Glossier just laid off one-third of its corporate employees, mostly in tech

Glossier, the favored magnificence model led by former blogger Emily Weiss, let go of 80 of its company staff immediately, in response to an inner e mail obtained by Trendy Retail. The cuts, which quantity to round one-third of Glossier’s company workforce, will primarily influence the corporate’s know-how group.

“[W]e are shifting our know-how technique to leverage exterior companions for components of our platform that we’re presently sustaining internally,” Weiss wrote within the e mail asserting the layoffs to employees.

The e-mail recounts among the firm’s current errors, together with prioritizing strategic initiatives that “distracted” the corporate from its core magnificence enterprise and that executives “acquired forward of ourselves on hiring.”

The tech group layoffs are notable for a magnificence retailer that has usually described itself as a know-how firm. In quite a few interviews all through the previous two years, Weiss and different executives have emphasised the corporate’s concentrate on its direct-to-consumer on-line transport mannequin and obsession with iterating the client expertise based mostly on suggestions.

The corporate constructed its personal point-of-sale system and commerce APIs in-house, permitting them to ship a “seamless” buyer expertise, former Glossier CTO Bryan Mahoney stated in 2018.

Based in 2014, Glossier is broadly touted as one of many earliest breakout successes of the DTC mannequin, and raised its Collection E final July at a $1.8 billion valuation from Lone Pine Capital, Sequoia, Forerunner Ventures and others. E-commerce gross sales usually account for 80% of Glossier’s income, the Enterprise of Style reported final July. 

Regardless of its fundraising success, Glossier’s ascent has oftentimes been removed from clean. The corporate laid off its total retail employees and closed all its bodily places, together with its flagship New York Metropolis retailer, in August 2020. It additionally grappled with the fallout from an open letter written by a few of its staff of colour sharing their experiences of tolerating racism from managers in its shops, prompting a public apology from Weiss.

Practically a yr later, the corporate appeared to alter course on its choice to double down on e-commerce alone, saying it deliberate to make use of the Collection E funding to open three new everlasting bodily shops in Seattle, Los Angeles and London — in addition to reopen its New York Metropolis location. It hoped to make use of the retail places to construct model consciousness and encourage prospects to create content material, areas Glossier turned well-known for in its early days by its distinctive, millennial-pink aesthetic and intelligent use of social media advertising and marketing.

The firm’s web site presently says prospects ought to “keep tuned” for extra retail retailer openings this yr.