The Strat · Episode 50 · The Beauty Counter
30 August 2026 · 8 min
Rare Beauty
Make the cause the product, and give one percent of every sale to prove you mean it.
From the show notes
Rare Beauty, a beauty brand pioneering accessible inclusive product design, community impact, mental health awareness, etc
Published as
50- Rare Beauty: More than Makeup
§01 — What to listen for
Selena Gomez launched Rare Beauty in September 2020, straight into a pandemic and straight into Sephora as an exclusive. Listen for the two decisions that did the work: the Rare Impact Fund, which takes one percent of sales for mental-health services, and a liquid blush that became the brand's hero product because it was genuinely good rather than because it was famous.
Celebrity beauty brands usually fail at year three, when the celebrity's attention moves on. Rare's bet is that a cause with a real budget behind it outlives a launch cycle. The strategic question the episode leaves open is whether purpose can carry a brand once the founder is no longer the story.
The episode tells the story. The written case does what twelve minutes cannot: the business model, the moat, the statements, the valuation, and a verdict. Read the Rare Beauty teardown.
§02 — The strategy, named
The mechanisms this episode demonstrates, in the same vocabulary the case library uses. Where a pattern has been written up, the claim is here; otherwise the tag is still in the queue.
- cause as strategy
Tagged across the library; the write-up is in the queue.
- founder myth
Tagged across the library; the write-up is in the queue.
- hero product
Tagged across the library; the write-up is in the queue.
- exclusives as moat
Tagged across the library; the write-up is in the queue.
§03 — Go deeper
Rare Beauty
Narrow moat · Watch it
The founders
Selena Gomez
“A founder's fame gets the first customer in the door. Only the product and a reason that outlasts the founder's attention bring the second one back.”
Scott Friedman
“The celebrity brands that last tend to have an operator who has already scaled one beauty brand and sold it. The fame is the launch; the operator is the second act.”
Your turn
Your growth has flattened inside one retailer and the buyers would not meet your price. Do you give up the exclusivity that made you special, or find growth somewhere you already are?
Selena Gomez · 2026
Verdict
Watch it
If credible reporting shows 2026 sales growing well above 20% with Sephora sales holding steady, Ulta found a new customer and the plateau was a distribution ceiling, not a demand one; I would move to own it. If instead Rare Beauty's Sephora business shrinks while Ulta grows, the brand bought a year of growth by trading away its exclusivity, and the $1.3 billion estimate is closer to the truth than the $2.7 billion one.
§04 — More from The Beauty Counter
Eight beauty houses, from a 150-year-old Japanese empire to a founder brand that sold for a billion dollars in three years.
- 44Charlotte TilburyPut a working makeup artist's name on the box and price the credibility, not the pigment.7 min
- 45NARSName the blush Orgasm, and let the shock do the work a media budget would have done.7 min
- 46M.A.C.Give the artists the product, take a stand the industry would not, and let both do the selling.7 min
- 47ShiseidoSit between two cultures and sell each one the other's idea of beauty.8 min
- 48GlossierRecruit the readers first, then sell them the product they told you to make.7 min
- 49RhodeSell three products, name an aesthetic, and be acquired for a billion dollars before your third birthday.7 min
- 51Fenty BeautyServe the customer everyone else agreed to ignore, and let the industry re-price itself around you.7 min