Employee Spotlight: Evelyn Economy

Can You Tell Us About Your Role at GlossGenius?

As Chief of Staff at GlossGenius, I partner with our CEO, Danielle, on the most important priorities for the business. My role is very broad: to help the company be successful. Over the 5+ years I’ve been at GlossGenius, that’s meant anything from starting and scaling new departments/functions to stepping in as an interim leader and building/evolving teams to leading critical initiatives for the company to helping choose decor for our new office! Above all, I am responsible for identifying and solving problems that could get in the way of our success.

What Drew You to Join GlossGenius in the First Place?

Prior to GlossGenius, I was working at a hedge fund when I began to look for startup jobs. I knew I wanted to be in an environment where I would have more ownership and a deeper connection to customers. I also knew I wanted to be in an environment with excellent people where I would learn a lot. GlossGenius definitely ticked all those boxes! But the true differentiator was the mission. I grew up watching my parents build a small business, and have many family members who are small business owners as well. I was drawn to the idea of helping small business owners be successful, and it was refreshing and exciting to feel like my work would create tangible value in people’s lives.

What Have You Found to Be Unique About GlossGenius?

The scale and scope of our ambition. One of our company values is “Make ambitious things happen,” and it has always resonated with me. The size of our vision is massive, and so is the size of opportunity within the beauty and wellness industry. One of my favorite things about working here is that everyone pushes each other to think bigger, more creatively, and more ambitiously about the kind of impact we can have. We aren’t just trying to build a business management solution, we are trying to change the way an entire industry operates. It’s exciting to be part of such a big vision, and it’s been really fun to see it start to come to life over the last five years.

GlossGenius Has Grown and Transformed Rapidly Since You Joined. What’s Been the Most Surprising or Impactful Change You've Witnessed?

The most impactful change has been the growth of our team. When I joined, we had just about 40 team members. Now we have over 300, and we’re still growing. We’ve held a very high bar for talent that will only get higher: in short, every person we hire should make our team even stronger than it is today. I always ask myself the question “will we learn from this person?” because I think it encapsulates one of the most important qualities to look for in a hire. Without our incredible team, we would be in a very different place as a company.

[CTA_MODULE]

GlossGenius Is Customer-Obsessed. What Does This Mean in Practice to You, and How Has That Mindset Evolved as the Company Has Grown?

I find GlossGenius is uniquely customer-focused. A lot of companies talk about customer centricity, but here we really live and breathe it. We make decisions through the lens of “what’s best for our customers.” We prioritize meeting our customers where they are, whether that’s on social media or in person. We have a number of team members who worked in the beauty and wellness industry at various points, and their deep knowledge of the challenges of business ownership help us build products that actually solve customer problems, rather than just features that do certain operations. Our customer-focused mindset has been front and center from the beginning, but as we’ve grown we’ve had to scale some of our practices to make sure customer centricity continues to be baked into how we operate across the entire company.

How Have You Grown Professionally and What Skills Have You Sharpened Since Joining the GG Team?

Working at a high-growth startup, especially in a role like mine, you learn all kinds of skills you never would have anticipated! But if I’m distilling themes, two big ones stand out: First, the ability to make decisions quickly and confidently in ambiguous situations, and second, the ability to quickly build context and become enough of an expert to be dangerous.

On the first one, I’ve learned that there are a few decisions you need to really deliberate on and get right, but there are many that you’ll never have 100% confidence in. In the latter group, it’s usually more important to just pick a path quickly so you can learn from it than it is to get to full certainty. Coming from a hedge fund, I was used to moving slowly and precisely in the decisions/recommendations I made. But that doesn’t fly at a startup, since every day you wait is a day of momentum you lose. At GlossGenius, I have built the toolkit to know what information I need to make a decision, quickly gather that information and weigh it, listen to what my gut is telling me, and then pick a path and learn from it.

This feeds into the second ability I mentioned because building context quickly is a critical input to making decisions quickly. I have a liberal arts education, so I was trained to learn about new subjects by asking questions, synthesizing information, and forming my own perspective. But I have really leaned into that skill at GlossGenius because the problems we’re solving are constantly changing. In a given month, I may need to help negotiate a new contract, debug progress on key inputs to our financial plan, communicate about a new initiative, and more. Many of the challenges we encounter are new to us, but we don’t have time to waste by taking months to get up to speed or by hiring experts for everything. So I’ve gained a lot of experience in quickly assessing and building the context I need to be able to add value.

What’s One Project You’ve Worked on Here that You’re Especially Proud of?

There have been so many, but I’m particularly proud of the work I did to help codify our vision for talent in 2024. Like many companies, we grew organically during and after COVID, and last year we decided to take a step back and redefine how we want to work together so we can build connection and collaboration in our hybrid environment. This was an abstract challenge that spanned every level from defining “how do we want working at GlossGenius to feel” to literally building Notion pages. It was also highly collaborative and touched every department – particular shoutout to the People and IT teams who were heavily involved! I like when my work has tangible impact, and this was a project that I knew would shape how we operate not just now, but in the years to come.

What Are You Most Excited to Build, Solve, or See Come to Life at GlossGenius this Year?

There is SO much! But I’m particularly excited about unlocking the ability to serve new types of customers through deeper product and sales capabilities. We invested significantly in expanding our product experience last year, and now we get to share that with new customers while continuing to delight our existing customers. The journey to business ownership isn’t linear, and we find there are seemingly endless configurations of types of business. So it’s been a big priority of ours to be able to serve customers through their entire lifespan in the industry, whether they are running a solo business, part of a larger team, or anything in between. The whole team has been working hard on this, and I’m excited to see it come to life!

[CTA_MODULE]

What’s Something About You that Your Coworkers Might Be Surprised to Learn?

I have a 629-day (and counting) Duolingo streak in Italian. I’ve always loved learning languages and traveling, so a couple years ago I decided to try to learn Italian to make travel to Italy more fun and fulfilling. It’s slow going since I only spend a few minutes a day, but I can now hold my own in most basic interactions!

‍

GlossGenius is actively hiring across many departments – check out our open roles here.  

Additionally, below is some recent press you may be interested in:

• TechCrunch: GlossGenius Increases Valuation, Raises $28M in Series C Round of Funding
• GlossGenius Named a Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startup 2023
• GlossGenius Named to the Forbes Fintech 50
• GlossGenius Named a 2023 BuiltIn Best Places to Work Winner
• BeautyMatter: GlossGenius and the Power of Customizable Beauty SaaS
• Fast Company: The 10 Most Innovative Retail Companies of 2022