Emily Weiss and Glossier: Can Mood Boards be a Business Model?

If you are interested in skincare or makeup, chances are you have heard of Glossier. Often deemed to have a cult following, Glossier is a relatively young and remarkably popular beauty company that believes “beauty isn’t built in a boardroom.” They create for the customer -- looking at what modern women already use and love, but reimagining how they could make it better. Vanity Fair calls it a “paradigm-shifting beauty brand” right after a casual mention of the company’s $1.2 billion valuation. 

What you may not know, however, is that Glossier was born out of a beauty blog: Into The Gloss (ITG). After leaving her roles at Teen Vogue and Vogue, Emily Weiss jumped around before finally launching her own blog in 2010. It was mostly composed of interviews named “The Top Shelf” where Weiss would spend time with different women to learn about what beauty products they loved and why (namely, what was on their “top shelf”). Her aim for the blog was to “show the real-world beauty routines of fashion insiders and celebrities,” as well as other things she had learned working behind the scenes in the fashion and beauty industry.

The blog grew quickly, as it gave readers an inside scoop into the glamorous and often distinctly unattainable routines of celebrities, models, and A-Listers. But that’s the thing --Weiss began to see that some pieces of the routines were actually very attainable for the normal beauty level. She also began to see a lack in the beauty industry, one that was informed by what was previously mentioned as “boardroom beauty.” Companies were creating for profit, not for the customer.

So in response to that, Weiss decided to go for it and launch her own beauty company through the blog. Thus, Glossier was born. It started with only four staple products: cleanser, moisturizer, lip balm, and facial spray. The products were simple, clean, and affordable, and the packaging reflected that same uncomplicated approach.

Helen Steed, Glossier’s Creative Director, recalls that first year of Glossier and her work with CEO Emily Weiss. She remembers her role as being a pair of second eyes, “a bit like taking a pair of scissors, cutting up some of the ideas, and rearranging them.” She goes on to liken this to a mood board, which is a prominent theme throughout Glossier’s marketing. Their website looks like a virtual mood board, and their packaging includes post cards and stickers to create your own at-home version.

It goes beyond the visual aspect too -- the process of creating Glossier was actually one big mood board. Steed captures this when saying:

“Obviously we love moodboards, and that’s a big part of our process. That’s kind of how Emily built the brand! She had all these images she’s been collecting for years… That’s our North Star in a way. And when we start any project, like with the flavored balms for instance, the moodboards we build really help to tell the stories and convey the emotion of the product. So this time we literally started to turn them into collages, cutting things out and really rebuilding them. You can see the cutout lips pasted over the backgrounds and the environments, which we thought were very fun. They became the concept for the packaging. And sometimes you don’t need the whole image—you just need a piece of it.”

ITG and Glossier are prime examples of creative collecting done by CEO Emily Weiss. In her time on fashion sets and reality shows, she was both inside and outside of the industry--working behind the scenes for magazines and brands but still shopping and curating her own routine. She collected the products, ideas, and approaches that worked and didn't work. She tried different jobs, worked at different companies, and experimented with all kinds of products. The mood boards and product design are deeply rooted in this collected knowledge. Even when Weiss brought on fresh eyes, the process stayed true to physically piecing together images and ideas from the road she traveled. These mood boards were both literal and theoretical: the walls of her office were actually covered in collected images and ideas (as seen above), but her creative process was equally informed by the collecting of successes and failures.

An example of this is their infamous (and a personal favorite) Milky Jelly Cleanser. The company heard readers and customers complain about the multi-step process of removing makeup and then washing your face, needing two steps and two products. While this division is more marketable for companies, ie they sell two products instead of one, Glossier decidedly made a product that does both steps. They created what the customer wanted, not what would make the quickest money. CFO Henry Davis considers this when telling Forbes, “Before we even make anything, we make it because we learned from our customers what they are missing.” Their collecting process entails listening, learning, creating, and repeating.

ITG and Glossier also embody a unique combination of Western and Eastern creative cultural values. While it has certainly become a marketable and profitable set of products (re: billion dollar net worth), Glossier very much evolved through a process-focused endeavor. Glossier was born out of a single-woman blog that leaned into the process about hearing and learning from women first. This was the entire focus of her infamous column, The Top Shelf, where she simply learned and reported about different women’s routines. Weiss took traditional products that many women loved and reworked them, making them even better than before. Only after building a base of loyal readers did Weiss cultivate an even larger base of loyal customers. She did not set out to create a billion dollar business, but rather the journey naturally led into it.