Luck vs. Strategy: What Made Glossier and Trader Joe’s Successful?
A tale of two business biographies. Launching Business Book Club!
As you’ve likely picked up from my previous newsletters, I love books. I read across several genres–from literary fiction to graphic novels, sci-fi, memoirs, romance and essays. One of the book categories I read the most, and discuss the most with friends, family, and colleagues, is what I would call a business book.
Business books tell stories about companies, the people who build and run them, and the associated principles that shape them. They can focus on leadership, management, and self-improvement, or detail the achievements of individual founders, thinkers, researchers, or specialists. The stories I like best are typically narrative nonfiction–what I like to call business biographies.
Business biographies are the stories of particular companies or product lines coming to exist–usually resulting in meteoric success or catastrophic failure. They sometimes aren’t even books at all! The Acquired podcast, for example, is a perfect articulation of a business biography.
In the United States, self-help stories are a staple of everyday life, reflecting a society in which individuals believe that they can contribute to a better future if only they could better themselves. This is not as much the case in France. Mostly only the French tech scene, built on a striver culture adapted from Silicon Valley, ingests American self-help and business idioms (“do things that don’t scale!”) with the same voracity as their American counterparts.
I find these stories captivating for the way they dissect and give us an understanding of trends, culture, social dynamics, society, and power. I love the way they shape our understanding of capitalism, success, and ourselves in relation to it.
But I also believe that we should be critical of business books as projects with objectives–as entertainment, as manuals providing blueprints, as records of major cultural events. They establish philosophies about strategy, innovation, self-mastery and leadership that become axioms.
Launching Business Book Club
That’s a long way of saying: welcome to the first edition of the ~Business Book Club~, a new feature in Bokeh that will exist both online and offline.
I’ll try to write short synopses of business books I’m reading and thinking about, and discuss how they are written, what they try to accomplish, whether they are readable beyond summary bullet points that should have been a slide deck or tweet thread, and what lessons or “key takeaways” I’ll carry with me.
A Tale of Two Business Biographies
At around the same time last year I read Glossy by Marissa Meltzer and Becoming Trader Joe by Joe Coulombe with Patty Civalleri. These are business biographies of two iconic contemporary American retailers that cater to urban millennial and social media tastes: Glossier and Trader Joe’s.
They were two very different business books attempting to answer the same fundamental questions:
What role does the mythology of the founder play in a company’s success, and in the retelling of it?
How much does luck or strategy influence business outcomes?
Yet the styles of these two books and the way they cast the companies and their founders could not be more different.
So, for this first edition, we’ll examine them head to head.
Quick Facts
TL;DR
Glossy: Examining Weiss as a mythical figure takes attention away from Glossier as a business, and emphasizes luck and strong will over strategy, but in doing so, enters the company’s story into the canon of business biographies that have mass appeal and romanticize ambitious founders.
Becoming Trader Joe: Removing Joe from the story–even though the company is literally named after him–frames the book as a tactical instruction manual, which means it’s less readable for the average TJ’s shopper, but more impactful for brick-and-mortar retail business devotees.
Vibe check and writing style
Glossy: Slick, effervescent, insightful, and gossipy at times.
Becoming Trader Joe: Pragmatic instruction manual interspersed with cheesy Shakespeare and other quotes.
Page turnability
Glossy: Breezy and astute. Finished in a couple of days.
Becoming Trader Joe: Painfully boring and lacking narrative cohesion. Took ages to finish. Filled with so many wise nuggets that I underlined tips with a pen and took notes in the margins.
My recommendation
Glossy: Read if…you want to understand why Glossier is so important–and how a generational media company can become a massive, category-defining consumer ecommerce business. Also worth reading because it’s one of the few contemporary business books about a female founder. We need more of them, but this was an important start at including women-led businesses that sell into female markets like beauty as part of the business biography genre.
Becoming Trader Joe: I don’t think anyone should have to spend time struggling through this barely coherent book. It’s more like a series of emails and post-its cobbled together. EXCEPT! If you are passionate about grocery or brick-and-mortar retail businesses, it’s worth wading through the unstructured information for kernels of wisdom, because they are insightful and detailed.
Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier by Marissa Meltzer
It’s difficult to overstate the impact of Into the Gloss and Glossier. The pale pink colors. The besties-in-the-group-chat copywriting. The no-makeup makeup look. It married media and ecommerce and changed the way that millennial women interact with brands.
Founded in 2010, Into the Gloss peeked inside the medicine cabinets of high-profile celebrities long before #GRMW. It’s where we learned that French pharmacies were magical universes full of Cicaplast and Embryolisse. How we came to understand that celebrities swore by Biologique Recherche. The website made the inaccessible routines of beautiful people accessible. It made us feel beautiful and cool by proxy.
