Hailey Bieber

Bieber was a model with a very large following before she was a founder, and the obvious reading of Rhode is that fame did the work. It is not wrong, but it misses the part that is worth studying. Plenty of famous people have launched beauty brands since 2017, and most of them launched big: a full range, a retail partner on day one, a campaign. Bieber did the opposite. Rhode launched in June 2022 with three products, a serum and a cream at $29 and a lip treatment at $16, on its own website and nowhere else. She named it after her middle name because the name she first wanted, Bieber Beauty, was already trademarked, and a New York fashion label called Rhode sued within days of the launch. The brand kept trading while the case ran and settled it two years later.

What she contributed was taste and restraint, and the second is rarer. The range grew one hero at a time: tinted versions of the lip treatment in 2023, a phone case that holds the lip treatment in 2024, a cream blush that same summer. Each was launched as an event, sold out, went to a waitlist and was restocked as news. The phrase glazed donut skin did more for the serum than any advertisement could, and the phone case put the product into the mirror selfies of the people who bought it. None of that requires fame to copy, but fame made it work faster.

The contested part is the one e.l.f. Beauty wrote into its own annual report after buying the brand in 2025 for up to $1 billion: Bieber is described as essential to Rhode, and her retention is listed as a risk. She stayed on as founder, chief creative officer and head of innovation, with part of the price tied to a three-year earnout that ends in 2028. She had said publicly that she would not sell unless the number was a billion dollars, and the headline price was exactly that. Whether the brand can outlive her daily involvement is the question the next three years will answer, and it is not one she can answer by herself.