BeyondGloRilla

By the time Black Beauty Founders reaches Gloria Woods, she has spent the day telling the story of GloVerse, interview after interview. Ask her about the people behind her glam, though, and the answers still come fast.

Because she has lived this story from the chair.

A new city. A show that night. A look that has to be right. And one question her team had to answer over and over in the year her career exploded: who is doing glam?

They searched social media. They sent DMs, city after city.

"Sometimes we'll get a reply. Sometimes they'll reply but not be available," Woods says. "So it was just super frustrating all the way around."

Sometimes nobody answered at all. The clock kept moving, and a Grammy-nominated artist sat down in the chair of whoever was free.

"Sometimes I was booking people because I had to, because no one else was going to do it," she says. "And I got messed up a few times."

For most people, that is a bad glam day. For Woods, it became a business plan.

"The first year I blew up, it kept happening," she says. "Before every show, I would get mad because I didn't have somebody to do my makeup or hair. So I said, okay, I'm going to find a solution. There's got to be a solution to this."

That solution is GloVerse, a beauty marketplace she co-founded with Georgii Speakman, founder and CEO of the venture consultancy OUT.LI.ER. And with it, the Memphis rapper the world knows as GloRilla steps into a title she does not take lightly.

President and Founder.

"I think it's so big. It's very important," she says. "Beauty is our culture, so I'm excited about that."

Unlike most celebrities who enter beauty, she did not start with a product.

She started with the infrastructure.

The Problem Was Never Talent

Celebrity beauty usually arrives in a familiar package: a lipstick with a famous name on the tube, a fragrance timed to an album. Woods went somewhere less glamorous and far more useful. She went after the broken, scattered way people find the hairstylists, makeup artists, nail technicians, barbers and estheticians they trust.

Ask her what makes her trust someone new, and her answer is simple. The work has to match the vision.

"If their work is not compatible with how I want to look, then I'm like, I don't know," she says. Has she sat in the wrong chair before? "I've been through it a lot of times."

For everyone else, finding that match is a scavenger hunt. Scroll Instagram. Scroll TikTok. Ask a friend. Search a hashtag. Send a DM. Wait. Ask if they are in town. Ask if they travel. Ask if they can actually deliver the look in the photo.

GloVerse is betting all of that can live in one place.

"With GloVerse, you can see everybody in that area," Woods says, "and have a plethora of people to choose from."

Rapid Fire

So, with skin like that and a company called GloVerse, where is the product?

"I'm working on it," she says with a smile.

No announcement followed. Speakman widened the frame instead. "GloVerse is unlimited," she says. "It's an unlimited Gloria Woods universe, so anything and everything is possible."

The Turn

From GloRilla to Gloria Woods.

The artist found the problem. The founder is building the answer.

Inside the GloVerse

GloVerse calls itself "your home for on-demand glam." The difference is control. You are not matched with whoever happens to be closest. You see the work first, then choose the artist whose style matches yours.

Open the app and the first screen asks you to choose a door: Login as Glam Professional, or Login as Customer.

It is the whole business model in two buttons.

Here is how it will work when the full marketplace opens at the end of the year, based on early screens shared with Black Beauty Founders.

1. Choose your side. Clients log in as customers. Beauty professionals log in as Glam Professionals, known on the platform as GloPros.
2. Browse the talent. Customers land on a feed of trending providers, sorted into Hair, Braids, Makeup and Nails. Each profile shows the pro's look, specialty, starting price and star rating.
3. Search by your look. Filters go beyond category to the details that actually matter, like hair type and face shape.
4. Pick the place. Go to the professional, or book the professional to come to you.
5. Book the artist you chose. No random match. You decide who does your glam.
6. Share and save. A referral program, coming soon, will give both friends 10% off their next booking when a new client books a first appointment.

For GloPros, the payoff is visibility. Each professional builds a profile and a shareable GloID designed to put their work in front of new clients, in a place built for booking rather than scrolling.

GloVerse is live now on Google Play, with the App Store version on the way and the full marketplace expected by the end of 2026.

The brand's own line sums up the positioning: Built by culture. Designed for everyone.

What GloVerse Is Actually Building

The beta introduces GloVerse as an on-demand beauty marketplace. But in a follow-up conversation with Black Beauty Founders, co-founder Georgii Speakman opened up about the larger business strategy behind the platform.

“You’re the first person that I’m talking to in this much detail, actually,” she told BBF.

For providers, the GloID is designed to become much more than a profile. Beauty professionals can showcase their work while setting their availability, pricing, specialties, travel preferences and other parameters around how they want to work. Speakman sees it as a way for independent professionals, including beauty-school graduates, to build clientele and operate as solopreneurs without being entirely dependent on a traditional salon or employer.

The platform is also being shaped by the professionals using it. If a provider offers a specialty that is not already represented, they can submit it for review. The GloVerse team then determines whether it belongs within an existing category or warrants a new category or subcategory. Beard sculpting and loc removal are among the specialized services already identified through that process.

