Ghia Founder Melanie Masarin on Pitching a Risky Move

Ghia Founder Melanie Masarin on Pitching a Risky Move 

Melanie Masarin once pitched Glossier’s founder, Emily Weiss, to do a pop-up at a former fried chicken shop. Her response? “I don’t get it, but I trust you.” It was a career-defining moment for her. Because getting approval from the founder meant she couldn’t afford to mess it up. Listen as Melanie shares why being given major responsibilities in her mid-twenties shaped her career. Plus, how it prepared her to start Ghia, the non-alcoholic apéritif that’s now a millennial bar-cart staple. 

In this episode of 9 to 5ish, Melanie also shares: 

• Her food-centered core memories growing up in the French Riviera 

• The money-shock she experienced attending Brown University 

• The once-in-a-lifetime chance she had to design the Glossier flagship store

• Her journey shifting from founder-to-CEO mode, and the difficulties that come with it

• How pivoting Ghia’s launch strategy actually paid off 

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Melanie Masarin once pitched Glossier’s founder to do a pop-up at a former fried chicken shop. Her response? “I don’t get it, but I trust you.” Listen to why it was a career-defining moment for her.

WEB ARTICLE: 

Melanie Masarin once pitched Glossier’s founder, Emily Weiss, to do a pop-up at a former fried chicken shop. Her response? “I don’t get it, but I trust you.” It was a career-defining moment for her. Because getting approval from the founder meant she couldn’t afford to mess it up. Listen as Melanie shares why being given major responsibilities in her mid-twenties shaped her career. Plus, how it prepared her to start Ghia, the non-alcoholic apéritif that’s now a millennial bar-cart staple. 

In this episode of 9 to 5ish, Melanie also shares: 

• Her food-centered core memories growing up in the French Riviera 

• The money-shock she experienced attending Brown University 

• The once-in-a-lifetime chance she had to design the Glossier flagship store

• Her journey shifting from founder-to-CEO mode, and the difficulties that come with it

• How pivoting Ghia’s launch strategy last minute actually paid off 

On the Reality of Fundraising in 2025

Melanie: My superpower is building the world around Ghia and the brand and getting people into our world. But what I'm doing right now is – I'm doing 10 investor calls per day, in the middle of the tariffs and the current political and macroeconomic environment. I’m trying to get people who don't wanna invest to invest. We just launched at Whole Foods. We want to launch into more retail and we need money to do that. It is particularly challenging right now, but I also know that my real superpower is I never give up and I'm gonna see this through with Gia. And if right now it's a rough patch that we have to survive to win, we're just gonna make it through. it's the bottom b*tch role. No one else can do that.

On a Career Defining Moment at Glossier

Melanie: We were gonna do a pop-up in San Francisco and San Francisco is very reluctant to kind of like having bigger retail. There's a lot of zoning laws that make it very difficult to find a pop-up space. At that point, we weren’t able to find a space. It had been months of searching… I'm on Craigslist, looking for spaces, and I see this guy that put up his fried chicken shop for sale. At this point, I'm desperate. I can't go back after a third trip to San Francisco to Emily [Weiss] and say we don't have a strategy. San Francisco was a very big city for us. I emailed the guy and I was like, keep the fried chicken shop open and we'll take it over…I went back to Emily and I said, ‘I don't have a real estate space for a popup, but there's this fried chicken shop that's very well-loved in the Mission They've been open for 40 years. The guy wants to shut it down. I think I can convince him to leave it open and we can have a Glossier fried chicken shop. She looked at me and was like, ‘I don't get it, but I trust you,’ which is honestly the most empowering thing that she could have said. Because there was no way from that point I was gonna f*ck it up.

On Why She Dislikes Managing Stakeholders

Melanie: The thing that I struggle with the most because I'm such a creative person and I love to be an individual contributor…The mandate is so different when you're a manager or when you report to a founder vs. when you're a founder. I'm also at this stage where I have to say things such as, ‘good is the opposite of great’, when my whole life, I have strived for greatness and tried to do my best work. We just have to keep the business moving forward and it kills me. I die inside every time I say it.

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