Our Commitment to Sustainability
A letter from Emily Weiss, Founder and CEO
People have been at the core of Glossier Inc from day one, when our inaugural four products were born out of conversations with readers of Into The Gloss. For half a decade, you’ve told us what products you’d like to see us make, the role beauty plays in your lives, and what causes you’d like us to champion. More recently, our global community is increasingly focused on the impact the products they use have on the environment. We hear you—and as is often the case, we’ve been inspired by your voices, your knowledge, and your desire to do more good and less harm. We share this desire.
As a founder and CEO (and consumer myself), the tension between bettering people’s lives through what we create and inherently producing “stuff” is one I feel near daily. It’s one of the main reasons we’ve built a highly curated portfolio of products, and have always strived to keep an extremely high bar for what we actually launch. (Often we ask ourselves, “can this truly be a ‘hero’ product, becoming a part of people’s lives for decades to come?” If we don’t feel this kind of conviction in a product’s potential, we keep moving.)
When it comes to sustainability, at a little over five years old, we’re simultaneously a young company with nothing but road ahead, and an organization with some legacy decisions under our belts that we want to rethink (and rework). So in early 2019, leaders from across Supply Chain, Packaging, Product Development, Design, and other teams did a thorough audit. We pored through your messages and emails, talked to industry experts, did a bunch of research, and put together an initial roadmap—one that can (and should) evolve as we evolve, as a company and as a collective. We also developed a set of principles to empower our entire team to make decisions across the company with sustainability front of mind.
And we’ve made some early progress: In the world of packaging, we’re focused on reduction—of excess, waste, and impact on the environment. As a direct-to-consumer business, an important milestone was the launch of Limited Packaging, which makes it easy to opt out of the pink pouch and any packaging extras when ordering on our website. Since we launched this option in June of 2019, you’ve selected Limited Packaging more than *250,000* times.
We also updated our shipping boxes to be made from 100% recycled content, discontinued sticker sheets, and began the process of removing all unnecessary liners in our boxes. Starting in April of 2019, we’ve offered pink pouch recycling at all our retail locations, both permanent and temporary.
On the product side, we’re discontinuing one of our products: Glitter Gelée. We launched Glitter Gelée last March, and quickly heard from many of you who were disappointed that we’d created a product using glitter, which has become increasingly and deservedly controversial since it gets into the waterways and accumulates in the ocean. It was clear to us that we’d made the wrong choice, so we pledged to work on reformulating this product with bio-glitter, a newer and more environmentally-friendly raw material.
Over the past year, our product development team has experimented with multiple formulas using bio-glitter, but ultimately we haven’t been able to make a product that we love. It’s possible that future innovations in bio-glitter materials will enable us to try again, but in the meantime, we’ve decided to discontinue Glitter Gelée as of March 2.
As we embark on a new decade, we enter it with eyes wide open that sustainability is one of the greatest undertakings of all of our lifetimes. As a company, we’re making an ongoing commitment to the environment, our customers, and our team that we will always seek to improve and innovate when it comes to our products, packaging, and operations. We’re not always going to nail it, or have the perfect “forever” solution, but I don’t want that to stop us from making this journey something we share and, even better, inviting you to join that conversation—it’s how we’ll make the most impact. The knowledge across millions of people is always going to be greater than what the 250 of us inside these walls can gather on our own. This is just the beginning, and we thank you for your passion, patience, and participation.
Emily Weiss, Founder & CEO
We’re excited to share more about our sustainability efforts, and we also want to hear from you. Please get in touch: gTEAM+impact@glossier.com
