Writer and New York Times contributor Marisa Meltzer is set to publish a book about the meteoric rise and slow fizzle of beauty brand Glossier, detailing its evolution from cult blog to billion-dollar behemoth and its recent failure to keep pace in a changing industry. “Glossy: Ambition, Beauty and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier,” is set for release by One Signal at Simon & Schuster in Summer 2023.
“Let’s pull back the curtain a little bit on this,” said Meltzer. “They’ve done a great job at fostering mystique — let’s get into it.”
Into the Gloss, Weiss and Glossier caught Meltzer’s attention from its earliest days. In the book, she will take a critical look at the era-defining company and where it’s headed, while savouring all the story’s juicy details, like what business books sat on the shelves of founder Emily Weiss’s New York apartment, and what quote she chose for her high school senior yearbook.
“The sprawling nature of the company was what always fascinated me from the beginning,” said Meltzer.
After publishing her last book, “This is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World — and Me,” in April 2020, Meltzer had her sights set on writing about the beauty industry and its changes over the past decade, such as the rise of independent brands and shifts in aesthetic trends like no-makeup makeup to heavy contouring. She realised Glossier was at the centre of it all, and that zooming in on Weiss and the business was a way to touch each topic. Plus, she could broach the process of navigating venture funding and Instagram, and how society, media and the business world treat female founders.
Glossier just has that sort of intangible mystique that makes for a great story, said Meltzer. She highlights similarities to Adam Neumann’s WeWork, which she experienced firsthand attending the start-up’s “Summer Camp” for the New York Times in 2014. In writing the book, she’s thinking about how inclusivity manifested itself at Into the Gloss (whose slogan at launch was “you can sit with us”) and then later in product at Glossier. She’s also interested in the idea that a person can be understood through their routines, a sentiment that Into the Gloss was founded on.
For the book, Meltzer spoke to Weiss, who she profiled for Vanity Fair in 2019, as well as a number of employees, company watch dogs, investors and store associates.
“She’s always really known who she is and who she wants to be in a way that I and probably most people do not know …” Meltzer said of Weiss. “I am fascinated by Emily and that kind of person that is so compelled, and where that ambition comes from and what it means to them, and how the rest of us interact with it.”
