Allbirds, a venture-backed startup that’s carved a lucrative market for itself selling eco-friendly footwear, has added new board members including Emily Weiss, the founder and CEO of the popular venture-backed makeup brand Glossier. Weiss was added alongside Mandy Fields, the chief financial officer (CFO) of cosmetics brand e.l.f Beauty.

With Weiss and Fields joining Allbirds’ board, the eco-friendly footwear brand now counts eight members on its board. Though the new board additions may seemingly hint at cosmetics ambitions for Allbirds, the company’s Co-CEO Tim Brown has clarified that it has no plans to get into that market.

Likely, Weiss has been tapped for an Allbirds board position thanks to her position of founding and building a venture-backed, high-growth direct-to-consumer brand. It’s notably her first board seat outside Glossier, the popular cosmetics brand she founded.

Weiss built Glossier from the ground up starting from a beauty blog known as “Into The Gloss“. She turned a popular blog drawing millions of page views on a monthly basis into Glossier, a cosmetics brand that’s backed by nearly $200 million in venture funding and was valued at $1.2 billion from its most recent funding round.

Glossier is known to have passed $100 million in sales with just a few dozen products in 2018.

It’s no easy feat to build a high-growth billion-dollar cosmetics brand starting from a blog, and with that, it should be no surprise that Allbirds has sought Weiss’s expertise for a board position. Just like Glossier, Allbirds has similar status of being a high-growth, venture-backed direct-to-consumer brand, but in the world of footwear.

Founded barely seven years ago, Allbirds has grown into a major maker of eco-friendly and sustainable footwear that’s known to have over $100 million in annual sales. Just like Glossier, it’s backed by about $200 million in venture funding and was valued at $1.7 billion from its most recent funding round.

Allbirds is backed by a mix of big-name institutional and individual investors like Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, T. Rowe Price, Franklin Templeton, and Mark Vadon, the founder of accessories e-tailer Zulily.

Like Allbirds, Glossier is also backed by a mix of big-name institutional investors such as Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, Index Ventures, IVP, and Thrive Capital.

Photo credit: TechCrunch, licensed under CC BY 2.0

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