The next layer is personalization. GloVerse plans to recommend beauty professionals based on factors including location, preferences, service needs and budget, moving beyond a static directory toward what Speakman calls a “beauty intelligence network.” The idea is that someone looking for an everyday beauty service and someone seeking celebrity-level glam may have completely different needs, budgets and expectations, and the platform should recognize that difference.

That same thinking extends to who GloVerse is being built for. Speakman says the platform is designed for every race, culture, nationality and gender.

“We want everybody feeling like there’s a place for them,” she says. “We want them feeling seen.”

That relationship with users also extends beyond booking. GloVerse has introduced Love Letters from Glo, a weekly message shared through the platform, website and email every Wednesday. The letters combine encouragement from Glo with updates on new and upcoming features, creating another way for the company to stay connected with the people entering the GloVerse.

“It’s going to take a minute for people to appreciate and really understand how it works,” Speakman says.

That level of personalization matters. NielsenIQ reports that 60% of Black consumers say it is important that a product or service be customized to their needs. Anyone who has ever left a salon with the wrong look understands why.

A $247 Billion Industry Powered by Independents

The market beneath the idea is enormous. Fortune Business Insights values the global professional beauty services market at $247.6 billion in 2026, with the U.S. market at $49.26 billion this year. Hair services alone account for more than half of the global total.

And much of that economy runs on individuals, not institutions.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics counts more than 670,000 barbers, hairstylists and cosmetologists. Eighty percent of barbers are self-employed, as are 48% of hairdressers, hairstylists and cosmetologists. The field is projected to grow 7% over the next decade, much faster than the average for all occupations, with roughly 80,000 openings every year.

These professionals are their own marketing team, booking desk, front office and creative director, all at once. What many of them lack is not skill. It is a reliable way to be found.

"There's a lot of opportunities for us out there," Woods says. "The people need to be discovered and be seen."

Her definition of success for them is refreshingly specific.

"I want them to be booked up all the time," she says, laughing. "I want them to be so booked up that they get mad and frustrated. Get that much money that they get irritated."

It is a joke. It is also the entire thesis. In a services economy built on independents, visibility is income.

And Black consumers are already where those professionals need to be found. NielsenIQ reports Black shoppers spent $16.2 billion on beauty over the past year, up 9%, and nearly half of beauty spending from Black households now happens online. The client is already searching on a phone. GloVerse wants the professional to be the first thing she finds.

Built for Both Sides of the Chair

Woods could have entered beauty a dozen different ways. Asked why a platform for professionals felt right, she points to the people on either end of the booking.

"It was helping other people too, on both sides," she says. "It's helping the customer and the service provider. And I'm big on helping other people."

That both-sides thinking is already shaping the product. One feature Woods personally wants in GloVerse centers on time, and who gets to charge for it.

Glam professionals routinely charge late fees when clients run behind. Woods thinks accountability should run in both directions.

"If they have the customer waiting a certain amount of time, they've got to get their fee too," she says.

It sounds like a small detail. It is not. Marketplaces live or die on trust. The client needs to know the professional will show up on time and deliver. The professional needs to know the client will respect their time and talent. The platforms that last do more than process bookings. They write the rules of fair exchange.

That is a founder thinking about the system, not just the spotlight.

Meet Gloria Woods, the Founder

There is a distinction Woods wants people to understand. GloRilla is the artist. Gloria Woods is the one in the meetings.

"I'm super focused and I'm super locked in on this," she says. "They don't see all the hard work that we're putting in behind the scenes, but I'm super hands-on and just getting the work done."

She is also discovering a different kind of creative muscle.

"I'm actually more creative than I think," she says. "You have to be creative as an artist and as a founder, but it's two different types of creativity. I'm learning that about myself."

Ask her whether GloVerse is a marketplace, a discovery platform or a business tool, and she declines to choose.

"I see it going above and beyond," she says. "We're building on it every day, so it's only going to get bigger. I just plan on it being the biggest everything."

And when the conversation turns to the long game, including the possibility of an acquisition one day, she does not flinch.

"I definitely see something like that happening," she says.

Bigger Than the Name

Celebrity can open the door for a new company. It cannot keep the customer. In McKinsey's 2025 beauty research, when consumers were asked what drives their repeat purchases, founders ranked lowest of every option given.

So Black Beauty Founders asked Woods the question every celebrity founder eventually faces: does she want GloVerse to one day be bigger than GloRilla?

She does not hesitate.

"Yes, I do," she says. "I want GloVerse to be its own thing. I'm going to be big in it in the beginning to get it out there, but eventually I want GloVerse to be GloVerse and GloRilla to be Glo."

It may be the most important thing she says all afternoon.

The Founder Era

For now, the story is the platform. A platform born because a touring artist got tired of landing in cities with no easy way to find the people she needed. A platform that could give independent beauty professionals a new road to clients. A platform its founder hopes will one day stand without her name out front.

And for the young women watching her move from the stage to the startup, her advice is plain and urgent. She admits she sat on the idea herself before acting on it.

"Go work on that idea as soon as it comes to mind," she says. "As soon as you think about it, think about a way to make it happen, because God can give your idea to somebody else to act on it."