The Gal Squad: Emily Weiss

Glossier's CEO and Girl Boss Extraordinaire, Emily Weiss, is taking over the beauty world by storm. Weiss, who got her start in the fashion industry by interning at Ralph Lauren and Teen Vogue and taking on styling assistant jobs at W Magazine and Vogue, soon decided to switch gears by taking on the beauty industry.

Weiss got her first break into the beauty industry when she launched Into the Gloss in 2010, a beauty blog that served as an online community for beauty fans. Into the Gloss featured several series, the most famous of which was Top Shelf, where the blog interviewed both beauty icons and fans on their must-haves, featuring the products on their medicine cabinets and bathroom shelves. Soon, the blog had reached cult-status, with features on industry favourites like Karlie Kloss and Emma Watson, with around 10 million page views and countless readers.

Weiss soon turned the success of Into the Gloss into her own beauty company by utilizing the community's reviews, commentary, and existing fanbase. The thousands of reviews helped create Glossier, launched in 2014, starting out with 4 products that Weiss proudly called "crowd-sourced". Glossier's branding was a hit with its millennial fanbase, clad in millennial pink and featuring fun yet minimalist product design as well as inclusive advertising. Glossier soon became a cult-hit amongst beauty fans, with the brand's pink bubblewrap pouch becoming a status symbol, labelling you as one of the Glossier Girls.

Weiss had managed to marry her love of aesthetic and fashion into the brand, taking the beauty products and turning it into a lifestyle. The Glossier Girl was fun, cool, and effortless. She knew her trends but married them seamlessly into her own unique style, she was fresh and youthful, not entirely unlike the company's very own founder, the original Glossier Girl herself. Gone were the stuffy advertising from beauty companies of old, here was a new approach to beauty, of the less is more philosophy, talking to its millennial market directly because they were a millennial company too.

Weiss had taken the beauty world and turned it upside down, injecting her own brand of effortless chic, which had started from her early love of fashion into her own company. With Glossier now valued at over 1 billion dollars and several product lines under her belt, there is nothing stopping this girl boss from taking over the world and running it, with one lip balm at a time.

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