Online Makeup Startup Invites Customers Inside With a 'Stairway to Heaven'
Selling makeup to nearly 2 million Instagram followers has made a beauty products startup a top darling among technology investors. Now it's trying to apply some showroom style.
Glossier, pronounced gloss-e-ay, landed $100 million in its latest round of funding to push its total funding to $186.4 million since starting five years ago, according to Crunchbase. The latest funding reportedly values the company at $1.2 billion, remarkable for a retailer that sells its brand mostly online and promoted primarily through Instagram to a millennial and younger following. Its annual revenue has hit $100 million.
Going public may be just around the corner. If it does, the initial public offering roadshow for the internet-based company probably would include showing off its new brick-and-mortar flagship store in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood.
Glossier grew out of a blog started in 2010 by founder Emily Weiss called Into the Gloss that gives beauty tips, profiles fashion industry leaders and interesting women and discusses products. The goal was to create products with relatively low prices that were must-haves but also function as skincare and makeup.
Heavy social media interaction spurred sales. But like a growing number of consumer brands that started online, Glossier saw that a physical location would help increase internet commerce and strengthen customer loyalty. The company learned some of that through pop ups in the United States as well as abroad.
In 2017, it opened a small showroom on the sixth floor at 123 Lafayette St., which originally housed the company’s headquarters, to create more of an experience with Glossier products. Many days, fans waited in lines to make their way up.
Glossier decided to enhance the customer experience by turning the showroom into a full-fledged flagship store. “They had already outgrown their offices” which gave them the option, said Miriam Peterson, a partner in New York architectural firm Peterson Rich Office and oversaw the space renovation. New York-firm Gachot Studios handled the interior design.
Now, customers begin their experience as soon as they enter from street level. It’s a three-story entrance up stairs covered with a deep candy red “quartz stone carpet”, an epoxy resin mixed with quartz granules. A large light illuminates the entrance from the third story to “create the sense that you’re connected to the exterior,” Peterson said. “The idea was to kind of make a stairway to heaven.”
After ascending the stairs, customers enter about 4,000 square feet of retail space. The display stations look a bit like wedding cakes with the hand-troweled plaster layered like icing. Accent walls make use of the same hand-troweled plaster. Peterson said the objective was to create a tactile experience with a “soft, experimental attitude toward the materials”.
The color pink is used throughout. Pink is Glossier’s brand color. But the design didn’t start out with the color. Peterson said as the design evolved everyone agreed that it was appropriate to infuse the color into the space. “The color helped create richness,” Peterson said. Perhaps the most colorful element in the space is the red-colored wavy seating along one wall that looks like lips. Peterson said that wasn’t intentional. “But they definitely evoke lips,” she said.
The space encourages customers to fully immerse themselves in the experience, take selfies and put them on Instagram. Since the company started from a blog, “there’s always been an interactive element, Peterson said. “Social media is how they grew as a brand. So it was always important for the space to be a place for people to take photos.”
Spaces is an occasional CoStar feature showcasing innovative design.
