A journalist’s deep dive into beauty brand ‘Glossier’: How Emily Weiss built a $1.9 billion business

Weiss was not the first founder of a company to take an assertive role in trying to change the way the public perceived them. Founders like Weiss, or the ones she shaped herself after, are big talkers. Showboats. Creators of their own worlds. They say they’re changing the world, and they believe it, and they’ll say it to anyone. Jeff Bezos started out as a dork wunderkind who changed the business world and has now evolved into a source of some controversy over the treatment of workers. Elon Musk went from a proudly neurodivergent wunderkind into a political bad-boy billionaire on the loose. Martha Stewart began as a type A entrepreneur moving at the speed of the Energizer Bunny, taking the lemons of homemaking and turning them into billion-dollar lemonade. Sure, she happened to go to prison along the way, but she managed to emerge seemingly more likable and with a little bit of street cred. In her eighties, she is known for having a friendship with Snoop Dog, a cannabis business, and a propensity for posting thirst-trap photos of herself that people take seriously.

The most obvious evolution was in Weiss’s interests. She personally had invested in the Co–Star astrology...

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