Glossier Trusts Cloudflare to Secure and Supercharge Its Beauty Ecosystem

Glossier is one of the world’s fastest-growing beauty companies, with surging popularity among millions of customers and celebrity endorsements from the likes of Beyonce. But this is not your typical department store mainstay: Glossier is a digital-first company that generates considerable revenue through online sales — propelled by an ever-growing library of content featuring ways customers are using its products to enhance their personal style.

That combination has struck a chord, but it wouldn’t resonate long if Glossier’s web presence wasn’t keeping up with demand. To ensure its performance and security keeps pace with its rapidly-expanding audience, Glossier turned to Cloudflare.

Glossier Director of Engineering Aaron Suggs explains:

“Cloudflare was the easiest way to get everything we were looking for, from global points of presence, to speeding up network traffic around the world, to absorbing potential DDoS attacks. Beyond that, we thought about the user experience for our engineering team — and Cloudflare stood above the rest.”

Beauty at the Speed of Light

Glossier’s focus on performance isn’t just about the practical realities of running a modern ecommerce business, where every hiccup of latency can translate into lost revenue. Instead, it stems from the company’s core promise: Glossier strives to fit seamlessly into people’s lives, and sluggish and unreliable load times would be the antithesis of that ideal.

To ensure its customers have a seamless browsing experience, Glossier taps into the bevy of acceleration features enabled by Cloudflare’s network. With Argo Smart Routing, Glossier’s content takes the most efficient route across the global Internet — informed by the intelligence Cloudflare derives from the millions of requests that pass through its network every second.

Glossier also leverages Cloudflare’s network to ensure its web properties are available and reliable worldwide. The company has focused its efforts in North America and Europe to date, but many of its customers are frequent travelers who shop while they’re on the go — whether they’re vacationing in Japan or on a business trip to India. With Cloudflare, that’s no problem: Cloudflare’s global network has data centers in 330 cities worldwide, providing Glossier with a low-latency footprint wherever its customers are.

Safeguarding Customer Trust

Glossier’s brand ethos also explains why it thinks so much about security. Glossier is fundamentally a company that revolves around trust — which is crucial to its mission of connecting with and empowering customers. Meanwhile it faces attacks common to any popular retailer; attacks with the potential to undermine that trust.

That’s why Glossier employs Cloudflare’s robust suite of security features, like its Web Application Firewall — harnessing the massive scale of Cloudflare’s network to evaluate and identify malicious traffic in real-time. DDoS Mitigation ensures Glossier’s storefront stays reliable even in the face of concerted attacks. And with Cloudflare’s industry-leading Bot Management, Glossier detects and thwarts malicious bots that masquerade as real customers.

“Cloudflare has made us more resilient to whole classes of security threats, blocking everything from DDoS attacks to bots attempting to stuff credentials and scrape content.

I’m very bullish on Cloudflare’s ability to identify threats — because of the volume and diversity of Internet traffic they handle, they're positioned to leverage that data to detect and mitigate the most sophisticated DDoS and malicious bot attacks.” - Aaron Suggs Director of Engineering, Glossier

From ensuring a world-class shopping experience to safeguarding consumer trust, Glossier shows why building the world’s next-generation beauty company isn’t simply a matter of aesthetics — and Cloudflare is proud to be helping them on their journey.

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For more on Glossier, don’t miss their online storefront here.

Learn more about Argo Smart Routing.