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Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. Today, Rachel Strugatz digs into what’s really happening at Glossier, the beauty brand (or maybe just the brand?) of our time. Up top, some C-suite news from Saks Global, and my final thoughts on the final New York shows.
I’ve had a fabulous past 24 hours here. Yesterday afternoon, I wore a hard hat to walk through the new Laura Gonzalez–designed Printemps department store at 1 Wall Street, set to open this spring, just a block away from Puck’s South Tribeca headquarters. More soon, but all I have to say for now is: Holy cow. It’s lavish, it’s inventive, it’s fun—this is going to be a thing. Thanks to the retailer’s amazing U.S. C.E.O., Laura Lendrum, for taking the time.
After Thom Browne, I headed up to Majorelle, on 63rd Street, for a dinner in honor of designer Victor Glemaud’s collection with Patterson Flynn. Victor has a really special group of friends—including Bethann Hardison, Kate Young, Virginia Smith, and Patrick Robinson—and I couldn’t think of a better way to end this New York Fashion Week. (We mostly talked about our dependence on The RealReal, not the shows.)
At Victor’s dinner, I sat with Line Sheet reader Lisa Metcalfe, a longtime business consultant to fashion brands of various stages and sizes. After walking the Bergdorf Goodman floor the other day, she came to the conclusion that Phoebe Philo is the best thing going, both in terms of design and quality. The next morning, I stopped by Luisaviaroma on Bond Street to try on pieces from Philo’s Collection B. (It’s good.)
By the time you read this, I’ll be at the Oscar de la Renta store uptown, where Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia are showing their Fall/Winter 2025 collection to a group of friends and clients. No press, except for me. More on that tomorrow—and pray (or whatever you do) that my flight takes off tonight!
Mentioned in this issue: Glossier, Emily Weiss, Charlotte Tilbury, LVMH, Sephora, Rhode, Hailey Bieber, Selena Gomez, Rare Beauty, Lady Gaga, Haus Labs, Off-White, Francesco Ragazzi, Palm Angels, Saks, Jeff Pedersen, Mark Weinstein, Calvin Klein, NYFW, Joseph Altuzarra, Oscar de la Renta, Michael Kors, Tory Burch, Thom Browne, and many more…
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Three Things You Should Know…
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- Bluestar’s NGG takeover: More on this another time, but it’s very interesting to see that Bluestar Alliance, the licensing firm that bought Off-White from LVMH, has now acquired Palm Angels—once the second largest brand in the New Guards Group fashion accelerator. WWD reports that founder Francesco Ragazzi will get outta there as a result. To say this is not the way it was supposed to go is an understatement. Palm Angels had been growing fast, and poised to offset slowing sales at Off-White, when NGG was taken over by Farfetch in 2019. But instead of evolving into something bigger, it’s been diminished. (NGG, after all, filed for the Italian equivalent of bankruptcy protection last year.) Ragazzi will be fine, but it’s nonetheless a shame that it ended this way.
- Is the Saks reorg over, or has it only begun?: Saks Global C.F.O. Jeff Pedersen left last week after fewer than six months in the position, I’m told. Given that most of his career was spent in tech and startups—from Amazon to the investment firm Stripes—I’m not surprised that he wasn’t suited to run the finances for what is essentially a massive, incredibly complex retail real estate play. A Saks rep had no comment on why Pedersen is out, but the company did share that fixer Mark Weinsten—who dipped into Neiman Marcus during its bankruptcy process, first as its interim C.O.O. then as interim C.F.O.—has been named interim C.F.O. of the merged business. “Mark has a successful track record of helping retail organizations through transition periods, leading finance teams, and establishing stable foundations for growth,” a rep told me in an emailed statement. “We are confident that Mark is the right leader to step in. ”What does this mean for everyone else at Saks Global? This situation seems like a one-off, but I expect some more culling as the new senior leadership team settles into their respective roles.
- The New York story: With the exception of Calvin Klein, which felt like a real event, New York Fashion Week seemed somewhat emaciated this season. (Remember, Marc Jacobs’s seven minutes in heaven happened three days before the actual start of the shows.) In total, I saw 19 collections, starting with Marc on Monday and concluding with Oscar de la Renta on Wednesday afternoon, and it seemed that the name of the game is value. Everything is too expensive, so if you can propose something that’s less so, without it feeling diffused, you are poised to gain some market share.
