Do we like them?

Do we like Emily Weiss?

Our score: 6 out of 10. No harmful words or acts of her own turned up and the company gave real money to racial justice causes, but the staff complaints keep it in the middle.

Weiss founded Glossier in 2014 and ran it as CEO until May 2022, when she moved to executive chair and handed the top job to Kyle Leahy. She framed the handover as a long game, saying Glossier was in “year 7 of a 100-year journey”. It is the story of a founder who built a name brand and then stepped back.

The handover came after a rough patch. Earlier in 2022 the company laid off about a third of its workforce, and Weiss took responsibility and acknowledged the company had “made some mistakes” in strategy and hiring. Glossier had also closed its stores in 2020 and laid off its retail staff during the pandemic, before reopening them in 2021.

The messiest chapter is August 2020. A group of former retail staff calling itself Outta the Gloss alleged a hostile and discriminatory store culture, an unresponsive HR system and poor working conditions. Weiss answered on Glossier's blog, saying outside counsel had investigated and that the company would redesign retail management. The group called that “empty words”, and Glossier then posted an apology with an action plan that included anti-racism training. These are allegations, not court findings, and no lawsuit turned up in what we read.

There is nothing new on her lately that we could confirm from the sources we could open, so there is no fresh controversy to report. The record is thinner on her own views than on her business, and that is the honest gap here.

The good stuff is mostly that pledge, plus building a beauty brand from a blog and then stepping aside when the company needed a different kind of leader. Against that sit the staff complaints and the layoffs, which are fair things to weigh.

So would we support her? On harm, yes: no harmful words, no harmful company turned up. On being nice to work for, it is a close call, because the workplace complaints were serious and the response was criticised as too little by the people who raised them.