The stage is about for a Glossier IPO.

With a fresh round of funding and sky-high valuation, Glossier’s debut on the general public markets seems more an issue of when, not if.

The quintessential Millennial beauty business just accomplished its third round of funding — $52 million — valuing the business at about $390 million, based on industry sources. The raise follows a $24 million Series B in late 2016, and $8.4 million Series A in 2014.

The investments and the valuation are major for a business that beauty sources say shouldn’t be yet profitable and that has an estimated $40 million in sales.

Weiss said in an e-mail to Glossier subscribers that the brand new capital will keep the corporate doing “more of the identical, really” — but that belies her grand ambitions for the brand.

“We’re constructing a large, stand-alone business with customer experience on the core,” Weiss said in an interview with WWD. Henry Davis, Glossier’s president and a former enterprise capitalist, echoed that sentiment, saying Glossier “will likely be as big as any of the sweetness businesses which might be around today.”

But there’s no denying that Glossier has a ways to go, considering the scale of many within the industry.

L’Oréal, for instance, raked in greater than 26 billion Euros in sales for 2017. The Estée Lauder Cos. posted $11.8 billion in sales for fiscal 2017. And Coty Inc. had greater than $9 billion in sales last 12 months.

“In the best way that those firms built generations of companies by owning a channel, we will do the identical thing,” Davis said. “We’re going to construct as big of a business as we will.”

“If an IPO is one of the simplest ways for us to get there, then we’ll do this,” Weiss said. She added that there aren’t any specific plans or a timeline for an IPO “at the moment.”

What Glossier is concentrated on at once is growth. Since its Series B closed, the brand has expanded its product line with Body Hero, a body lotion and wash duo, Glossier You, its first fragrance, which is available in liquid and solid forms, and Solution, a face exfoliant that’s seen as Glossier’s foray into “serious” skin-care, amongst other makeup products.

The corporate also entered Canada, the U.K. and is soon to hit France, began its rep program, committed to a recent larger office space in Latest York’s SoHo and to adding 282 employees to its already 150-plus staff with a purpose to secure a $3 million tax break.

Monthly traffic to the location, aided largely by referrals from Weiss’ beauty blog Into the Gloss, which Glossier grew directly out of, hit an all-time high of two.15 million in January, based on data from SimilarWeb. Although stats inside that traffic number aren’t stellar, like a bounce rate of 52 percent and a median visit duration of just over three minutes with about two pages per visit, traffic has grown by nearly 1 million visits since August.

It’s this rate of growth, coupled with a dedicated fan and shopper base of mostly women of their teens and 20s — including 1 million and growing Instagram followers — and its productive direct-to-consumer model that seems to have financial types, looking forward to growth stories, in a tizzy.

While Glossier’s valuation is a fraction of another independent businesses in the sweetness industry, like Anastasia of Beverly Hills, which is alleged to be considering acquisition bids in excess of $2.5 billion, Glossier’s rise has been much quicker. The corporate was founded by Weiss in 2014, 4 years after starting her blog.

Based on Kathy Smith, a cofounder and chairman of Renaissance Capital, which conducts extensive research on newly public firms and people with the potential to go public, Glossier’s recent valuation puts it in pretty good range of an IPO.

“There are other ways than going public to grow, but bottom line, an IPO could be very worthwhile and really helpful,” she said. “Corporations will say [they don’t want to go public], but the truth isn’t that they don’t, it’s that they’ll’t. In the event that they were adequate, they’d do it since it’s one of the best technique to get maximum value.”

But going public has quite a bit to do with timing, in addition to profitability, which is usually paramount to success. Investor patience quickly wears thin when an organization not only reports a loss, but doesn’t sustain an expected rate of revenue and profit growth.

“[Glossier] seems to depend on a ton of promoting, in order that they’d need to make a profit in spite of everything of that, and that will be tough,” Smith added. “It’s sort of the identical issue that Stitch Fix has…how do you get people to enroll and buy those boxes? They advertise like mad, but is that sustainable? Do you could have to maintain doing that to maintain adding customers? That’s a priority with all these kind of firms.”

A Glossier spokeswoman said the corporate gets about 20 percent of its traffic from promoting, and the remaining 80 percent “comes from owned, earned, and peer to see referral.”

One other industry source said that the market appears to be growing less tolerant of unprofitable firms, but given the scale of Glossier’s funding rounds and the extent of product the corporate might want to roll out to maintain up with the “recent” addiction in beauty, “an IPO will be the only technique to go to lift more.”

Clara Sieg, a partner at Revolution Growth, agreed that it will make sense for Glossier to go public in the future. “I’m unsure in regards to the timeline, but there’s absolute confidence that there will likely be more IPOs on this space and Glossier is a superb candidate,” Sieg said.

