Brand Spotlight: Makeup by Mario
Builders in beauty — founder interviews
We’re in lower Manhattan; It’s November, 2017.
There’s an eternal line on the corner of Canal and Lafayette the size of a Supreme drop.
Shoppers—in droves, and mostly female—descend on the premises like it’s their personal Mecca, with phones in hand, ready to flick up their surroundings like a shutterbug grabbing extra credit after school.
Where are they headed?
Why, the Glossier store at 123 Lafayette, of course.
A brand whose product and storefront served as the creative muse for other brands to imitate during the DTC golden era of the 2010s.
It’s hard to imagine another beauty brand (during that time) that had the kind of chokehold on gen z and millennials the way Glossier did for that moment.
No doubt, Glossier was the product of an appetizing brand presentation. It was also the first brand of its kind for shoppers to discover brands and products purely on Instagram. And ultimately, it ushered in a new wave of marketing to diverse consumer groups, not just white people.
The Glossier store at 123 Lafayette
And in many ways, Glossier created a new language for how to interact with consumers by leveraging the best of both online and IRL tactics, and its success has paved the way for an explosion of brands and products in the beauty space at large.
Beauty is a fascinating consumer category. It seems like no matter how many brands exist, there’s always something for everyone. And over the last decade, with the help of social (ahem, TikTok), it’s exploded into a class of its own, citing the overall market for it at around $100 billion **in the US alone,** and expected by McKinsey to reach $114 billion by 2027.
So, as we tend to do, we decided to research more on this space and explore how beauty’s continued rise has connection to:
A huge thanks to Vaan Group for partnering with us, yet again, on another banger research report. If you missed the previous one we partnered with them on covering the state of luxury brands and their online presence, you can find that here.