In New York City, Glossier Gets a Glow-Up 💅
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Dewy, glowy, and fresh are bywords of the beauty community, and perhaps no retailer has captured their essence more than the direct-to-consumer makeup and skin-care company Glossier. Products with dreamy-sounding names like Milky Jelly Cleanser, Cloud Paint, and Futuredew have become cult favorites, and the brand’s pleasingly minimalist packaging and highly Instagramable, pink-tinged stores have become paragons of millennial taste.
Nearly a decade after the company’s founding, and three years after the pandemic forced it to shutter several retail locations (including its stairway-to-heaven Gachot Studios–designed flagship) alongside some well-documented corporate soul-searching, Glossier is back in Manhattan with a luminous new SoHo flagship. The space itself is a love letter to New York City—complete with an homage to the MTA—and also a nod to the brand’s evolving values and customer base. Gone is all that Millennial Pink; in its place is a more muted palette of blush and taupe. Call it a glow-up.
“Given that Glossier started in New York, it was so exciting for this opportunity to think about returning to our roots, to our home so to speak,” says the company’s vice president and deputy creative director Adrianna Deleo, who has been with Glossier since its inception in 2014. As such, their mood boards were filled with images of New York of yore—“you know, those dreamy lofts in SoHo that you hear about,” she explains.
When you enter the flagship through a pair of frosted front doors on Spring Street, you step down into a deep, monochromatic room, bisected by a long table filled with Glossier products and awash in a single shade of putty-pink. “Color has always been part of our DNA—pink, specifically,” Deleo says. In this case, “we want the space to feel a little bit more grown-up, but still really warm.”
Rippling barrel vaults overhead (architectural curves and arches are a theme throughout the store) and bespoke recessed resin sconces bathe the room in a uniform bright light. Zips of fire-engine red—in the handrails, the light fixtures, and custom illuminated shelving—match the tint of makeup bottle caps and ceramic candles that line the main beauty bar, making the product part of the interior design. “We were balancing the plaster walls, which are really soft and textured, with a high-gloss red, which feels a little bit contrast-y,” Deleo explains.
The idea of a Glossier “homecoming” is reflected in everything from the furnishings and the gorgeous light fixtures to the residential scale of the rooms themselves, which include a “wet bar” with bright-red sinks and samples; a “merch room” with branded tote bags and sweats for sale; a lounge in which to deposit your bored kids (or boyfriend); and a “community room” for both virtual and IRL tutorials and events.
There are also some surprises, notably a brightly lit corridor that leads to the most self-esteem-boosting (and filth-free) subway bench you’ve ever seen, surrounded by gleaming white tile, fluorescent tube lights, and a mosaic made by the MTA’s favored artisans proclaiming “You look good.” Other elements remain unchanged: Store employees—called “editors” in Glossier vernacular—still wear pink jumpsuits, and the product line still includes the classics.
It’s all part of a larger Glossier comeback. The Manhattan location joins outposts in Atlanta, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Washington, Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle, and London, with more to come. The store has also partnered with Sephora to sell its products. So is this Glossier 2.0? “I don’t know if [that’s] exactly the right term,” Deleo says. “It’s less about asking what a millennial wants or what a Gen-Zer wants. It's more about, How do we stay relevant?
“The phrase we’ve been using a lot internally is, ‘Glossier was born in New York but raised on the Internet,’ ” she adds.
As soon as you approach the new store, it’s clear that it's already making a splash among the next generation of Glossier devotees. On a recent damp evening in SoHo, passersby paused in front of the windows, smartphones out, to watch a mesmerizing conveyor belt slowly rotate bags of product up, down, and around, like a glam Ferris wheel. Inside, beautiful young things packed the product bar, demo-ing Glossier’s Boy Brow eyebrow tint on their friends.
“I think that’s part of our DNA,” Deleo reflects. “Let’s make it fun.”
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