On September 20th, 10 Emily Weiss started writing. She worked as an assistant at Vogue at the time, which meant she had none of the resources typically required to start a brand: She wasn't a founder. She didn't have any money. She didn't even know what she was going to do. But before Weiss went into work every morning, she blogged.
She interviewed women about their skincare routines and published those interviews on a free blog that she named Into The Gloss. No brand guidelines. No ad dollars. Just one POV consistently: that interviews with real women about their real skincare routines would trump anything advertised or performed every single time.
By the time Weiss left Vogue four years later, she had amassed approximately two million monthly readers of Into The Gloss and still hadn’t sold a single product.
Glossier launched in October of 2014, and Weiss announced it exactly how she’d announced every blog post: in the first person and on Into The Gloss. She spoke directly to the readers who’d been following her tell-all interviews with beauty celebrities for years. She set up Glossier’s Instagram account months before any products existed, based purely on UI. It hit 13,000 followers in a week. When the product launched, it sold out immediately, not because of any advertising, but because by then the Glossier brand existed in full inside people’s heads. Nearly 80% of Glossier’s early customers heard about the brand from a friend, according to Glossier’s own data. By January of 2021, Glossier had peaked at a $1.8 billion valuation.
Before Weiss sold a single product. Before Glossier had employees or warehouses or products. The brand came first. The strategy was built around it.
Here’s the thing about “brand.”
When people say “brand,” what they think of is a logo. Or a color palette. Or a pretty font. Brand is none of those things. Those are how you show your brand. But they are not the brand itself.
Your brand is the conversation people are having about you when you leave the room. It’s the subconsciously familiar feeling someone gets when they see your name on a newsletter or hear it in a podcast intro or pick up your product in their hands. That feeling is the result of every interaction they’ve had with you, from the ads they ignored to the content they loved. And you can create as many interactions as you want for free.
All interactions matter, but the ones that actually build your brand are the consistent ones. The ones that remind people of who you are every single time they have an experience with you.
And those consistent experiences are your point of view. When Weiss started Into The Gloss, her perspective was that authentic interviews trumped anything a brand would say about their own products. Every interview she published reinforced that perspective by refusing to hide anything.
Nobody knew who Glossier was when product first launched except for Emily Weiss. But her readers did. They knew Glossier would have some version of her Into The Gloss point of view because that’s exactly what they’d gotten for four years: her point of view.
Same point of view, same voice, repeated thousands of times. That’s how you build brand recognition. And when it’s time to turn your hobby into a business, you already have a legion of people who are ready to become your first customers.
Think years-in. All famous brands started unknown. All deserve your attention.
