In three years, with ten products and zero retail presence, you can’t deny the Rhode Beauty success after being sold for a billion dollars. The brand operated entirely through its own website, skipped wholesale completely, and never once considered an Amazon storefront. All it took was a waitlist and a woman with 55 million Instagram followers who made “glazed donut skin” a cultural reference point for an entire generation of women who moisturize.

Within 11 days of launching in June 2022, Rhode had crossed eight figures in sales.¹ Everything sold out within three days of going live. By the time e.l.f. Beauty came knocking in May 2025, Rhode had gone from zero to $212 million in net sales, direct-to-consumer only, with only ten products.²

The question everyone is skirting around but nobody wants to say out loud is this: is this a beauty success story, or is it a Hailey Bieber success story? And if you removed her from the equation entirely, would Rhode be anything at all?

The answer is worth understanding if you’re also building a brand of your own.

The Honest Case for Celebrity as Strategy

Let’s not pretend the celebrity angle is incidental to rhode beauty success. Bieber’s cultural influence was doing the heavy lifting that most brands need entire marketing departments and eight-figure budgets to accomplish.² Rhode spent roughly 11% of revenue on marketing, compared to the 30% to 50% that most DTC brands pour into paid social advertising.¹ That gap is not operational genius. That gap is Hailey Bieber posting a GRWM video to 55 million people who already trust her skin.

Rhode became the number one skincare brand in Earned Media Value in 2024, with 367% year-over-year EMV growth and a 3.75% engagement rate, surpassing the industry benchmark of 3.6%.³ Earned media, for context, is coverage and conversation you did not pay for. Rhode did not earn that through product innovation alone. It earned it because when Hailey Bieber puts something on her face, people want to know what it is before the video even ends.

To be fair to Rhode’s team, that is not a bug. That is the business model, and it was deployed intentionally and brilliantly.

Positioning and Unique Value Proposition

Lady Gaga has Haus Labs, Ariana Grande has REM Beauty, Selena Gomez has Rare Beauty, and despite the fact they arguably have bigger starpower behind them, they haven’t hit the Rhode mark.⁴ Kylie Jenner had one of the fastest-growing beauty brands of the 2010s, and yet nobody is talking about Kylie Cosmetics the way they talked about it in 2016. Kylie no longer seems as passionate about creating a unique and desirable product, and the brand has changed into more of a fan brand than a trusted company.⁵

So when we work to understand Rhode beauty success, we can’t exactly tie to a celebrity following. Of course it’s an accelerant, but it’s not all you need to win the game. Plenty of brands have tried the celeb founder route and watched it burn out. What Rhode did differently was refuse to let the celebrity moment be the whole story.

Rhode’s formulas were developed with all skin types in mind, with purposeful ingredients at efficacious levels, backed by top cosmetics chemists, dermatologists, and makeup artists.⁶ The products were not beautiful packaging over drugstore formulas. The Peptide Lip Treatment genuinely works. The Barrier Restore Cream genuinely works. And in a market where consumers have learned to read ingredient labels and leave reviews that include the word “disappointing” seventeen times, that matters more than it used to.

The glazed donut skin aesthetic was genius positioning, but it would have collapsed under the weight of bad product. Rhode’s products gave people a reason to come back after the first purchase, a mix of fantastic marketing and great operations.

What Consumers Are Actually Buying

Here is the more uncomfortable part of this conversation. Among 25 to 34-year-olds aware of Rhode, 47% agreed it is a premium brand, but only 30% felt that Rhode is “for people like me.”³ That gap tells you that only 30% of Rhode’s own audience feels like the brand is for them, and yet they are buying it anyway. That’s the key reason Rhode is outperforming, with or without Hailey.

They are not buying lip gloss as much as they’re buying into the cool fact they’ve created by their strong positioning in the market. They are buying the version of themselves that lives in a clean apartment, drinks water, has good skin, and looks like that effortlessly. The product is the physical object but the purchase is the aspiration.

This is not unique to Rhode either, and it’s something a great agency can help you achieve. Hailey Bieber’s minimalist skincare routines and Gwyneth Paltrow’s clean-living narrative through Goop are both clear, intentional, and consistent messaging about a lifestyle the consumer wants to inhabit.⁷ The brand allows the consumer to walk the walk of someone who lives a certain lifestyle.

