How Hailey Bieber Made Rhode Into a $1 Billion Success Story

By Chavie Lieber  Photography by Marili Andre for WSJ. Magazine | Styling by Gabriella Karefa-Johnson

N AN EARLY September morning in New York City, Hailey Bieber’s beauty brand, Rhode, was a few hours away from launching at Sephora. A staffer flipped open a camcorder and began filming Midtown cityscapes—food carts and street traffic—for B-roll on Instagram. Next to her, an employee with a digital camera took a shot of the giant photo of Bieber overlooking the Times Square storefront.

Suddenly, Bieber stepped onto Seventh Avenue in a plunging silver top and miniskirt, her hair slicked back in a bun and her moisturized face glowing behind sunglasses. The crowd broke into a cheer as she pulled a curtain off the store. Inside, Bieber huddled for photos with Sephora associates and filmed TikToks. All of this content would soon generate millions of likes, shares and comments. It would also sell tons of products.

When I went back to that same Sephora a few days later, the store was practically wiped clean of Rhode’s moisturizers, serums and blushes. I watched a little girl with a British accent nearly break into tears. “There’s no more blush from Haaayley Biebaaa!” she wailed to her mother. 

 

In the three years since Bieber debuted her brand, Rhode has become one of beauty’s more influential labels. Shoppers buy its milky facial tonics and sticky lip glosses for the chance to smear Bieber’s vibes into their skin. It’s the same allure that has shoppers dropping $20 on a Hailey Bieber Erewhon smoothie, or buying any piece of hot-girl clothing she’s photographed wearing. 

“She looks so good, I just want to look the same,” says Marie Shim, a 25-year-old engineer in New York City. Shim dropped everything to run to Times Square for Rhode’s Sephora launch. She waited about an hour to use the Rhode photo booth and buy one of the brand’s lip tints, which she says women her age are obsessed with. 

Rhode entered a crowded market of celebrity cosmetics in 2022 and rose above the tide. By March of this year, the brand said it had hit $212 million in annual net sales. In May, Elf Cosmetics announced it was acquiring the brand for $1 billion, adding Bieber to a growing class of beauty supermoguls.

“Most celebrity brands fail because it’s just a celebrity lending their name,” says Elf CEO Tarang Amin. “This is a real brand. She’s all in.” 

 

IF HAILEY BIEBER is being honest, she wasn’t always sure she’d be embraced as a beauty entrepreneur. “I felt like a lot of people didn’t like me. I still feel that way,” Bieber, 28, says.

It’s the day after the Sephora launch, and we’re having lunch at a Tribeca restaurant near her New York City apartment. She’s wearing a vintage leather Gucci jacket and $890 flip-flops from The Row, her hair pulled back into a pink claw clip. A massive oval diamond glistens on her ring finger, which is dotted with dainty tattoos. We’re sipping iced coffees and trading photos of our babies.

Bieber had woken up early that morning to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange with the Elf Cosmetics team. Earlier that day, her husband, Justin, had dropped a new album, Swag II.

Mental health, finances, marriage rumors—all of the Biebers’ personal matters have been widely scrutinized. Had the Rhode acquisition and album launch detracted from negative attention on the couple? “No,” Bieber says dryly. “But we’re both really finding our voices of who we are and, I believe, both really walking authentically in what it is we actually want to be doing.”

By the time Bieber was drumming up her idea for a skin-care brand in 2020, she’d already built a huge audience as one of fashion and beauty’s most sought-after faces. Sitting alongside her friends and fellow Insta-famous models, the Jenners and Hadids, she has inspired millions of beauty tutorials with her glowing “glazed donut” skin. TikTok even came up with a name for her fresh, minimal makeup look: “clean girl.” 

In building her business, Bieber says she didn’t want a licensing deal or collaboration with an existing brand. “I had lent my name enough times to see how it benefited that company,” she says, cutting into her chicken paillard. “I knew for a fact that if I’m doing this, I have to be the majority owner.”

