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Glossier: Beauty Blog to Billion-Dollar Brand Case Study

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Glossier: From Beauty Blog to Billion-Dollar Brand
Community
Case
Author: Alexandra E. Upton & Justin O’Brien
Online Pub Date: January 04, 2021 | Original Pub. Date: 2021
Subject: Consumer Behavior, Direct Marketing, Electronic Marketing
Level: | Type: Indirect case | Length: 4897
Copyright: © Alexandra E. Upton and Justin O’Brien 2021
Organization: Glossier | Organization size: Medium
Region: Northern America | State:
Industry: Other manufacturing| Retail trade, except of motor vehicles and motorcycles
Publisher: SAGE Publications: SAGE Business Cases Originals
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781529740691 | Online ISBN: 9781529740691
SAGE
© Alexandra E. Upton and Justin O’Brien 2021
Business Cases
© Alexandra E. Upton and Justin O’Brien 2021
This case was prepared for inclusion in SAGE Business Cases primarily as a basis for classroom discussion
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https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781529740691
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Glossier: From Beauty Blog to Billion-Dollar Brand Community
SAGE
© Alexandra E. Upton and Justin O’Brien 2021
Business Cases
Abstract
Vogue trained Emily Weiss created a USD 1.2 billion valued social media beauty business from
scratch, spun out from her side project blog Into the Gloss. Weiss spotted a clear gap in the
market for a fully integrated beauty advice community for real, rather than idealized, women.
The vertically integrated Glossier brand used data analytics and insight gleaned from community
posts and feedback to provide a powerful understanding of its audience. This enabled the
development of compelling and highly engaging advice content and the capability to effectively
identify unsatisfied product formulation needs.
A bottom up, customer centric launch strategy using sophisticated search engine optimization,
a strong focus on user experience, and a distinctive communications style all helped to
differentiate the new brand of Glossier from its better known and better financed competitors.
Weiss recognized early on that her company needed to maintain her blog’s original voice and
brand identity whilst simultaneously scaling up to fund investment in leading digital marketing
tech. Through the application of insightful user generated content strategies, the Glossier
management team were able to cut costs, build awareness, and maintain their voice in an
authentic way. But, as big brands wised up to community based social marketing techniques
and large influencers eyed lucrative direct-to-consumer beauty product brand extensions, could
Emily Weiss’s Glossier continue to be a trailblazing success?
This student-academic, co-created case study uses only publicly available information. It is
designed to encourage marketing students to appreciate how innovative search engine
optimization practice and a powerful direct-to-consumer business model was used to scale a
passion blog into a unicorn beauty community, by leveraging user generated content and peerto-peer recommendation.
Case
Learning Outcomes
By the end on this case study, students should be able to:
•
•
•
•
Explain how customer engagement can be used to enhance user experience
Appreciate a range of innovative search engine optimization practices
Consider the threat posed by direct-to-consumer businesses to traditional, established brands
Describe the importance of peer-to-peer and influencer-to-consumer word of mouth and electronic
word of mouth in the beauty industry
• Evaluate how founder Emily Weiss successfully scaled her blog into a unicorn business and how it
might counter the threat of future competition
Introduction
In 2019, Glossier’s founding entrepreneur 33-year-old Emily Weiss told her 450,000 Instagram followers that
she had successfully raised USD 100 million in venture capitalist funding. In so doing she had propelled
herself into a very elite group of female unicorn (USD 1 billion+ valued business) chief executive officers
(CEOs). Glossier, a “barely there” skincare and cosmetics brand, was valued at over a billion U.S. dollars, just
5 years after its inception (Gross, 2019).
Initially, back in 2014, just four products (balm, mist, skin tint and moisturizer) were launched by a tiny team
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Glossier: From Beauty Blog to Billion-Dollar Brand Community
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© Alexandra E. Upton and Justin O’Brien 2021
Business Cases
that fulfilled 953 client orders on the first day of trading. But five successful years on, Glossier had grown to
serve 3 million customers who were buying from a range of roughly 30 products (Weiss, 2019).