The Numbers Piece

Rhode’s revenues actually diminished by 24.5% year-over-year (YoY) in 2024, showing that consumer demand was falling despite having strong brand visibility in the market.⁸ The brand was still generating strong revenue numbers, but the trajectory wasn’t looking great. They lost their marketing efficiency ratio and their margin which started to concern people.⁹ The slowdown is attributed partly to the Sephora launch maybe pulling buyer’s focus.

Rhode’s P&L is strong comparatively but it’s still unusual to see a high-growth brand achieve that level of marketing efficiency without the benefit of a built-in audience.⁹ In other words, good luck permeating the market without that kind of celebrity reach. The question that matters now is what happens to Rhode’s cost of customer acquisition when Hailey Bieber’s face is less culturally dominant, and what happens when the glazed donut aesthetic shifts, as aesthetics always do.

When Bieber was asked whether the world needed another celebrity beauty brand, she replied that while she understood the fatigue, her ultimate aim was to create a brand that could survive without her.⁴ That quote is doing a lot of work and baked in savvy PR strategy, but is still a genuine business problem that e.l.f. is now inheriting.

So Would Rhode Exist Without Her?

I hate to say it but no, not as it was built today, not at the speed it scaled, and not at the valuation it received. Rhode without Hailey Bieber is a well-formulated, minimalist skincare line competing in the most crowded consumer category on earth, trying to explain its moat on a Sephora shelf next to 400 other well-formulated, minimalist skincare lines. Only 26 of nearly 1,000 beauty brands tracked in the United States generate more than $100 million in annual retail sales.² Getting into that tier without celebrity fuel would take a decade and a very different budget.

It’s not me coming for Rhode at all either. But any founder with all the markings of the next “Rhode” will likely not have the success without that level of reach and quick investor interest.⁴ What Rhode did with the advantage it had, including the operational discipline, the tight SKU count, the DTC-first model, the genuine product quality, and the cultural specificity of the brand world it built, is what separates it from the brands that launched big and disappeared.

What This Actually Teaches You About Building a Brand

Rhode beauty success is a case study in something that makes a lot of founders uncomfortable: you cannot separate a brand from the person behind it, at least not in the early stages, and pretending otherwise is a missed opportunity.

Hailey Bieber did not try to make Rhode feel like a brand that existed independently of her. She made herself the product, made the product an extension of herself, and let the consumer buy into both simultaneously. While some say it’s celebrity exploitation, it’s also a strong brand strategy/

The version of this lesson that is actually available to you, if you are building something without 55M followers, is this: your point of view is your competitive advantage. Your aesthetic, your way of seeing the world, your specific and non-generic perspective on your industry, that is what cuts through. Rhode did not win because Hailey Bieber is famous. It won because her specific vision for what skincare should feel like was clear, consistent, and compelling enough that people wanted to live inside it.

The billion-dollar question, now that e.l.f. owns it, is whether that vision can survive the handoff, and that’s what I’ll be watching in this next chapter.

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Sources

1. Arthnova, “Hailey Bieber Rhode Elf Beauty Billion Dollar Deal,” 2026. arthnova.com
2. Social Life Magazine, “The Hailey Bieber Rhode Sale: Billion Dollar Beauty Brand,” 2026. sociallifemagazine.com
3. Because of Marketing, “The Rhode That Led to a $1B Acquisition from E.L.F Beauty,” 2025. becauseofmarketing.substack.com
4. The Drum, “Celeb-Founded Beauty Brands: Why Some Succeed Where Others Fail,” 2024. thedrum.com
5. The Lexington Line, “The Rise and Fall of Celebrity Beauty Brands,” 2024. thelexingtonline.com
6. Entrepreneur, “Ready for Rocketship Growth: Hailey Bieber’s Rhode Acquired by E.l.f. for $1 Billion,” 2025. entrepreneur.com
7. BusinessWomen.com, “The Top 10 Celebrity Beauty Brands Ranked by Revenue in 2025,” 2025. businesswomen.com
8. FashionBI, “Rhode 2024 Financial Performance: Revenue Decline Amid Strategic Expansion,” 2025. fashionbi.com
9. Beauty Independent, “Hailey Bieber’s Rhode Combines Celebrity With Financial Rigor. Can Others Replicate It?,” 2025. beautyindependent.com