About.
Launched in 2014 by Emily Weiss, Glossier transformed the direct-to-consumer beauty landscape. The brand grew from four essential products into an omnichannel beauty company spanning skincare, makeup, body care, and fragrance. After acquiring over one million customers in its first four years, Glossier continued to evolve, launching in major retailers like Sephora in 2023 while keeping its creative-driven DTC presence intact.
Challenge: scale performance marketing without sacrificing the brand.
Glossier built one of DTC beauty's most powerful brands on creative-led storytelling. Scaling paid acquisition without diluting that brand was the structural challenge. Every ad needed an experience that matched its creative promise. Every product launch needed its own journey. PDPs were doing too many jobs at once, asked to serve brand expression and conversion simultaneously. The growth team needed to enhance performance marketing efficiency while maintaining the distinctive brand identity that built Glossier. They needed a hands-on strategic partner who could enable experimentation and custom experiences rapidly, without losing the brand.
The team needed a solution that would:
- Improve marketing efficiency without sacrificing brand integrity
- Enable rapid experimentation without requiring additional creative resources
- Provide strategic support for experience optimization
- Leverage Glossier's existing creative assets more effectively
They needed a strategic partner, not a tool.
"Working with FERMÀT has given our growth team the ability to cohesively align our ad-level creative and full-funnel experiences, bridging the gap between our brand vision and performance marketing capabilities." Madeline Kutner, Director of Performance Marketing, Glossier
How FERMÀT worked alongside the team.
FERMÀT's AI agents shipped in partnership with Glossier's growth team, launching 24 new shopping experiences and running merchandising, payment, and launch tests in parallel. The experiments ranged from bigger swings to granular optimizations. Each one cohesively bridged ad-level creative and the full-funnel experience, so Glossier's brand vision and performance marketing capability stopped pulling in different directions. This is what AI native commerce looks like inside a creative-driven brand.
Glossier's operating model also shifted. The growth team stopped trading off brand against performance and started running both in parallel. Glossier moved from periodic launches to continuous experimentation, without sacrificing the brand.
Together the teams ran four core strategies:
- PDPs optimized for both brand and conversion. Glossier's core ecommerce site is highly branded and aesthetically driven, with PDPs that prioritize brand expression over conversion. By leveraging FERMÀT experiences, Glossier combined the best of both worlds. The embedded PDPs blended branding with CRO best practices: educational infographics lifted from Sephora listings, streamlined product copy, preset defaults to best-selling shade variants, and a curated mix of genuine customer reviews.
- Payment method experimentation. Glossier had Apple Pay at checkout but not directly on PDPs. Before Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM), FERMÀT added Apple Pay buttons directly to embedded PDPs. The results were significant. Nearly half of purchases routed through Apple Pay before ever reaching the core Shopify checkout.
- Strategic product merchandising. Heading into BFCM, the team wanted to drive sell-through on a specific fragrance SKU. Agents featured the product above the fold, surfaced its discount through strategic pricing display on both ad and experience levels, and positioned the perfume as the hero of the fragrance shopping experience.
- Dedicated experiences for new product launches. For new collections and even new shade variants, FERMÀT built dedicated experiences. For example, to promote the Black Cherry collection, FERMÀT experiences included video shop landing pages showcasing complete looks, pre-selected Black Cherry shade variants across all relevant products, and consistent collection messaging from ad click to purchase. Shoppers landed exactly where the creative promised.
Results.
Since implementing FERMÀT, Glossier has:
- Launched 24 shopping experiences, with 6 identified as standout high-performers
- Seen up to a 65% lift in ROAS with personalized experiences built on FERMÀT
- Achieved a 25% reduction in CPA across FERMÀT experiences
- Routed nearly 50% of purchases via Apple Pay
- Uncovered insights that inform broader ecommerce operations
The growth team now tests new ideas on FERMÀT experiences before anything touches the core brand site. Wins compound across campaigns and the brand stays clean.
Working with FERMÀT has given our growth team the ability to cohesively align our ad-level creative and full-funnel experiences, bridging the gap between our brand vision and performance marketing capabilities.