The Glossier brand was born from the New York University art graduate’s blog, Into the Gloss
(intothegloss.com). Weiss had started writing in the early mornings before her day job as a full-time fashion
assistant at fashion publisher Vogue. Weiss’s blog sought to decipher the perplexing aspects of the USD 250
billion cosmetics industry for everyday women (Hart, 2019). Featuring interviews with influential women in the
modeling, acting, and business world, Into the Gloss quickly established a sticky, engaged community who
generated more than 10 million-page views per month. A cult following where remarkably 60% of readers
checked-in daily (Smith, 2015). Sticky clients are those hard-to-find, repeat, regular, or returning purchasers
who may be described as the loyal customer base, where advocates are most likely to be found. They are
attractive not only because their advertising cost of acquisition may be lower, but also for their bigger sales
baskets and their potential to generate powerful and low-cost peer-to-peer influence.
Weiss had identified that large, traditional beauty brands (e.g. Estee Lauder, MAC, Clinique, L’Oreal,
Maybelline, Covergirl, Shisheido, Lancome, and Chanel (Shen & Bissell, (2013)) lacked meaningful consumer
electronic word-of-mouth (eWoM) support. Although they often benefitting from being part of substantial,
international firms and were backed by powerful marketing muscle, these well-known legacy brand names, for
all their advantages, struggled for traction in social media (Bertrand, 2013). Additionally, after 3 years of hands
on community building by publishing celebrity “interviews, product reviews and more” (intothegloss.com,
2019), Weiss was able to draw on an extensive body of curated audience feedback about experimentation
with products, insightful reviews, and critiques of both cosmetic products and application regimes.
Back in 2004, fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) brand Dove had successfully launched its “real beauty”
campaign, using groups of real women with diverse body shapes. It pledged to feature only real women, not
models, portrayed as they were in real life without any form of digital distortion. Dove’s overarching aim was
to help girls build self-esteem and empower positive body confidence (Unilever, 2017). Having undoubtedly
been aware of this ground-breaking campaign in the mass market, Weiss had spotted, during her time as
a model and whilst hobby blogging during her time at Vogue, that there was an important gap: the large,
premium beauty brands did not focus on real women, instead they profiled an idealized version of perfection
(Johnson, 2019).
Weiss, who had zero formal business training (Ellison, 2019), launched her new brand, Glossier, to help fill
this void with a compelling and authentic promise to “never cover you up, turn you into someone else, or
overcomplicate your routine” (CNBC, 2019). She created a highly curated line of accessible products that
focused on addressing fundamental skin issues, described as a “skin first, make up second” philosophy.
Weiss had also engineered a peer recommendation and product delivery network that fulfilled her clients’
needs in a way that was appropriate for the new digital age (Siegal, 2015). At Glossier, customers’ feedback
was at the forefront of product development and business strategy, and Weiss had realized that social media
had game changed consumers’ roles in brand storytelling, moving from merely listening passively to more
active participation, often dubbed co-creation (Singh & Sonnenburg, 2012).
Glossier’s innovative SEO practice and a powerful direct-to-consumer (D2C) business model was used to
scale a passion blog into a unicorn beauty community by leveraging user-generated content (UGC) and peerto-peer recommendation. But, as big brands wised up to community-based, social marketing techniques, and
large influencers eyed lucrative D2C beauty product brand extensions, could Emily Weiss’s Glossier continue
to be a trailblazing success?
D2C Business Model
By 2018, Weiss’s fast-growing firm boasted 200 employees and turnover was in excess of USD 100 million.
