The Blog Came First

In 2010 Emily Weiss started a blog called Into The Gloss. The format that made it was simple: interview a woman, in her bathroom, about what is actually on her shelf.

Not what she endorses. Not what she was sent. What is there, half used, that she reaches for.

It ran for four years and reached hundreds of thousands of readers a month. In October 2014 she launched Glossier with four products.

Look at the order, because the order is the entire lesson.

Almost every brand does this the other way round. You make something, then you go looking for people who might want it, and you pay to find them. The looking is expensive, the finding is uncertain, and the thing you made was designed in a room, based on what you and a small number of colleagues guessed.

She built the audience first, and by accident built the best possible research instrument while she was doing it.

Consider what four years of comment sections on a beauty blog actually contains. Thousands of people describing, unprompted, what they use, what they gave up on, what they wish existed, what they are mixing at home because nothing on sale does the job. Nobody is being paid, nobody is answering a survey, and crucially nobody is talking to a brand. They are talking to each other, which is when people tell the truth.

Compare that to what a company normally has: a focus group of twelve people in a room being watched through glass, who will say what they think they are supposed to say, for a fee, about a product they saw ten minutes ago.

The research was better and it was also free. In fact it was better than free, because the blog was attention people arrived for on purpose rather than attention that had to be purchased.

That is the piece worth taking away and it generalises far past beauty. Attention you buy is a cost that resets every quarter and stops the moment you stop paying. Attention you own keeps working in the months when there is no budget at all, and it compounds, because the people who arrive bring other people.

Then the launch itself, which was four products.

A balm, a mist, a skin tint, a moisturiser. That is a very short list, and it is a deliberate one.

Four products is a claim you can stand behind, keep in stock, and explain in a sentence. Forty products is a catalogue, and a catalogue is not a brand: nobody can describe it to a friend, nothing is definitively the thing you are for, and the operational load of keeping it all in stock will eat a young company alive before the range has taught you anything.

Narrow ranges appear repeatedly in this subject, from Uniqlo to Cold Culture to Comme des Garçons, always for slightly different reasons, always with the same effect: the brand becomes describable.

The comparison that closes this chapter is with Nude Project, five years later and in a different country and category.

Two students filmed themselves trying to build something, for years, before there was much to buy. A blogger interviewed strangers about their bathroom shelves, for years, before there was anything to buy at all.

Different methods, identical asset. Both ended up with a large group of people who felt the brand was partly theirs, because they were there before it existed. That is the only marketing advantage in this entire subject that cannot be purchased at any price, and the only way to get it is to start early and be publicly uncertain in front of people.