The Strat · Episode 51 · The Beauty Counter
30 August 2026 · 7 min
Fenty Beauty
Serve the customer everyone else agreed to ignore, and let the industry re-price itself around you.
From the show notes
Rihanna redefining the beauty industry with inclusive shade ranges
Published as
51- The Fenty Effect
§01 — What to listen for
Fenty launched in September 2017 with forty foundation shades when the norm was closer to twenty, and the deepest shades sold out first. Listen for what that sell-out proved: the demand had always been there, and every incumbent had been leaving money on the counter for decades because their shade chart was a habit rather than a decision.
The strategy underneath is counter-positioning. Once Fenty had made forty shades the standard, every rival that matched it was admitting it had been wrong, and every rival that did not was conceding the customer. Kendo, the LVMH incubator behind the brand, built a category-defining launch out of a single product decision — which is the cheapest kind of category creation there is.
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 Fenty 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.
- counter positioning
Tagged across the library; the write-up is in the queue.
- category creation
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.
§03 — Go deeper
Fenty Beauty
Narrow moat · Watch it
Your turn
Foundation is the riskiest product you could lead with, and every shade you add costs inventory in sixteen hundred doors. How wide do you launch?
Rihanna · 2017
Verdict
Watch it
If LVMH discloses Fenty at over a billion dollars of revenue with Fenty Skin a material share of it, the brand has become a house rather than a launch and the Forbes figure is conservative. If instead the next disclosure is a merger of Fenty into another Kendo or LVMH beauty structure, the group has concluded the brand cannot scale on its own, and the right verdict is pass.
§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
- 50Rare BeautyMake the cause the product, and give one percent of every sale to prove you mean it.8 min
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