It had essentially become a D2C web proposition that boasted just two permanent shops (New York and
Los Angeles), some semi-permanent pop-up stores, and 2.2 million Instagram followers (Ellison, 2019). In
leap frogging traditionally high-cost elements of the beauty value chain, notably by largely ignoring third party
retail distribution and deploying only a modest marketing spend focused on the website, product packaging,
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Glossier: From Beauty Blog to Billion-Dollar Brand Community
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Business Cases
and micro influencers, Weiss was able to offer quality cosmetics via a web-enabled, convenient, fast delivery
service at a more affordable price point. This form of luxury promotion of relatively inexpensive products has
been dubbed “masstige” (from mass market + prestige) (Kestenbaum, 2017).
Peer recommendations for high involvement purchasing categories, such as beauty, play an extremely
important role at the point of brand selection, known sometimes as the zero moment of truth (ZMOT) for online
transactions (Bertrand, 2013). Glossier was one of an increasing number of marketing, tech-based, beauty
start-ups that was tapping into and promoting the content created by everyday people. Other beauty startup examples include Pat McGrath, Mario Badescu, and Milk Makeup (Mahoney, 2019). Weiss had created
and effectively leveraged a network of remunerated and unpaid influencers to amplify her brand’s proposition
(Mendell, 2018).
This system of influencing has been shown to be particularly effective; close friend referrals can account for
as much as 86% of purchase decisions (Lammertink, 2019). Glossier attributes 79% of its sales from peerto-peer sources (Wischhover, 2017). Using affiliate marketing, Weiss’s team developed a powerful network
of about 500 micro influencers (whose followers were typically measured in tens of thousands). These
influencers were formal representatives paid to endorse Glossier to their substantial social media following
(Zerbo, 2019). Micro influencer fees were cheaper than the big names and often delivered appreciably higher
engagement rates, typically 60% (Porteous, 2018). The micro influencers were given their own page to
endorse from, hosted on the Glossier website, where the well ranked blogs and high-quality content captured
from the influencers pages helped validate the Glossier website and boosted its SEO performance, as well
as increasing brand awareness (Montti, 2019).
Weiss tapped into changing consumer decision making trends that put less emphasis on rational product
evaluation and objective measures of service quality, in favor of emotional engagement and social
experiences (Tynan et al., 2010). The CEO of QVC (a television shopping channel), Mike George, highlighted
a “collapse of institutional and brand authority” caused by four key factors: a less trusting society, an ecommerce-fueled price race to the bottom, a desire for authenticity, and a change in influence sources
(Kestenbaum, 2017). In this dynamic context, Weiss defined Glossier as an experience company that
transcends mere physical products and digital interfaces to enable offline experiences (Ellison, 2019).
People-Powered Ecosystem
When Emily Weiss launched Glossier as a separate entity from Into the Gloss, a team of salaried staff
editors, dubbed the gTeam, became central to Glossier’s people-powered digital ecosystem. The gTeam grew
to comprise 30 editors, who were carefully chosen to compile and reflect the opinions of customers, and
determine how to market products effectively (CustomerThermometer, 2019).
Functioning as a part of the marketing department, Weiss claims the gTeam was much more than just a
standard customer service team. Acting as the beating heart of a customer centric organization, a peoplepowered ecosystem, the editors worked in real time to gather insights from customers and provide authentic
customer voice input for product development. Each editor had hundreds of conversations daily, spanning a
range of social channels, focused on creating salient conversations about products in a highly personalized
manner and distilling the market intelligence into key actionable insights (Schiffer, 2018). The gTeam played
a critical part in the company’s feedback loop, enabling it to intimately source ideas from a wide array of
individuals through digital information feeds.