I loved Joseph Altuzarra’s take on the trends of the moment (ruched dresses and fat sequins styled with his signature chunky knits), Wes Gordon’s cummerbund corsage (he’s perhaps the least insecure designer in New York), and Thom Browne’s experimentation with color (this was, dare I say, the most commercial collection I’ve ever seen from him). Michael Kors also came out strong, post-Tapestry fallout, with a quintessential display of rich colors and loose-hanging blazers, although I’d love to see him go ultra, ultra-luxe next season: Invite 50 people, use crazy expensive fabrics, and forget about the Fashion Week charade for one minute. You can always come back.But if you want to see a model of how to do New York Fashion Week right, look no further than Tory Burch. Monday’s show at MoMA was absolutely weird in the best way possible: Burch developed so many fabrics and silhouettes, and the end result was a sort of bizarro classic wardrobe that could make a woman rethink her life. (Tory called it “twisted sportswear.”) I especially loved the TV-static tweeds, the expertly draped dresses, and the sweaters pinned oh-so-specifically onto the shoulders. (Shoutout to my fave stylist, Brian Molloy, the man who is teaching Americans how to dress, lookbook by lookbook.)Anyway, it was a fun, cool, strange show, with plenty of stuff to desire. Indeed, the next day I spotted Karla Martinez, the Vogue Mexico head of content, carrying one of the new pierced shoulder bags, which hasn’t hit stores yet. It’s going to sell, because it feels worth it.
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And now, on to the main event…
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After waiting seven years to release a follow-up to its bestselling perfume, Glossier has launched two new fragrances in rapid succession, with yet another arriving next month. Is the decade-old brand killing it, or getting killed, as investors push for an exit?
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Less than five months after Glossier unexpectedly launched two new perfumes at once, the ur-millennial D.T.C. beauty brand is preparing to launch yet another scent in March, this time a floral called… Fleur. There will be a pop-up in Paris, plus all the usual activations, mailers, and parties that come with the territory. I’m sure Fleur smells pretty good, too. Nevertheless, it’s somewhat baffling that Glossier—a brand that has historically placed disciplined image maintenance above innovation and speed—will soon have launched three new fragrances in under six months. This is, after all, a brand that waited seven years to release a follow-up to its bestselling Glossier You.
One theory, proffered by sources close to the company, is that Glossier is simply doubling down on what’s working. Fragrance represents the brand’s most expensive category, with some of the highest margins in all of beauty, allowing Glossier to offset softer performance in makeup and skincare, where the company has fallen behind competitors. “That’s where we’re winning,” insisted a person involved with the brand. “So why wouldn’t we launch more fragrance? That’s what customers are buying, so that’s where we’re going to go.”
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Indeed, it was long past time for Glossier to diversify its fragrance portfolio, allowing it to create franchises around hero products just as Nars did with Orgasm, or Charlotte Tilbury did with Pillow Talk, etcetera. A multi-category brand on the offensive should release a second scent pretty quickly after a successful debut—within a few years, at most. But the speed with which Glossier has started firing off new fragrances has raised some eyebrows in the industry, especially as the company pushes to increase its profitability and build a wider moat.
This time last year, Glossier was flirting with the idea of selling to LVMH, as I reported in March. At the time, the company’s EBITDA for 2024 was expected to be in the mid-single-digit millions—a number that a conglomerate like LVMH could easily optimize. But while the company might be on track to double that outcome this year, that’s hardly enough to entice the sort of strategic acquirer that would allow Forerunner, Thrive, Sequoia, Index, and others to exit with dignity after investing at a $1.8 billion valuation in 2021. “They’re feeling the pressure,” said another person with knowledge of Glossier’s business. “They were supposed to sell last year and didn’t.”
A person close to the company assured me that “profitability is meaningfully ahead of the three-year strategic plan,” and that the company is in the “best financial position in brand history.” But there’s no doubt that Glossier needs to accelerate its product pipeline, grow its margins, and diversify the business to fend off emerging threats. “[The success of] Rhode basically eviscerates [the notion] that you need to spend $300 million building a brand for Gen Z,” said someone familiar with Glossier’s business. “Whether you think Rhode is worth anything or not, it doesn’t even matter––it’s the idea that you would invest that level of capital to get this result.”