“Into the Gloss captured so much of what was pivotal to this new era of beauty: recognizing the power of personal affiliation, of embracing and monetizing the idea that this-is-what-I-use is deeply linked to this-is-who-I-am” (51).
Glossier was the makeup brand born out of the success of Into the Gloss in 2014 and became the blueprint of a media company turned retail business. It grew alongside its minimalistic hero products–boy brow, balm dotcom, and the You perfume. Women who wore Glossier products didn’t overspend on obvious makeup; they were beautiful and they knew it. Popularizing light coverage, Glossier products shifted the conversation to skincare routines and diet–because barely-there Glossier makeup didn’t look like makeup at all.
Meltzer gets all of this very right. She details the Into the Gloss era beautifully, contextualizing the company and its influence.
Meltzer also examines Emily Weiss as the charismatic founder whose personal brand was entangled with Glossier’s.
Weiss, who was beautiful, well-connected, and had appeared on The Hills as a can-do-anything super intern at Teen Vogue, became one of the earliest and most successful founders in the DTC ecommerce boom. She was inspired by Silicon Valley tech founders, and consumed their success stories religiously, but faced the harsher scrutiny reserved for girl bosses. While leaders like Steve Jobs or Travis Kalanick are excused for bad behavior as flawed geniuses, women in her position are not typically afforded the same leniency. It’s a double standard that Meltzer details well.
“There’s a whole genre of bestselling books about how awesome and valuable failure can be. But when a woman fails, she’s just a crazy bitch or an amateur. Either way, she had it coming” (214).
As a book, Glossy is breezy, propulsive, and delicious, like many business biographies that have come before it, from No Filter (about Instagram’s success) to Bad Blood (about Theranos’ fraud). This format, as well as the questions it is trying to answer, make it juicy reading but also make it feel tougher to analyze business strategy.
My favorite parts were when Meltzer laid bare the specific tactics of Weiss and her team.
Glossier, for example, was one of the first ecommerce companies for women that understood the intimacy of opening a package at home. That the experience from ordering alone on the internet to opening the box, testing the product for the first time, and sharing your feedback could either be isolating or could embed you in an online community, depending on how the brand facilitated each step of the journey. The Glossier pink bubble wrap zip-top pouch and stickers that came with every order of Vaseline-that-smelled-like-Lip-Smackers balmdotcom felt like a rite of passage into womanhood for savvy young women on the internet. And showcasing those items in public dog whistled to other women like you.
There’s a great example of early customer feedback and ambassador creation that Meltzer highlights:
“They would scan Instagram for each new market and find a half dozen or so fans with the most engagement with Glossier. Then an employee would be dispatched to befriend them in order to tap into their community and understand what life was like for the people they wanted to sell to. They would invite fans for a coffee or lunch or mixers. Glossier even threw a birthday party for one girl on a bateau-mouche in Paris” (167).
I also loved the descriptions around why Glossier stumbled in recent years–describing how newcomers like Fenty beat Glossier to the market with makeup for different skin tones and shades. Or how Euphoria influenced a resurgence of sparkly, glittery makeup, hastening the end of the natural makeup era.
But the question that Meltzer returns to throughout the book is: Was this success intentional? Or was it lucky? While most businesses, including Glossier, rely on a combination of both, Meltzer details how Weiss’ approach to the press and the public downplays her strategic acumen. In prioritizing public likability–for herself and for Glossier as a brand–she downplays how savvy she and her team were in building this business .
“But Weiss sometimes fell into the internalized misogynist trap of not taking credit for her ideas, as if Glossier were a craft project, a manifestation of her vision boards. That’s because luck plays a huge role in Weiss’s trajectory. And luck can be scary to discuss because it can’t be bought or controlled…But I don’t think it has to be a luck or hard work thing, but rather an and” (262).
Part of that can be attributed to the fact that Weiss wasn’t really open to discussing every single detail of the business. She wasn’t willing to give more than a few interviews for the book. It’s a shame, because Glossier was last valued at $1.8bn, running a business in which margins on makeup can be 85%+, jousting famously difficult-to-beat, giant legacy brands.
Treading lightly on quotes, numbers, and anecdotes may inadvertently diminish the full scope of what Weiss and her team achieved. It makes for a fascinating, and sharp book about cultural trends and biases, but also means that it’s light on the actionable, compounding business details. Despite thoroughly acknowledging the sexism in business literature and framing in the book, it may repeat a similar pattern.