Weiss was convinced the gTeam enabled insights and customer care was invaluable, delivering Glossier an
important edge. The editorial team successfully created a true community, transcending the initial status as a
single person hobby blog. gTeam editors were able to identify a range of customer stakeholder perspectives,
for example: identify where item descriptions on the website were deficient; synthesize what customers
expected from particular products; evaluate catchy, new product names; and assess new formulations
(Danziger, 2018). Curated UGC, in the form of reviews and testimonials, was augmented with exposure
provided by a group of paid micro influencers to help encourage customers to choose to buy Glossier
products. Forbes (2016) notes that when combined, these opinions and thoughts can be more persuasive
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Business Cases
than brand manager messages. Leveraging this authentic UGC, Glossier was able to develop an enduring
portfolio of roughly 30 affordably priced products, staples that many shoppers often categorized as automatic
repurchases. However, from a business ethics perspective, Weiss was undoubtedly aware that her grass
roots business relied on the unpaid good-will of the Glossier community of contributors. The majority of
content generators and influencers were unlikely to see an equitable return on their efforts. Duffy (2017) calls
out this exploitation of immaterial labor, an inequity that sees many passionate individuals not getting paid
fairly to do work they love, whilst some ingenious individuals, such as Emily Weiss and others, have been
able to create lucrative businesses by harnessing the opinions and influence of the crowd.
Glossier’s Optimization
According to Weiss, Glossier views all of their product, packaging, and names as content, and their digital
feeds reflect this. The brand’s signature pink color theme, carefully orchestrated photos, benefit boasting
copy, and superlative descriptions are curated to communicate the brand in a way that is easily shareable.
Web content uses succinct headlines that telegraph benefits and body text that identifies problems, whilst
then adroitly emphasizing how each product solves them. Reviews, presented in reverse chronological order
with most recent first like blogs, are easy to access and use the popular and familiar five-star evaluation
grading system. They are filterable by skin type, age range and skin shade, enabling customers to quickly
access just the feedback and comments from “people really like me,” should they wish to. Pared back metrics
show the volume of community-generated reviews to inspire trust. Low comment volumes may indicate poor
customer engagement and are more likely to be biased by fake reviews. Simple star rating graphics are
augmented with clearly labeled customer and paid influencer testimonials, which, when woven together on
the uncluttered web pages, create a powerfully credible peer-to-peer endorsement. Weiss is clear in her mind
that word-of-mouth is more influential than anything a brand can say, and this philosophy underwires the D2C
business model in bypassing the need to invest substantially in traditional advertising channels and retail
distribution. When tagged in social media, Glossier gTeam editors incorporate UGC on their channels (Hart,
2019). This is important, not only because the beauty brand’s feed reflects its users in an authentic way, but
because it can substantially increase exposure at low cost. UGC has been proven to increase rankings on
search engine results pages (SERPs), as people co-create relevant content (Union, 2017).
As a D2C company, Glossier owns the entire sales funnel. The company thus has complete, interconnected
data
sets
and
the
ability
to
track
consumer
behavior
throughout
the
five-step
awareness–consideration–trial–repurchase–advocacy customer journey (Willits, n.d.). With very limited
offline sales through its modest retail footprint, Glossier’s majority online business model can reliably measure
marketing effort and efficacy at each step of the consumer journey (also known as the user experience or
UX). This provides a major advantage over other legacy beauty brands, whose retail distribution is often
in the hands of third parties. This knowledge-is-power, big data insight enables Glossier to corroborate
the qualitative comment posts, creating a powerful, positive feedback loop. Each step of the UX can be
then optimized based on this heady blend of rich qualitative, attitudinal information, and actual quantitative
behavioral data, that combined help drive changes aimed at enhanced customer satisfaction and delivering
the all-important goal of profitable sales growth (Rodgers, 2018).
In 2019 Glossier was ranked 23rd worldwide for SEO in the beauty and fitness sector and averaged
2.4 million visits per month. This high rank is impressive for a company that is younger and offers less
products than its lower-ranked competitors like Tarte, which ranked 27th with 2.3 million monthly views, and
Estee Lauder, which ranked 46th with only 1.1 million monthly views (SimilarWeb, 2019). Particularly notable
was Glossier’s social media engagement rate (comprising: comments, likes, shares, and retweets), which
was more than four times the rate experienced by Estee Lauder. In part, the lower rankings of its competitors
may be due to a failure of utilizing keywords in URL structures, a practice that Glossier has deployed
successfully. Glossier URL’s are clear, succinct and uncluttered when compared with beauty conglomerate
Estee Lauder’s more complex format:
• glossier.com/products/milk-jelly-cleanser
• esteelauder.com/products/681/26959/product-catalog/skincare/advanced-night-repair/synchronizedrecovery-complex-ii.
