“My lip gloss is poppin'”

Glossier’s future gets a brand-new $52m coat of lipstick

Direct-to-consumer beauty company Glossier just raised another $52m, bringing their total funding to just over $86m since launching in late 2014.

D2C companies have been shaking up industries left and right, but makeup is one of the final frontiers for e-commerce.

It takes a lot of trust to get someone to buy a highly individualized product that they’ll wear on their face every day, and traditionally, beauty brands have been beholden to mall department stores and wholesalers.

Yet, since their inception, Glossier has been known for their ability to mobilize fans and rise above the noise in the crowded beauty space.

“Apple who?”

According to founder and CEO Emily Weiss, their showroom in SoHo generates more revenue per square-foot than the average Apple store, and the company reportedly tripled their revenue in 2017 (they won’t disclose actual numbers).

And it’s almost all organic: Glossier says 80% of their growth and sales come from peer-to-peer recommendations or their own channels.

So what’s in the Glossier Kool-Aid?

Transparency in concealers

Glossier boasts radically open communication channels with customers, including highly personalized one-on-one interactions with members of their 30-person “customer experience” team, whom they refer to as “editors.”

Weiss is also acutely aware of the power of social media groundswell for consumer-facing brands: In 2016, Glossier gave their biggest brand evangelists landing pages and started paying them to participate in feedback sessions, host community events, and share content on social.

In Weiss’ words, every customer “has a microphone and she’s reaching 50, 500, 5,000 or 500,000 of her nearest and dearest friends” — so you better have ‘em on the payroll.

A strong foundation for the future

Their last round of funding helped them expand their presence overseas, but they plan on funneling this new cash into product innovation (Glossier currently launches a new product every 6 weeks).

The question is, at 22 products, whether they’ll be able to scale their same level of customer intimacy as they grow.

Snap’s market value fell $1.3B after a single tweet by Kylie Jenner

On Wednesday afternoon, at 4:50pm ET, Kylie Jenner posed a question to her 24.5m twitter followers: “sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me… ugh this is so sad.”

Overnight, the tweet was shared nearly 300k times — and when the markets opened Thursday, Snap Inc. stock tumbled by as much as 7.2%, or $1.3B in market value.

While analysts can’t conclusively determine whether the tweet was solely responsible for Snap’s decline, it serves as a reminder of just how dependent Snap is on influencers.

As recently as 2016, Jenner was Snapchat’s most viewed user “by a longshot” — and her declaration didn’t go unnoticed by Wall Street: Many comments on Jenner’s post echoed discontent with Snap’s redesign earlier this week, and the company’s “abandonment” of its core audience.

A follow-up tweet by Jenner 11 minutes later (“still love you tho snap … my first love”) didn’t seem to do much in way of recouping Snap’s losses.

SpinLaunch is raising $30m to catapult cargo into space

On Wednesday, SpaceX launched the previously flown Falcon 9 rocket into space, carrying satellites to bring 5G Internet to the world. But what if you could do it via catapult?

Catapult? The quiet startup SpinLaunch thinks they can, and they’re aiming to raise a $30m Series A to develop the tech and prove it.

Sometimes to go forward, ya gotta go back

Catapults are some straight-up ancient Greek tech — reportedly created by Dionysius the Elder of Syracuse back in good ol’ 400 BCE to launch stones over walls and whatnot.

Now, SpinLaunch is looking to bring it back, only this time it’ll be a little more high tech, and aimed at reducing the price of a space launch to less than $500k.

According to TechCrunch, Spinlaunch wants to use a centrifuge spinning at an “incredible rate” inside a vacuum, which will harness enough energy to fling a proposed payload outta this world at speeds of 3k mph.

SpinLaunch has been pretty secretive… until now

Started in 2014 by Titan Aerospace founder Jonathan Yaney, the company has quietly raised $10m to date.

They don’t have a backer for their Series A yet, but last month, the Hawaii state Senate proposed issuing $25m in bonds to help the startup build their launch system. So, as lofty as the goal is, they’re making some progress.

BYO-Dank: Colorado has the nation’s first “bud and breakfast” hotel

Weed was legalized in Colorado in 2012 — and since then, it has brought in hundreds of millions in tax revenue, which the state has used to fund local schools and alleviate homelessness. But it’s still illegal to toke in public.

This sparked a high-dea for Colorado residents Joel and Lisa Schneider: to create the nation’s first pot-friendly hotel in 2014, aptly named “Bud+Breakfast.”

A bed and breakfast… with chiller marketing

The Schneiders don’t have a license to sell weed, so there’s a strict bring your own cannabis policy, but what Bud+Breakfast lacks in originality, it swiftly makes up for in stoner-like hospitality.

The Schneider’s Bud+Breakfast is a safe haven for guests to steez in peace while on vacation, with a complimentary “wake and bake” breakfast that includes bacon, eggs, and an open area to smoke that sweet green. Also included: a 4:20pm gathering in the living room, with munchies.

There’s been some highs and lows

At $299-$399 a night, guests of all (legal) ages travel across the country to toke it up in quaint Colorado fashion. Reportedly, the Schneiders raked in over $1m off their investment in 2016.

Unfortunately, they had a rocky 2017 (they had to close 2 additional locations), but the weed-trepreneurs feel confident they can bring the ebb back to a flow by licensing the Bud+Breakfast namesake to other proprietors.

1. Most things start from scratch, but an itch ends in one.
2. It doesn’t matter whether you go all out or all in.
3. What would the design of a chair be if our knees bent backwards?
4. If a newborn baby spends 10 years with no human contact and only hears two computers communicating in binary code for its entire life, will the human be able to speak binary and make sense of the numbers the same way computers can?
5. Toast is just twice-baked bread.
6. A drunk cyclops wouldn’t see double.
7. via Reddit

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