When a young girl runs a beauty blog in her spare time, she may never imagine that this blog, which started at $700, will become an Internet beauty brand valued at $400 million in eight years.
In 2010, Emily Weiss was an assistant editor at Vogue, working late every night.
Not because she worked overtime, but because she spent all her spare time on her beauty blog.
Weiss is very bullish on the fast-growing vertical editorial field of beauty blogging.
So she started Into The Gloss, a beauty blog, to teach readers how to look stunning without breaking the bank.
Weiss paid $700 out of his own pocket to cover the initial cost and updated content three times a week.She often produces, publishes and promotes all of the site's content on her own beauty blog between 4am and 8am.
In 2010, when there were very few beauty bloggers, Into The Gloss quickly attracted many readers with its minimalist design aesthetics and insight into fashion.
Weiss also made the most of the connections she'd accumulated during her internships at Vogue, Ralph Lauren, and W Magazine, among others.
Interviews with celebrities like comedian Aziz Ansari, model Emily Ratajkowski, actress Danielle Brooks and rapper Angel Haze in the blog's first year.
These celebrity interviews quickly set Weiss's Into The Gloss blog apart from its competitors.In less than two years, Into The Gloss has 200,000 unique visitors and 4.5 million page views per month.
The success of the beauty blog attracted Elle magazine's senior fashion news editor Nick Axelrod to leave Elle to join Weiss to help her run IntoThe Gloss.
The frequency of blog content posting has also increased from three times a week to three times a day.
In 2013, Into The Gloss has started to look more like a true fashion magazine.
Her customer-centric approach to beauty has resonated strongly with women who feel neglected by traditional beauty brands, building a growing number of loyal fans.
It builds brand trust with the way readers recommend each other and leverages social media to expand its reach.
In 2013, Weiss and her team began meeting with venture capitalists, securing $2 million in angel funding and an $8.4 million Series A in 2014.
Interestingly, Into The Gloss was not yet an official company at this time, nor did it have a clearly defined product idea.
But the positioning, traffic and influence of Into The Gloss make investors very optimistic about it.
Because Glossier started with content and has a group of loyal fans, it can achieve trust that is difficult for traditional beauty brands to achieve, as well as a very personal and intimate experience.
Glossier is able to create a private connection with customers in a low-cost way to create a brand that users trust.
This trust is also the foundation of popularizing Glossier beauty.
The traditional beauty industry uses price to demonstrate value. The more expensive a beauty product is, the better the quality of the product will be.
And all of Glossier's products are not only cheap, but also resonate with users and are trusted by users.
Even as more editors are hired, labor costs, content costs, and social communication costs are rising.
Because direct-to-consumer, no retailer makes the difference, and the company doesn't rely on traditional advertising, Glossier has significantly lower operating costs than traditional competitors.
In 2014, beauty brand Glossier officially launched as a sister brand to IntoThe Gloss.
At this time, beauty blog Into The Gloss has completed the building of the brand.
Glossier has a large number of fans from the beginning, and can develop and improve new products that users really like based on the large amount of data accumulated before and the interaction with users.
A precise grasp of the needs of fans lays the foundation for the best-selling products of Glossier.
In just eight years, Glossier has gone from a beauty blog with a $700 start-up capital to an Internet beauty brand valued at $400 million, and has begun to march into a global lifestyle brand.
From content as the starting point, attracting a group of loyal users, to developing beauty products, entering foreign markets, and setting foot in offline retail stores, Glossier's development history is worth learning from entrepreneurs and other companies.
