Glossier Community Platform

At Glossier, I co-led the early exploration and alpha design of our community platform and mobile app concept, an initiative to evolve e-commerce beyond transactions into connection-driven discovery. We already had an incredibly active customer community sharing recommendations across social channels, but those conversations lived in fragmented spaces not built for meaningful discovery.

Starting with qualitative research we set out to define how customers find, evaluate, and trust beauty products today. Coming out of discovery we envisioned a “people-powered” discovery model, leveraging community data and machine learning to surface accurate recommendations from people with similar profiles, helping users cut through choice overload and find what works for them.

I led requirements definition, feature prioritization, and information architecture, collaborating with design to define the app experience and its integration into Glossier’s broader ecosystem (e-commerce, editorial). To validate the concept, I designed and ran an internal alpha program, testing usability, engagement, and trust dynamics among employees and early advocates.

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Impact

The resulting functioning app experience and DAU demonstrated how community connection could become a powerful driver of discovery, conversion, and brand loyalty, laying the foundation for the Glossier Community Profiles initiative, which positioned Glossier as a pioneer in community-powered beauty.