NEW YORK — CEO Emily Weiss (or someone on her press team) wrote, in an announcement post yesterday, that “After years of thinking, planning, formulating, and brushing up on our French, we at Glossier are finally ready to share some big news with the world: We’re launching internationally!”
In the announcement she stressed that Glossier intends to take the same methodical, community-focused approach with each new market, just like it has in the US. “We’ll be taking this country by country, making sure we nurture each new community like we did with our US crowd,” she said. In the expansion plans, Canada is first up, naturally. Then it’s on to the UK, before heading to France in early 2018. Ostensibly, each new market will be getting its own Glossier bureau, in which case we should expect to see more job openings for the brand in the immediate future.
Glossier’s expansion, placed into context.
Keep in mind, Glossier is still only three years old, and is expanding internationally at a time when most older MLCs (modern luxury companies) and DTC brands are still only shipping domestically. One big example is Warby Parker which at seven years old just started testing the international market by stepping over into Canada just a few months ago. But even they aren’t venturing over into Europe quite yet. For them, this may be because eyewear competition abroad is more established than in the US, as several DTC brands in the WP mold have already established a strong presence there — Ace + Tate being a prime example. Still it’s interesting to note just how rapidly Weiss has been scaling Glossier over the last several months. There seems to be a noticeable uptick in momentum, and by all appearances it shows no signs of slowing — for better or for worse.
Alongside this international push, you should also expect to see more domestic retail openings as well, with LA being a natural next step with the brand having already opened up the its first permanent showroom in NYC this year. And if the following words from Weiss are anything to go by, we should expect something rather soon: “I think offline is really important. There’s definitely something to be said for wanting to touch and feel product,” Weiss says. “And I think what we’ve seen happen is people are just as interested in touching and feeling brand.”
