Glossy

I don't know—this was entertaining enough as an audiobook that I did finish it up. It inexplicably instilled a deep yearning to smell their signature fragrance, “You”. I made a trek over to the brick and mortar store in hopes of smelling it...which I now wear everyday. I guess you could say this was an influential work on my life.

I would not call this a “bombshell exposé.” The author felt very measured, if frustrated by a lack of transparency from Emily Weiss. If there was ever a true scandal at Glossier, this book didn’t cover it. There were certainly missteps, but you’ll learn nothing you didn’t already know from the ex-employee Instagram account in 2020. It's a book looking for a bombshell and finding mostly typical founder/startup dysfunction.

While it’s an interesting story, and Emily Weiss has obviously been very ambitious (and privileged) from her youth, I personally believe it’s making way too big of a deal of her selecting a new CEO at the end of the story. The book acknowledges that founders may not have the right skills to be ongoing leaders, while also seeming to think Emily Weiss somehow failed (the author’s personal hope) by not eternally being the CEO herself. If anything, this should be heralded as a sign she is, in fact, willing to make hard decisions, despite having the same wannabe tech company delusions as Adam Neumann of WeWork. Coming from the business world, this seemed like a very normal stepping stone decision, and the fact it seems to have felt like it wasn’t is itself a sign that the cult of founders is still a serious problem. Also, she’s still in leadership. As someone who considers a couple of Glossier products as mainstays in my daily routine, I WANT the company to be run by someone who understands operations, scale, and longevity in a practical, non-flighty way. Bringing in an experienced CEO is the right way to go.

It was difficult to follow a clear narrative arc in this book. There's history, it's well-written, and there's some excellent commentary on the detestable word "girlboss" and the double standard for women executives, but I'm not sure what the point of this book was, exactly. It originally started out as a book on the beauty industry and pivoted to became all about Glossier, and it definitely feels that way. Read it if you're a fan of Glossier, are interested in the vapidness of the fashion industry, want to see a high-level view of what creation and growing pains look like for a VC-backed DTC company, or want a decent look at their brilliant Instagram marketing and building a following around a brand (Glossier pioneered this concept in many ways). However, if you want more on women as founders (mostly in tech), read Brotopia, or if you want real founder drama go with Bad Blood.

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"Weiss started out as a starry-eyed innovator, a girl for whom nothing had ever gone wrong. She wasn’t a Rockefeller, exactly, but to most Americans she might as well have been. She was pretty, connected, thin, tall. She dripped with privilege. But she was also smart. And, crucially, she was willing to put in the work. She had a solid idea—Into the Gloss—that came at exactly the right time. That was all hers. But Weiss sometimes fell into an internalized misogynist trap of not taking credit for her ideas, as if Glossier were a craft project, a manifestation of her vision boards. That’s because luck plays a huge role in Weiss’s trajectory. And luck can be scary to discuss because it can’t be bought or controlled. You can only set up all the right conditions for it, which can involve a lot of hard work, though not always. People don’t like talking about luck the way they don’t like talking about privilege: because it makes it seem like they haven’t “earned” everything. But I don’t think it has to be a luck or hard work thing, but rather an and." (Marisa Meltzer, Glossy)