Beauty brand Glossier has made the “incredibly difficult” decision to lay off 80 of its corporate staff.
Around one third of its workforce will be affected by the decision, which was announced to workers in a letter from founder and CEO Emily Weiss.
In the email, obtained by Retail Week, she admitted to having made “some mistakes” over the past two years, as the brand navigated through the pandemic.
“We prioritised certain strategic projects that distracted us from the laser-focus we needed to have on our core business: scaling our beauty brand,” she said.
Weiss also admitted that the company had “got ahead of ourselves on hiring”.
In November, the brand hired three executives to its team in the form of Seun Sodipo as Chief Financial Officer, Kyle Leahy as Chief Commercial Officer and Kristy Maynes as Senior Vice President of Retail.
However, it is the technology team that is expected to be hardest hit by the decision.
“We are shifting our technology strategy to leverage external partners for parts of our platform that we're currently maintaining internally,” added Weiss.
In a statement to Cosmetics Business, the brand added: “On Wednesday we parted ways with more than 80 members of our team.
“This was a difficult but necessary decision. We've always been a people-powered organisation, and are grateful to all of our current and former team members for their contributions to Glossier.
“We believe these changes leave us well positioned as we continue to grow the brand long into the future.”
The fresh round of redundancies follows a mass cull of in-store retail jobs in 2020 due to the pandemic.
Since then, the billion dollar brand has made a return to retail with new stores in London, UK, and the US.
Glossier found fame for its pioneering DTC model and simple but effective packaging, and was valued at US$1.2bn in 2019.