Bieber approached Michael D. Ratner, a friend and founder of the entertainment studio OBB Media, who’d worked with the Biebers on documentaries, to be a partner in the business. Ratner joined as Rhode’s co-founder and executive chairman, and co-founder Lauren Rothberg, now Ratner’s wife, worked on branding and marketing. Rhode hired veteran beauty chemist Ron Robinson and the New York dermatologist Dhaval Bhanusali. 

Rhode launched in September 2022 with a serum, a moisturizer and a lip treatment, all sheathed in monochromatic gray packaging. Bieber says all of these offerings were her idea. 

“I test them on my husband, I test them on my friends,” she says. “I’m product-obsessed.”

The company stuck to a small number of beauty products, which often sold out. Rhode also dropped limited-edition items to fuel brand hype. After a lip gloss collaboration with Krispy Kreme, Ratner recalled receiving a note from the doughnut CMO saying “he’d never seen anything like it.”

I ask if Bieber feels competitive, now that her products have to stand up against other Sephora brands. “I think there is space for everybody,” she says. She is most competitive with herself, she adds. “I don’t feel competitive with people that I’m not inspired by.”

Is she nervous that Sephora shoppers might compare Rhode to Rare Beauty, the brand from Selena Gomez that’s also sold at Sephora? Fans have suggested there’s a rivalry between the two; Gomez used to date Justin when they were younger. Before she can respond, a publicist sitting nearby tells her to skip the question.

“It’s always annoying being pitted against other people. I didn’t ask for that,” Bieber says later. “When people want to see you a certain way and they’ve made up a story about you in their minds, it’s not up to you to change that.”

BEFORE SHE WAS a Bieber, Hailey was a Baldwin. The second-born daughter of actor Stephen Baldwin and graphic designer Kennya Deodato, she was raised in the suburb of Nyack, New York, where she took ballet lessons and was homeschooled for most of her youth.

She spent 12 years training in dance, but it was a career in modeling that found her at age 16. She signed with Ford Models in 2014 and began working with brands like Topshop and Tommy Hilfiger. 

Bieber says she paid close attention to the products that makeup artists and facialists used to prep her skin before shoots and shows. “I was able to hone in that skin care is actually quite simple, and less is way more,” she says.

She met Justin when they were kids, and they later dated on and off for a few years. Then suddenly, in 2018, they were publicly back on again, and by the end of the year they’d tied the knot.

Her high-profile associations have led some to label Bieber a “nepo baby,” a phrase she has embraced; in 2023, she was photographed wearing a white T-shirt with the words emblazoned across her chest. When it comes to her business, Bieber contends that her success is hard-earned. She says she invested her own money in Rhode and took money from investors. She declines to say who her investors were or how much of the company she owns.

What’s inarguable is that Bieber has changed the way many young women think about makeup and skin care. “It used to all be about heavier makeup and full-coverage foundation, which she pivoted away from,” says Brianna Renee Price, a 27-year-old content creator in Toronto. 

“What sucked me in was getting that dewy look,” says Haley Vintson, 30, a labor and delivery nurse in Chelsea, Alabama. “Everyone wants to look hydrated.”

The brand did only direct sales for its first three years, but at Rhode pop-ups in select cities, Ratner says his team saw the craze firsthand—women and girls waiting for hours to take photos inside the brand activations. An expansion into blush and lip pencils carrying cute names like Sleepy Girl and Freckle helped Rhode’s revenue climb. In 2023, Rhode’s net sales tripled, the company said. Fans went wild for Rhode’s cream blush, and the sales demonstrated “just how big this company could get,” Ratner says.

The arrival of Rhode’s biggest innovation—a $38 iPhone case with a slot for lip gloss—prompted much of the internet to lose their minds. 

“im literally upgrading my phone so i can get this case lol,” one TikToker commented when the case launched in February last year. Rhode has sold over 700,000 phone cases, the company said.

“We put something in people’s hands that they didn’t know that they needed or wanted,” Bieber says proudly.

