The brand has grown to include 12 shades since then, but that is still a small selection compared to the dozens of shades offered by other brands, many newcomers.
And, most important, Glossier’s longstanding resistance to working with third-party retailers made it harder and harder for the brand to acquire new customers organically using just its social and online channels — a pinch that other direct-to-consumer brands are also feeling, Ms. Duggal said.
“The shift in the customer acquisition algorithm for paid social now makes it very hard to scale and find profitability,” she said, adding that selling through physical stores remains the biggest driver of sales across the board. According to a McKinsey 2020 report, 85 percent of beauty products were purchased in physical stores before the pandemic. Even younger consumers made the majority of their purchases in stores.
Then, in August 2020, in the thick of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality, came an anonymous letter from the Glossier retail employees (known internally as “editors”) alleging a racist, toxic work environment.
Management was “ill-equipped to guide a diverse team through the unique stressors of working in an experiential store,” the letter reads. When customers were hostile with the retail staff, including during incidents where a man massaged a staff member without her consent or when white teenagers played with the “darkest complexion products in gleeful blackface,” the retail staff “had come to expect no intervention and little recourse — not even reassurance of our safety.”
At that point, several other founders of the original girlbosses class were under scrutiny. Current and former employees accused them of abusive and aggressive leadership styles (a type of scrutiny that founders and chief executives often avoid). Away, Ms. Korey’s company, banned employees from emailing each other and limited employees’ paid time off, The Verge reported; Away said that it wanted to keep employees communicating over Slack instead, for reasons of “transparency.”
Source: NY Times