Why ‘community’ isn't the same as ‘audience’
Your audience is not a single entity, it’s made up of individuals, with different lives, struggles, backgrounds and stories
In 2010, Glossier’s Emily Weiss was sitting the floor of bathrooms interviewing real people about their beauty routines.
Writing blogposts on her beauty blog Into The Gloss between 4–8am, before her day job at Teen Vogue, Emily was quietly building a fiercely loyal community through stories.
For each story, Emily would interview and photograph regular people from within the beauty industry including beauty artists, models about their routines. She wrote it up in paragraph chunks, divided by times of day. A brilliant, connecting repeatable format.
Emily says she wanted the blog, which quickly grew from 100s to 1000s of subscribers, to “give people a voice through beauty.” Speaking to Guy Raz on his podcast How I Built This in 2018, Emily describes the website as giving space for people and how they did beauty, rather than ideas. “These are the human beings and how they actually put these things together.”
In 2014, the Into The Gloss community had enough momentum to build a beauty brand from the ‘bottom up’ which has been touted with disrupting the industry. In 2021, Glossier was valued at $1.8 billion and shows no signs of stagnating. User feedback notoriously directly influences design of the products and radical listening shaped how the future of the brand was developed.
Emily essentially built Glossier with her community, and it all started with gathering her first members around community-first storytelling.
“Democratisation of expertise and democratisation of influence,” she cites as the key factor. “The power of the individual to influence another individual is fascination and part of the reason Into The Gloss really resonated.”
Before we get hella deep into the nuts and bolts of community-first storytelling, I want to unpick what it actually is. I believe there is a certain way to tell stories which puts the community first, which increases the sense of belonging and meaning which builds community. This way is by giving your platform over to your community, to tell their own story, in their own voice.
In this post, let’s look at what community-first storytelling actually looks like, and the power in giving your community your platform.