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From inception, Glossier had been attentive to SEO. Their URL structure has contained keywords placed
near the front, a hierarchy that places product-search first (Ryan, 2017). They have also utilized other forms
of optimization:
• breadcrumbs (keyword summary of the route through a web page) to build internal links and define
their link architecture;
• title tags for user clarity on the SERP;
• smaller compressed files to make photos load faster;
• alternative descriptive names so both people and bots can understand the content (Doiron, 2017);
and
• rel=canonical tags, which consolidate multiple links to pages, but count all the different versions as
links, increasing SEO relevance (De Valk, 2019).
In addition, regularly updated product review content has kept pages fresh with new content optimized for
long-tail (secondary) keywords and added microdata (Smith, 2018). Glossier’s SEO strategy also extended to
YouTube, the world’s second largest search engine, a platform also owned by Google (Davies, 2018). Here,
UGC videos and reviews are linked to the Glossier website, educating and inspiring community members on
ways to use Weiss’s products (Ho, 2018) whilst providing content that Google could index with Glossier and
be paired with the metadata encapsulation to increase search results relevance (Ryan 2017).
Glossier Investing in Big Data Technology
At its launch, Glossier had relied on Into The Gloss’s vocal community of voluntary commenters to provide
inspiration. However, over time, this voice was augmented with an employed team of data analysts and
the gTeam to filter and distill the myriad ideas emerging out of an ever-growing community. From inception,
images of diverse women, product shots from consumers, and the signature millennial voice from Instagram
had been the focus of core community content. However, over time, the company began to rely more heavily
on the in-house tech (technology) department to engineer tools to create new UXs centered around the sticky
community it had created, to discover ideas for future products and to optimize the website.
To track users who were not active commenters, the company had initially used cookies (a record of an
individual user’s visit to a website), which allowed the computer server to recognize customers when they
returned to a page (Riermer, 2019). However, cookies were found to be blocked by 64% of browsers (Benes,
2018) and changes to data privacy laws have also subsequently affected how the company was allowed
to gather data (European Commission, 2002). To fix these unscalable issues, and drive further growth, the
company started using customer data platform segmentation and cross-domain analytics to connect the
movements around and across Glossier and the Into the Gloss blog. The move from a wide network of site
information to a richer data lake meant that the company could start to use machine learning to automate
and quantify the information (Milnes, 2017). From this, Glossier has been able to build a fit-for-purpose data
warehouse to house the large amounts of information used to run analytics on UX at an extremely specific
level and to learn what factors really impacted customer behaviors (Heintz, 2019).
Glossier worked to integrate its in-store experiences into its online presence and built its own point-of-sales
system to synchronize payment methods from both online and in-store purchases (Tom, 2018), creating a
more seamless experience. The approach of attempting to offer a consistent and fully integrated customer
journey, that is platform and channel neutral, is often referred to as omnichannel marketing (Manser Payne et
al., 2017). Weiss hoped to extend this even further by developing a social-selling platform to serve different
archetypes of customers and create a centralized place where consumers could build relationships with each
other to; discuss products instead of relying on traditional sources (publications like Vogue), and to help make
purchase decisions (Bloomberg, 2018), essentially retrofitting WoM marketing ideas into digital-first channels,
enabling people to meet up and collaborate with each other in an accessible way (PRNewswire, 2019).
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Summary: What Next?
