Beauty brand Glossier is hiring a senior vice president of retail—a leadership addition that comes amid a rapid expansion and more than a year after retail employees spoke out about racism in the brand’s stores.
Kristy Maynes, a Lululemon veteran, joined the $1.8 billion brand led by founder and CEO Emily Weiss last month, Glossier announced this morning. Maynes will determine Glossier’s retail strategy as the business opens Los Angeles and London stores, following the opening of a Seattle location earlier this year.
“We are entering the next phase of Glossier,” Weiss wrote in a blog post. “In the past three months alone, we’ve reimagined the Glossier retail experience, closed a Series E fundraise, launched new products…and backed our second cohort of the Glossier grant for Black-owned businesses.”
Before the pandemic, Glossier operated a New York City flagship and pop-up retail locations in several major cities. The brand shuttered those stores in March 2020 and has yet to reopen in New York.
Maynes has the retail experience to lead this expansion; she served as the general manager of Lululemon’s first 40 stores in Canada and opened the athleisure brand’s first locations in Europe. “Kristy will lead our retail expansion with a customer focus around fostering connection, community, and discovery,” Weiss wrote in a blog post announcing the hire.
But beyond rapid expansion, retail has been a focus of Glossier’s because of employee demand for change. In August 2020, ex–retail workers spoke to Fortune and organized under the mantle “Outta the Gloss” to share their dissatisfaction with retail management, including the handling of alleged racist behavior by customers in stores. In response, Glossier at the time promised to overhaul the management structure for retail employees, enabling them to connect directly with headquarters about complaints rather than relying solely on store managers. Glossier also pledged to hire new store management and to display a customer code of conduct in stores.
In June 2021, Glossier announced the hiring of a new head of people for retail, Hector Camacho. (Camacho reports to Glossier’s chief people officer, not through the retail operation.) “After learning more about the dialogues with former retail employees that took place last summer and fall, and all the work the team has done over the last year to deliver on the commitments we made, I knew I wanted to play a role in bringing to life a reimagined retail employee experience,” Camacho wrote in a blog post. “One that’s equitable, inclusive, and cultivated in parallel with the exceptional experience we provide our customers.”
His blog post outlined the details of that plan, which includes the commitments made by Weiss over a year ago alongside more explicit commitments to hiring more experienced store management and providing human resources support in stores.
Glossier also announced the retirement of Vanessa Wittman as chief financial officer and the hiring of Stripe’s Seun Sodipo as her successor, and the hiring of Cole Haan alum Kyle Leahy as chief commercial officer, a new role.
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