I had so many people in my comment section on Tick Tock and also I've seen so many Reddit threads about how people were really getting behind the brand after they were so vocal about voting rights and they had this series on Instag where they called it the say Voting Guide. They broke down state ID laws, voter suppression, how various levels of government impact different rights. They speak way more frequently about climate change and Roe v. Wade and other political issues than Glossier, so I'm careful not to liken the two. But I do want to cast our minds back to when Glossier made their first I'm voting sticker in 2020. Nowadays every brand does this because it's not polarizing to tell people to vote vote. You're not even aligning yourself politically at that point. But when Glossier made these three eyed smiley stickers for the 2020 election, it was met with so much applause it was crazy to think that something so neutral was considered radical. I do think it was one of the many dominoes though that pushed us into this world where we expect brands to talk about more than just their own products. And then finally a marketing initiative that unites all beauty brands far and wide and was once again birthed from the mind of Ms. Weiss and her several hundred employees Employees was the infamous pop up. Glossier opened their first not store but showroom in New York City in December 2016 which was in the penthouse of their office building. In 2019 they expanded into a permanent retail space, but this was just everyone does this. What was the most intense experience of FOMO was their pop ups. I'm really exposing my obsession that I've had with this brand when I tell you that I've been a long time follower of Glossier's Director of Retail Design, Kendall Layer Latham. You can actually go to his personal website Kendall Latham.com and see all his work on the Glossier pop ups throughout the years. And it's stunning the way that this brand brought to life physical spaces that were so unique and bespoke to the cities that they were in. Like Miami was Art deco, London was 19th century British social club. And then my favorite of all time was the Glossier Seattle where they brought the green lush wildflower surroundings of Washington inside the store. I am not kidding. The whole store had many mountains of flowers and shrubbery that were all real, might I add. And it was the coolest store you have ever seen. My feeling of FOMO was not unique because these pop ups were wildly and still are wildly successful. They launched their Williamsburg location at the end of 2022 and there were 600 people in line. Sales hit a record of about 76,000 USD which shattered the brand's previous record of 13 grand experiential retail, described as an approach that aims to transform a physical store into a destination where customers can explore, interact and connect with the brand on a deeper level, was not developed or invented by Glossier. In fact, I think they just refreshed Aesop's wildly successful retail model of every individual store having a unique fit out to reflect the city it's in. But Glossier did popularize the pop up version of this. They would swoop into a city, offer a free immersive experience for a limited time, and then fly out driving so much interest and traffic not only in person, but online. Beauty pop ups have become a core element of brand strategies for years now. In the past, like two months in London alone, we've seen Refy, Summer Fridays and Road all have insane, insanely successful pop ups. And I'm certain I'm missing some too. With an oversaturation of d2c e.com beauty brands, the move offline and providing immersive experiences is proving to be a really successful method to establish a brand in a target market. I actually really want to pull together some data and create a report on the impact of a pop up. I've tried looking into calculating media impact value for a brand across Instagram, but I had no luck. So if you have any suggestions or anything specifically you'd like to see, be sure to let me know. The only other thing I want to mention about Glossier today is a pretty specific brand don't, but I really think it's more broadly reflective of, for lack of a better word, society. Remember back to that footnote I made earlier about the series a funding round Glossier closed with Kushner's VC firm, Thrive Capital. Well, Thrive Capital on their website describes themselves as an investment firm that builds and invests in Internet software and technology enabled companies companies When I saw the author of the Glossier expose, Marissa Meltzer, speak at the Sydney Opera House earlier this year, she said that she believes the reason that Glossier started to sink was that they were chasing this idea of being a tech company again. As someone that ate up everything that Emily Weiss touched For the better part of a decade there was this consistent narrative that Glossier was a tech company. And I got to a point where I thought what she meant was that they had a really well developed and almost futuristic way of using consumer data, but supposedly they were actually trying to build a tech company. Which brings me back to the link to Thrive Capital, because that would make sense as to why they invested, because this is the only consumer company that I could find in their portfolio. They are best known for being one of the big investors in OpenAI, which is ChatGPT. And I really hope that we're at a point in culture now where like the success of Glossier can just just be marveled at for what it is, rather than this chasing of tech, this hype world of tech, and the success of a consumer brand somehow being lesser than even if it was beating out tech companies in terms of revenue, it just blows my mind. I think it says so much about how we see female interests. I also vividly remember the teasing of Glossier Play before it had a name and how it was almost described as what I thought to be like a community app. In fact, I can't find any proof of this online, but I feel like I'm not crazy in that there was discussions of this about building some sort of platform and it was going to enrich the way that the Glossier community could interact with the brand. When Glossier Play was announced and it was essentially just like a party version of their makeup line, it flopped and closed, I'm pretty sure inside a year. And when they had their massive layoffs a couple years ago as well, that was entirely their tech team. So this chase of being a tech company feels so bizarre. And that was one thing that when the new CEO got bought brought on, she was very direct about. I've cited it before, but in the final chapter of Maritza Meltzer's book glossy, she spoke to Kyle Leahy and she says something to the gist of D2C is a sales channel. It's not a unique selling point. And she's also done an interview where she mentions that Glossier is a product business, they're not a tech business, and so it's nice to see that they're honing in on what they're good at. But I just wonder that if this is a broader depiction of hopefully not female founders in the current day, but definitely in the mid-2010s where even being worth a billion dollars wasn't enough. You had to be a tech founder. But anyway, that's the end of today's episode. Finally made my personal goal of breaking the 30 minute mark. Yay. This format is wildly unsustainable as each episode takes a ridiculous amount of time because although I hope to come across conversational and chatty and approachable, these are actually entirely scripted. LOL. Today's episode was about 6,500 words, which doesn't matter much other than please subscribe to the pod, wherever you're listening. And if you haven't already, check out the Bareface substack. But otherwise, I will see you sometime next week because frankly, I haven't got a clue what day of the week these episodes drop anymore. Have a wonderful weekend and bye for now. This episode was recorded on Ghana Country Country. I acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land and pay my respects to elders past and present.