But, from her viewpoint, profitability shouldn’t be an important thing for Glossier, public company or not. “From an investor perspective, in the event you’re focused on profitability as a substitute of growth, you’re really undercutting your opportunities.”

Nevertheless, Weiss could have a very good window into the machinations of an IPO and related profitability hurdles given her link to Stitch Fix, where her sister-in-law Maria Dueñas Jacobs last 12 months became the corporate’s director of brand name development.

Stitch Fix went public last 12 months with an estimated market valuation of $275 million that has since was a market capitalization of $1.88 billion. While the corporate hit the general public markets after seeing modest profits in 2016 and 2015, it sunk back to a virtually $600,000 loss last 12 months, despite $977.1 million in sales. The corporate cited a hiring run and marketing investments, but some financial analysts grumbled about why an organization supposedly relying heavily on artificial intelligence needs so many employees, and shares of Stitch Fix have fallen because the report.

Glossier’s focus, for now, is on constructing out its mostly digital community for anyone who desires to be a component of it. The “customer experience,” Weiss said, is actually why Glossier raised $52 million, but her definition of that term is broad.

“Now we have physical experiences, we have now offline experiences, we have now our product experience, we have now our community experience,” she said. “Offline has been really incredible by way of community constructing, so we’ll be investing in offline, but in a much smaller way than we’re investing in our digital experience and constructing that out in the subsequent 12 months.”

One in all the things Glossier is working on is a technique to get much more in on the conversation that peers have about beauty products, and hopefully start them.

“Increasingly, those peers aren’t necessarily people [who customers] go to highschool with, but they’re the people they follow on social media or have a look at on the Web,” Weiss said. “On condition that Glossier is so people-centric, within the sense that our customers are really extensions of our team and extensions of our company and talk a lot to one another not nearly Glossier products but all products and wonder and their very own expertise, we’re going to be working to facilitate those conversations, digitally.”

That endeavor will tie in with Glossier’s “reps” program — a direct-sales setup with customers acting as salespeople for Glossier — Weiss said, declining to comment on the scale or scope of this system.

In the subsequent 12 months, Glossier plans to “fundamentally change what it means to buy and buy online,” Weiss added. Looking further ahead, Davis threw out the concept of reinvention.

“Our long-term vision, five years out or whatever it’s, is to be a large stand-alone company that has reinvented the best way people engage with beauty brands, beauty products and the shopper experience,” he said. “The client today, facilitated by technology, is looking forward to and capable of get a recent and differentiated experience, and we predict that if we might help deliver that, we will proceed to construct things that customers want. We don’t know the way big this company will likely be, but we imagine that chance looks massive.”

And while many beauty start-ups launch with the dream of selling to a strategic buyer, the emphasis from Weiss and Davis on “massive” and “stand-alone” makes it pretty clear that’s not where Glossier is headed — though sources said there’s loads of acquisition interest. Unusually, the brand’s products, which beauty sources describe as “just OK” and never particularly revolutionary, aren’t the allure.

As an alternative, they see the business as a marketing machine. The innovation, they are saying, is the business model.

In beauty, Weiss is credited with being first-to-market with a direct-to-consumer beauty business developed out of a blog community. The brand’s no-makeup-makeup approach was also one among the primary to market — Glossier launched sheer concealers while others launched full-coverage and contour. Glossier said “be yourself” while many other brands implied, “be Kim Kardashian.”

That time of difference, coupled with a cool-girl community that extends far beyond the Millennial audience has had the G-Team (as Glossier refers to itself) pondering big for some time.

At WWD’s June Beauty Summit in Latest York, Weiss likened the brand, which makes stickers and branded sweatshirts along with skincare and makeup, to Nike, one of the crucial successful and recognizable brands in history, which has a market capitalization of slightly below $110 billion. Within the mainstream press, Weiss and Glossier have also been all over the place — a recent high-shine shoot with Latest York Magazine’s the Cut (which credited products from MAC Cosmetics, not Glossier) and a corresponding gusher of a story deemed Weiss “the Millennial’s Estée Lauder.” (Glossier is a frequent advertiser by the use of affiliate links on Latest York Mag’s website).

It’s a “flattering” comparison, Weiss acknowledged. “She was a pioneer in lots of, some ways.”

Lauder’s 72-year-old company has grown right into a prestige beauty behemoth — a house for a lot of beauty brands, each built and bought — with a market cap of greater than $52 billion.  

Asked if that was the plan — to eventually buy brands, or construct other ones — Weiss said all of it comes back to the shopper.

“No matter how big we get, we’re all the time going to create things that customers want and…maintain this direct relationship with them. By doing that, we’ll be guided by their feedback,” she said. “If we will make what they need, great, and if we will’t, then we’ll determine one of the best technique to get them what they need.”

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