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Sources at Glossier tell me that Fleur’s launch wasn’t “pushed up,” and that March was always the target release date. Founder Emily Weiss has been focused on fragrance for more than a year, and each of the new scents had been in the development pipeline for some time. And yet the rapid-fire rollout of Rêve and Doux, now followed by Fleur, left neither of them with enough time or marketing support to stand on their own. The cadence feels haphazard, especially from a company that’s always been overly precious about everything—custom packaging, tone, extravagant launches, literal locked mailers that could be opened only at the exact time a code was sent, timed to a million-dollar party, etcetera.
Glossier maintains a “healthy” fragrance business at Sephora, according to a person familiar with the matter (overall, Glossier’s fragrance business ranks around the 10th spot), but You has also lost considerable momentum in the last year, after debuting on shelves in 2023 as the number one scent at the retailer. “Sales for You core size is down, and that’s bad for a category that’s on fire,” this person explained. If Glossier gets this next launch right, its emerging fragrance portfolio should help to “bring a halo back to the core and continue to drive growth to the hero,” the insider continued. Yes, sure, but additional similar-smelling or similarly named S.K.U.s (or “flankers” in fragrance industry parlance) could also cannibalize the hero product. To make it all work, the supporting players need to grow overall revenue while also bolstering the hero business.
Of course, it takes a lot more than Sephora and direct sales to build a blockbuster perfume business, and despite strong rankings, Glossier will need to increase distribution, too. Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Neiman Marcus sell the vast majority of prestige fragrance in the U.S., but none carry Glossier. Meanwhile, fragrance is one of the smallest categories at Sephora––it drives less than 15 percent of the retailer’s U.S. revenue. “Winning fragrance at Sephora is nice, but if you’re Glossier, you need to win a lot more than fragrance at Sephora,” said the person familiar with Glossier’s business. I have heard that Glossier has plans for its fragrance to enter Macy’s, but a source told me that although “it’s on the roadmap,” a launch isn’t happening yet.
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Glossier has room to grab market share in the makeup and skincare categories, too. While the company doesn’t share direct sales data, the brand is ranked around 25th among makeup brands at Sephora (a category that is inclusive of skincare), and that standing hasn’t materially improved lately. “You never hear about them having a top 10 collection outside of Boy Brow, and at Sephora, you need to build hero franchises and ‘own’ certain subcategories, which usually means being in the top five,” an insider explained. “Besides Boy Brow, what do they really own––and not even own, but at least rank in the top 10 with?”
In other words, Glossier simply isn’t cutting through the noise. Balm Dotcom, the brand’s lip balm, now has serious in-store competition from Summer Fridays, and soon Hailey Bieber’s Rhode; in blush, one of the top players is Selena Gomez’s Rare. No one really cared about last year’s re-relaunch of Balm Dotcom, and even Glossier’s big foundation launch in late 2023 was mediocre. (Surprisingly, Lady Gaga’s Haus Labs is among the small crop of newish players to become a top foundation, an incredibly challenging subcategory.) “They had a more difficult time in 2024, and in makeup, yes, they’ve potentially lost some ground. But there is strong innovation coming,” a Glossier insider said. Another person close to Glossier maintained that Q4 at Sephora “really reignited the business,” due in part to Rêve and Doux, and that momentum has continued into 2025, due in part to a new Black Cherry collection that’s tracking at close to 90 percent above plan at the retailer.
I’m genuinely curious to see what new products Glossier has in the pipeline, as well as what will happen when the company goes head-to-head with Rhode over shelf space at Sephora. But regardless of its competition or its innovation, the L’Oréals and LVMHs of the world aren’t fighting to pay billions for Sephora’s 25th bestselling makeup brand. While it’s possible that Glossier’s burgeoning fragrance collection may help to boost revenues and profitability in the short term––I heard Sephora projects that Fleur will be the most successful of the three flankers––there are other brands with better financials and growth trajectories that are likely more attractive to potential acquirers.
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That’s it from Rachel and me. By the way, if you were one of many who signed an N.D.A. in the Dior men’s building this week… you know where to find me! (Do we think we’ll go back to Dior Homme, by the way?)
Until tomorrow,
Lauren
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Puck fashion correspondent Lauren Sherman and a rotating cast of industry insiders take you deep behind the scenes of this multitrillion-dollar biz, from creative director switcheroos to M&A drama, D.T.C. downfalls, and magazine mishaps. Fashion People is an extension of Line Sheet, Lauren’s private email for Puck, where she tracks what’s happening beyond the press releases in fashion, beauty, and media. New episodes publish every Tuesday and Friday.
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