Executive Briefing
Glossier was building its own social network for years. Great idea or terrible idea?
Companies that sell physical products should think about making digital products. But it’s a different game.
By Dan Frommer on Saturday, March 19, 2022 at 8:00 am
Glossier, the pioneering direct-to-consumer beauty brand, has famously used social media, digital content, and community as foundational parts of its business.
Less well-known: That for years — and until recently — Glossier had been developing its own social platform.
Founder and CEO Emily Weiss talked vaguely about it in an interview with Kara Swisher in early 2019, hinting at a tool where people “could really connect to find the information or the inspiration that they need really quickly.”
The idea, I’ve heard, was that it was intended to be a place where people could connect and talk about beauty products and routines — a more vertically focused Reddit, you might say. Or perhaps a reinvention of Into The Gloss’s comments section — that was Weiss’s popular beauty blog that led her to launch Glossier in 2014 and helped shape its early products through user feedback.
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