“She is clearly someone with a lot of determination but who also wants the world to think she lucked out, which is something deeper to do with Weiss’ inner beliefs about herself and self-mythmaking. But if she has any interest in modeling a path for younger women entrepreneurs, it’s a strange stance that she doesn’t take herself seriously” (59).
My question is: What part does a founder have in controlling which side public perception lands on?
How does the storytelling around a business–the crystallization of it in the canon of business literature–impact how it is remembered?
Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Buys by Joe Coulombe with Patty Civalleri
What’s fascinating about Becoming Trader Joe is that, by contrast with Glossy, it is intentionally light on mythologizing Joe Coulombe, who is the namesake of the business. It barely touches on his personality or public perception. Instead, the book serves as an extremely tactical guide on how to optimize every square inch of a brick-and-mortar grocery business.
Becoming Trader Joe was one of the clunkiest business books I’ve ever read. It is disjointed and virtually has no narrative throughline. I believe this is somewhat intentional in order to seed the narrative that Trader Joe’s is a house built strategy brick by strategy brick.
“I’m going to disillusion those dear souls–there seem to be a lot of them out there–who think that Trader Joe’s sprang, fully developed, from my brain, like Athena from the head of Zeus. To continue the metaphor, it was more like an elbow here, a toenail there over a period of eleven years, with an occasional painful delivery of a major hunk of torso” (36).
Like Weiss, Coulombe was a brilliant marketer. He pioneered catalogs as we know them, circulating features on the benefits of quirky new health foods to his ideal customer profile of “overeducated and underpaid Californians.” He also took advantage of two key trends of the era: increased air travel (thanks to the introduction of the Boeing 747) and education (thanks to the GI Bill). He understood that these converging trends established a new class of consumers: people who knew the difference between a Barolo and a Bordeaux, but couldn’t afford the sticker price.
Though the book is dry, the narrative underscores dozens of calculated business tactics like these, attributing the success of Trader Joe’s to strategic planning rather than luck or grokking the zeitgeist.
For example, one memorable story is about jumbo XL eggs that a supplier would have otherwise discarded if Trader Joe’s had not purchased them. Coulombe sold them at TJ’s at the same price as normal eggs–a discount for consumers who got 12% more product for the same price.
When this book talks about trends, it does so in service of demonstrating Coulombe’s ability to seize opportunities and beat competitors with unusually astute foresight. At every turn, there is a reminder that Coulombe is straightforward and sensible. He doesn’t want any of the attention of being a “founder,” at least not the way we’ve come to understand it in Silicon Valley culture. He’s quiet luxury. He’s more interested in showcasing his product knowledge and awareness of the market and regulatory gaps that he anticipated and exploited.
For example, when they wanted to hire women in the 1970s, they decided that anyone in the store should be able to stock shelves, meaning that no item could be over 40 lbs. So he stopped stocking sugar at Trader Joe’s, improving employee happiness and retention, and reducing labor turnover costs.
TJ’s thrived by creating new relationships with suppliers, rotating its selection of goods for sale, and at times reformatting quantities and packaging with a private label for the items that reached end consumers–squeezing out a few extra percentage points of margin before every sale.
Despite the book being extremely dry, there are folksy quotes and playful aphorisms throughout, to challenge the reader’s assumption that the founder must be stodgy and stiff. The playfulness is in service of making Coulombe seem relatable and lighthearted, as opposed to calculated and shrewd, as if to say: Oh, this? This is just good, old fashioned hard work and elbow grease that we business folk do. You know, that number crunching?
This framing makes him seem exceptional. Which he is!
But it really stands out against the narrative structure of Glossy, which by comparison, made it seem like Weiss was running a business worth billions on vibes alone.
Both founders had a deep understanding of market trends and consumer needs. They assembled elite teams focusing on developing deep product knowledge and creating loyal fan bases that were happy to evangelize the brand. They observed changing trend tides and acted on them.
While Glossy is way more fun to read, it underplays Weiss’ strategic prowess; Becoming Trader Joe may not be thrilling, but offers a thorough look at the deliberate tactics behind its success and any brick-and-mortar retailer could learn a lot from reading it with a pen handy to underline.
It’s a shame, because there aren’t very many business books about female entrepreneurs, especially in our most recent startup era.
The reality is that all businesses, especially young innovative businesses, are a balance of luck and strategy. There are many lucky companies who can’t execute on a coherent strategy. There are many highly strategic companies that don’t get lucky.
But our memory of which side of the luck-strategy equation a business falls on can be determined by how their business biography preserves the story in amber for public consumption.
What do you think? What books would you like to see here?