Entrepreneurial founder Emily Weiss successfully leveraged authentic customer engagement and powerful
user generated reviews to scale her side project blog into a highly successful, disruptive, D2C, community
beauty business. The billion-dollar brand was founded with the aim to address a profound, unmet need:
beauty advice from real women, for real women. Emily managed to scale her founder empathy and industry
expertise by hiring a 30-strong team of editors, ensuring that a powerfully customer-centric culture was
retained through scale up growth. The gTeam successfully engaged with and listened to customers, and used
these insights to carefully engineer an expansion of the product range, whilst designing an appealing, slick,
online, customer journey experience. Always adept at digital marketing, Glossier’s early trading success was
built on increasing sales and sticky, engaged customers. As part of this strong growth, additional venture
capitalist funding was invested to build a powerful data warehouse and create an omnichannel analytics
capability.
Whilst accepting that Glossier had become a community-centric, marketing tech-enabled unicorn, Weiss
refused to frame the company she had birthed as merely an authentic online cosmetics firm, or just an
excellent digital journey provider. Instead she hoped it would be a highly successful emotive brand that
enabled high-value offline experiences. However, with a range of similar, high profile entities emerging in the
beauty industry (e.g. Fenty Beauty), this hope was in question. Furthermore, because the fundamentals of
influencer-enabled D2C business models were becoming better understood, the question of how much longer
Glossier could be at the forefront of digitally-enabled success needed to be considered. Incumbent beauty
brands would surely start responding and other potential new entrants (e.g. globally renowned influencers
such as; entertainer Rhianna and celebrity Kylie Jenner) were particularly well placed to follow with a similar
model. What would you recommend Emily Weiss to do next?
Discussion Questions
1.
2.
3.
4.
How is consumer engagement used to optimize Glossier’s UX?
What techniques does Glossier use to enhance its chances of being found online?
Describe, as concisely as possible, the Glossier business model.
Evaluate the triple threats faced by Glossier from traditional beauty brands, emergent D2C beauty
brands, and new entrant influencers with a large audience.
Further Reading
Brion, B. (2019). People are ditching iconic makeup brands and flocking to buzzy skincare companies like
Glossier, and that’s terrible news for Ulta. https://www.businessinsider.com/cosmetics-industry-struggles-tokeep-up-in-age-of-glossier-2019-8
Chaffey, D. (2019). E-commerce conversion rates – how do yours compare? https://www.smartinsights.com/
ecommerce/ecommerce-analytics/ecommerce-conversion-rates/
Estee Lauder. (2019, March 25). Estee Lauder Front Page. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/
esteelauder/?hl=en
Estee Lauder. (2019, March 28). Advanced Night Repair. Product. https://www.esteelauder.co.uk/product/
681/26959/product-catalog/skincare/advanced-night-repair/synchronized-recovery-complex-ii
Fenty Beauty. (2019, March 28). Pro Filt’r Soft matte Longwear Foundation. Product.
https://www.fentybeauty.com/pro-filtr/soft-matte-longwear-foundation/FB30006.html
Glossier (2019, March 25). Glossier Front Page. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/glossier/?hl=en
Glossier (2019, March 28). Milk Jelly Cleanser. Product Site. https://www.glossier.com/products/milky-jellycleanser
Glossier, (2019, September 16). Cloud Paint. Glossier. https://www.glossier.com/products/cloud-paint
Goldman Sachs. (2019). Emily Weiss: Rethinking the Business of Beauty 18 January. Video File.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSQ0boMmqrk
Helizberger, S. (2019, March 20). Glossier: How this 33-year-old turned her beauty blog to a $1 billion brand.
