// Glossier has made 80 people, a third of its entire workforce, redundant
// The job cuts mainly impact the beauty brand’s tech team as it has decided to work with external partners instead of having an internal team
Beauty brand Glossier has laid off a third of its workforce this week as it slashes its internal tech team in favour of working with external partners.
More than 80 jobs were cut on Wednesday, according to Retail Dive.
In an email to staff founder Emily Weiss explained: “[W]e are shifting our technology strategy to leverage external partners for parts of our platform that we’re currently maintaining internally.”
She added: “We’re making these changes to effectively execute what we are uniquely suited to do at Glossier: cultivate a brand that inspires our community, deliver magical and unique experiences, and create essential beauty products that our customers can use for a lifetime.”
Weiss emphasised that technology was still “extraordinarly important” to its customer experience despite the redundancies.
Founded in 2014, Glossier is often heralded as one of the big direct to consumer (DTC) success stories. The business raised Series funding in July last year which valued the beauty brand at $1.8 billion.
READ MORE: Can beauty retail make a comeback post Covid-19?
However, it has encountered bumps in the road as it has grown. Glossier culled all of its retail staff as it shut all stores in August 2020 before stepping back into bricks and mortar retail a year later. It still plans to expand its retail footprint beyond the three stores it opened last year.
In fact, the $80m funding it raised last July is earmarked to fuel international expansion and fund “dozens of new stores”. Just last month the US brand opened its first overseas flagship store in London’s Covent Garden.
Weiss admitted to making some mistakes as Glossier has scaled in her email to staff.
She wrote: “Over the past two years, we prioritized certain strategic projects that distracted us from the laser-focus we needed to have on our core business: scaling our beauty brand. We also got ahead of ourselves on hiring. These missteps are on me.”
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