Not all Rhode products were hits. The company had to reformulate its peptide lip treatment after customers complained the texture turned grainy. “It’s something that still haunts me,” Bieber says. Rhode resolved the issue, she says, and she looks back on the experience as a lesson. “Even when you’ve done all the testing and checked all the boxes that you need to, there are still things that can happen unexpectedly with formulas and production.”

Hannah Campbell, an 18-year-old content creator in South Jersey who buys Rhode and has also been given products by the brand, says she didn’t find any Rhode products to be particularly revolutionary but says the vibes pulled her in. “You’ve got to give credit to their marketing, because it’s so aesthetically pleasing. You almost want to eat Rhode.”

Some celebrities launch multiple business ventures to hedge their bets—the requisite alcohol brand, an activewear label. Bieber says she “put every egg into this basket.”

“If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it the best that I can possibly do it, and focus on one thing,” she says. “I don’t want to build a million brands just to build them.”

AS THE RHODE TEAM spent some seven months working on the Elf acquisition, Bieber was simultaneously shifting into her new role as a mother. Her son, Jack Blues, was born in August 2024.

Bieber admits she probably pushed herself to get back into the swing of things a little too soon. She did a Rhode shoot only three months after giving birth. 

Becoming a mother has made her more of a homebody, Bieber says. She recalls scheduling a dinner with girlfriends and insisting on 6 p.m. so she’d be back for bedtime. “I feel like time has just become so precious,” she says. “Having kids makes you realize that.” 

Bieber still models and remains highly sought-after by brands. “It doesn’t matter if the client is in automotive, hospitality, CPG—she’s always on the list,” says Ashlee Margolis, whose company, The A List, brokers brand and celebrity deals. “And she’s on the tippy top.”

She spends her downtime swimming with her son and creating fashion moodboards on Pinterest under a secret name. It’s usually late at night that she has “brain dumps” about Rhode. “I’ll be laying in bed at 1 o’clock in the morning and write something down. You can ask my team; they’ll get a text at 2 o’clock in the morning and I’m like, ‘Ignore this till the morning!’ ” 

Given the world’s attention on the family, Bieber says her son’s privacy is a priority. The couple doesn’t post photos of him and are careful about where they bring him. “Until your child can understand it and it’s possible to have conversation around it, I have no interest in putting him out there in any way,” she says.

I ask her how the money from the Rhode sale will affect her life, and the conversation comes back to Jack. 

“I want to preserve that for my son’s future,” she says. “It’s an amount of money that I have not dealt with before, so I just want to be smart with it. I would like to invest it wisely.” Bieber says she’s been working with the same business manager since she was 19.

Bieber feels she’s developed newfound “ferocity” in motherhood. “I like who I am so much more now than I did before I had my son,” she says. “You gain this silent strength and confidence. You can’t tell me the same s— that you could tell me before. You’re not f—ing with me after I pushed a human out of my body.”

While some entrepreneurs prefer to walk away after cashing in on acquisitions, Bieber says she is staying on at Rhode as founder and chief creative and innovation officer. She says the team looked for a buyer that wanted to keep her and the team on board.

“I never wanted to sell my company and wipe my hands clean and walk away from it,” she says. “I’m still the one that’s testing all the products, I’m still the one that’s sitting in the product-development meetings.” She has also joined Elf as a strategic adviser and will be lending ideas to the makeup giant.  

I joke that maybe Rhode needs to do a line of baby products, and Bieber admits it’s something she’s thought about. In addition to coating herself with creams every night, she’s now moisturizing her son with French pharmacy lotions.

“My baby every single night goes to bed like a baby glazed doughnut,” she says. “I slather him.”

Header video: Owen Smith-Clark for WSJ. Magazine; hair, James Pecis using Blu & Green; makeup, Emi Kaneko using Rhode; manicure, Dawn Sterling; set design, Patience Harding; production, Casa Projects.

Write to Chavie Lieber at Chavie.Lieber@WSJ.com