CNBC.com. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/20/how-emily-weiss-took-glossier-from-beauty-blog-to-1-billionPage 8 of 11
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Business Cases
brand.html
Milk Makeup. (2019, March 28). Hydro Grip Primer. Product. https://www.milkmakeup.com/hydro-gripprimer.html?cgid=skincare-face
Rogers, C. (2018). Why direct-to-consumer beauty brand Glossier is ripping up the marketing playbook.
https://www.marketingweek.com/2018/06/25/glossier-ripping-up-marketing-playbook/
Tarte Cosmetics. (2019, March 25). Tarte Cosmetics Front Page. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/
tartecosmetics/?hl=en
Tarte Cosmetics. (2019, March 28). Big Ego Vegan Mascara. Product. https://tartecosmetics.com/en_US/
makeup/eyes/mascara/big-ego-vegan-mascara/1634.html
References
Benes, R. (2018). Web Browsers reject About Two-Thirds of Cookies. https://www.emarketer.com/content/
web-browsers-reject-about-two-thirds-of-cookies
Bertrand, G. (2013). Social media research: Developing a trust metric in the social age. International Journal
of Market Research, 55(3), 333–335.
Bloomberg. (2018). Glossier Hits $100 Million in Sales and Takes Aim at Big Beauty.
https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/beauty/glossier-hits-100-million-in-sales-and-takes-aim-at-bigbeauty
CustomerThermometer. (2019). How customer feedback drives the Glossier phenomenon.
https://www.customerthermometer.com/customer-case-studies/customer-feedback-online-glossier/
Danziger, P. (2018). 5 Reasons That Glossier Is So Sucessful. https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/
2018/11/07/5-keys-to-beauty-brand-glossiers-success/#77a1d1f6417d
Davies,
D.
(2018).
Meet
the
7
Most
Popular
Search
Engines
in
the
World.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-101/meet-search-engines/
De Valk, J. (2019). rel=canonical: the ultimate guide. https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/
Doiron, A. (2017). 8 Ways to Optimize Your Product Page SEO like Glossier. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/
8-ways-optimize-your-product-page-seo-like-glossier-alicia-doiron/
Duffy, B. E. (2017). (Not) getting paid to do what you love: Gender, social media, and aspirational work. Yale
University Press.
Ellison, J. (2019, August 7). Glossier’s Emily Weiss: ‘We’re creating the Estee Lauder of the future’. Financial
Times. https://www.ft.com/content/352ded56-b509-11e9-8cb2-799a3a8cf37b
European Commission (2002). Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy directive. https://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/
cookies/index_en.htm
Forbes, K. (2016). Examining the beauty industry’s use of social influencers. Elon Journal of Undergraduate
Research in Communications, 7(2), 78–87.
Gross, E. (2019). Glossier raises $100 M and now has a Billion Dollar Valuation. https://www.forbes.com/
sites/elanagross/2019/03/19/glossier-raises-100m-and-now-has-a-billion-dollar-valuation/#335f2576720d
Hart, K. (2019). The Glossier Marketing Machine: How Emily Weiss Hacked Culture to Build a $100 Million
Business that’s Disrupting Beauty. https://jumpermedia.co/glossier-marketing-machine/
Heintz, M. (2019). Bayesian versus Frequentist A/B testing for the Curious Glossier Data Scientist.
https://medium.com/glossier/bayesian-versus-frequentist-a-b-testing-for-the-anxious-glossier-data-scientistec604c6ceec9
Ho, B. (2018). 3 Awesome Video Makerting campaigns from Nike, REI, and Glossier. https://www.criteo.com/
insights/video-marketing-campaigns/
Into The Gloss (2019). “Interviews, product reviews and more.” Landing Page Popup. https://intothegloss.com
Johnson, E. (2019). Full Q&A: Glossier CEO Emily Weiss on the “art and science” of the beauty industry.
https://www.recode.net/podcasts/2019/1/16/18185512/glossier-ceo-emily-weiss-beauty-makeup-interviewpodcast-recode-decode-kara-swisher
Kemmis, A. (2019). The Difference between Direct and Organic Website Traffic Sources.
https://www.smartbugmedia.com/blog/what-is-the-difference-between-direct-and-organic-search-trafficsources
Kestenbaum, R. (2017, June 19). How the Beauty Industry is Adapting to Change. Forbes.com.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardkestenbaum/2017/06/19/how-the-beauty-industry-is-adapting-tochange/
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Business Cases
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