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Weiss, who founded the company in 2014, will lead its board as executive chairwoman. Kyle Leahy, Glossier’s chief commercial officer, will become CEO effective immediately. The brand’s CMO Ali Weiss is also leaving the company.
In a blog post, Weiss said, “with this CEO evolution, I’ll be able to focus more of my time as I did in the earlier days —supporting our brilliant leaders of creative, brand, product and retail, as they take our customer experience innovation to new heights.”
The business was a DTC darling and repeatedly raised funding at higher and higher valuations to fuel its expansion, including physical stores and international sales. It most recently raised an $80 million series E in July 2021, to fuel its retail expansion, which valued the company at $1.8 billion. Within eight months of that funding round, however, Glossier laid off about a third of its workforce or more than 80 employees (a spokesperson for the brand said that the layoffs were intended to help the company refocus on beauty.) The brand opened three stores in Seattle, Los Angeles and London late last year, after New York and Los Angeles flagships and a London pop-up closed in March 2020. The brand struggled to tailor its messaging to a new group of younger consumers who shopped other brands in an increasingly crowded market. Additionally, its advantage as a direct-to-consumer brand began to wane, largely a sign of the challenges facing the broader DTC model.
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The direct-to-consumer pioneer, which popularised millennial pink and dewy skin, can’t keep up with an evolving beauty industry, customer and retail landscape.
