Getting Glossy: What Marisa Meltzer, Emily Weiss, and Glossier Teach Us About Executive Communication

Just read Glossy: Ambition, Beauty and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier by Maris Meltzer in about two days. Very enjoyable in a nostalgic way. Then again, anything that casts New York in pre-pandemic glamour qualifies as a nostalgia-fest. Plus, I remember what it was like working for a Silicon Alley tech startup in the early 2010s. Intoxicating stuff. Until it wasn’t.

Have to imagine there’s going to be a lot of conversation about this book because it’s pretty critical of Glossier founder Emily Weiss. Why exactly, I can’t really say.

Meltzer looks at Weiss’s eventual exit from Glossier as CEO in the context of the #girlboss reckoning that came for fellow female founders like The Wing’s Audrey Gelman and Away’s Steph Korey. Hard to say Weiss and Glossier “fell from grace” though. Unlike, say, The Wing, Glossier is still around and chillin’ at a $1.8B valuation. Yeah, there was a trough of disillusionment, and the pandemic may have altered some plans, but to be fair, that’s true of pretty much every venture-backed idea.

So what did Weiss do that was so bad or negligent as a founder and CEO? One of the biggest crimes, in Meltzer’s eyes, is giving non-answers in interviews 😆

By the end of the book Meltzer’s had enough:

“[Weiss’s] answers were truly amazing exercises in obfuscation. The way she spoke felt like shewas running for office: inane, plotless, a banal word salad.”

Ouch. I guess you could understand Meltzer taking flimsy interviews personally. She wanted juicy insights for her book! But is technobabble unique to Weiss? I’ve worked with execs for over ten years on this stuff, and I can say… methinks not.

Exec Comms 101: Talk Normal

I guess what is unique to Weiss, and what Meltzer finds truly tragic about her, is that at one time, Weiss was an excellent communicator. Meltzer points to the blog post Weiss wrote for Into the Gloss introducing Glossier as proof, and it’s worth re-reading that Glossier announcement. If I could coach an exec on how to announce a venture or product, I would just show them that intro post.

Meltzer describes this early version of Weiss as a communicator who “was adept at making her announcements sound like a polished version of the way people talk.” Couldn’t agree more. It reads like the work of one person, not a committee of product managers, marketers, and comms people. That it’s raw and a little rambling is a virtue because it’s actually believable. And above all else, it offers a point of view.

You will not read exec comms like this in 2024:

Confidence is overrated—it can be faked, whereas freedom is fearlessness. Freedom is being more or less okay with wherever you’re at, at any given point in your life or your day or your hour, be it really sucky or really great or somewhere in between (and there are a lot of in-betweens.) The single guiding principle that I try to follow, assuming blindly that the rest will fall into place, is to operate squarely in the present. I think it’s one of the most difficult things for anyone to do.

“Polished” here doesn’t mean bland or robotic. It means an awareness of the audience and brand idea, and shrewd execution in pursuing both.

Into the Gloss and Glossier were hellbent on showing women that here, finally, was a beauty brand that wasn’t judging you. It was befriending you. That was the brand idea. As the founder and leader of the venture, Weiss’s comms needed to embody that idea.

That’s how you end up with a word like “sucky” in a launch post. It’s brilliant.

So when Weiss swapped this kind of shrewd communication for the vapid rhapsodizing of a different milieu—that of the tech disruptor— I can totally understand Meltzer’s disappointment. It’s just not specific to Weiss.

Big Company, Generic Comms?

The bigger a company gets, the more generic the comms, typically. Tragic, yes, but also logical. The stakes only get higher with growth. One word from the CEO can tank a stock, lose the board, or create a public crisis from which it’s very hard to recover. Being cagey with journalists? Also par for the course. Surely Meltzer has experienced that with plenty of male subjects.

That’s not the only reason execs resort to cliches about “providing the best possible experience for the customer,” “maintaining a beginner’s mindset,” or some other Jeff Bezos misquote. As much as these leaders to stand out for their achievements, they really just want to be accepted as… acceptable. A convincing image of a leader. So everyone has fallen under the jargon’s spell. It’s a big reason our feeds are increasingly terrible.

Weiss all but says as much in the book during a final interview with Meltzer. Meltzer asks Weiss if she felt she had to change how she related to employees, or the press, or how people perceived her as Glossier grew. Weiss admits to some pressure to project “professionalism” but also resenting that “professionalism” for women is defined differently. They’re expected to smile, be nice, charming. Expectations men don’t have to deal with in this arena.

To me, as a comms strategist, this is a pretty revealing answer. It’s one I’ve heard from both men and women, actually: they often feel pressure to adopt a communication style that is foreign to them when embarking thought leadership or some other business aim. To which I would ask: If you’re using executive communications strategically, is it better to be professional or believable and clear, like that original Glossier memo? You have to strike a balance of engaging the world honestly, thoughtfully (dare I say authentically) without being irresponsible.

Meltzer takes a very different lesson from Weiss’s answer though. She concludes that Weiss seems “both unable and unwilling to tell me one real thing about power or money or success or hardship.”

A Double Standard

This is one of my problems with an otherwise highly entertaining book. Meltzer observes throughout the book that women founders like Weiss are often subjected to far harsher standards of behavior and scrutiny than their male counterparts. Hard to imagine that “cliquish behavior” among employees in the workplace for example, would surface as a public accusation against a male CEO. Then, in the same breath, Meltzer subjects Weiss to the same double standard she finds so objectionable, like bemoaning Weiss’s fairly standard answers to standard questions.

It’s like Meltzer was personally disappointed Weiss had cashed in the Glossier brand idea—that of the beauty-brand-as-friend—for something decidedly less original. That she turned out to be just another tech bro.

If only one lesson comes of this discourse, may it be that words like “sucky” are once again permitted in executive communications as we all decide to use our real voices.

Then add a little polish.