Hailey Bieber has arrived. 

Literally, to the Beauty Inc awards ceremony last Wednesday in Recent York and, figuratively, to the beauty industry. 

The Gen Z style icon has translated her beauty prowess right into a successful line of products — a rare feat within the crowded world of celebrity beauty brands. 

Bieber is buzzy, and so is her beauty brand, Rhode.

In a sea of celebrity beauty launches — from Ashley Benson and Ashley Tisdale to Lady Gaga and Brad Pitt — Rhode stands out. The brand has a definitive standpoint, launching with a curated assortment of vegan, cruelty-free essentials, and finding financial success. That’s not at all times the case relating to the wonder lines of the famous, that are sometimes stock formulations in chic packaging, and sometimes criticized online as money grabs.

But Bieber’s Rhode has a veteran beauty team behind it and major growth plans ahead.

Rhode debuted in June with a serum, a moisturizer and a lip balm in three flavors on Rhodeskin.com with prices starting from $16 to $29. Bieber’s intention was to start out small, and the groundwork for long-term, sustained growth.

However the market had other plans. Bieber’s pared-back routine resonated together with her following, which is just shy of fifty million on Instagram alone, and sold out nearly immediately. Rhode’s Instagram and TikTok accounts boast 645,000 and 139,000 followers, respectively.

Denizens of the net world obsess over Bieber’s every beauty move. TikToks show teens in bathrooms mimicking Bieber’s minimal concealer routine, and manicure tutorials showing her glazed donut nails took over the web this summer.

“I’m blown away by the response,” Bieber said of Rhode. “It thus far exceeded what I could have hoped for. My whole idea with this brand, going into it, was to be a slow grow: lay the foundations and construct it slowly and never be in a rush to expand.”

Bieber said across products, the brand’s waiting lists have topped 800,000. With products priced at a minimum of $16, that group could generate nearly $13 million in sales alone.

“Having seen the response, there’s an element of me that’s like, ‘I wish we could do more, faster and sooner for everyone,’” Bieber said. “But we’re a brand that’s focused on the long game. It’s the rationale we haven’t launched into other territories yet, we’re really focused on getting grounded.”

The model-turned-entrepreneur does have her mandates cut out for her, especially when factoring in a posh supply chain and determining when and expand her offering. “We’re really still learning. We’re a first-time brand; I’m a first-time founder. We’re up against restocks and provide chain issues and it’s been such a learning season for me,” she said.

Her strategy so far has been to tap leading industry experts to assist her develop the brand. Cosmetic chemist Ron Robinson, founder and chief executive officer of skincare brand BeautyStat, is Rhode’s chemist-in-residence; Dr. Dhaval Banusali was Rhode’s dermatologist-in-residence.

Rhode has reached a head count of 10 employees, including the newest hire: industry veteran Melanie Bender, who worked as president of mass skincare brand Versed for years, is now Rhode’s chief executive officer.

“I’m the one who’s involved within the interviewing process and the vetting process. I felt like I hadn’t found that person that actually understood me and understood my vision of the brand,” Bieber said. “It took an extended time to seek out [Bender], but I’m so glad I didn’t rush to seek out that role in the corporate. She is just like the magic fairy dust that we wanted on top of our team.”

Bieber is the brand’s majority owner, chairwoman, founder and artistic director. Her goal for Bender is for her to construct out the brand’s operations while staying true to Rhode’s philosophy of uncomplicated essentials. It’s a departure from the go-to market strategies of a few of Bieber’s celebrity-beauty-entrepreneur peers: Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty, Lady Gaga’s Haus Labs and even Kim Kardashian’s Skkn by Kim launched with more products which have more elaborate beauty-routine potential.

But Bieber said simplicity is certainly one of her keys to success.

“What I hope is chatting with people is the edited, curated essentials — my approach of less-is-more relating to my beauty routines, my hair, my makeup and my skincare,” she said. 

A recent TikTok showing her pre-makeup routine including an unspecified Rhode sample, the brand’s Peptide Glazing Fluid, Barrier Restore Cream and Weleda’s Skin Food, nabbed just shy of 700,000 likes on the platform.

“I’m hoping that what’s resonating with people is that after they get their hands on the product, they understand that you could get a extremely effective, great formula product for a extremely reasonably priced price. It may be an ideal staple in your routine and something that you need to have in your bag on a regular basis, that you need to travel with — that’s doing what it says it’s going to do,” she continued.

Reactions to the brand have been “overwhelmingly positive,” Bieber said.

“We’re a brand that’s going to thrive off of feedback. I would like feedback, I would like to know what’s working and what’s not working with the brand, because I would like to have the opportunity to take that feedback, feed it into the brand and improve it. Nevertheless I can proceed to enhance this brand, I’m going to, without end. That’s the usual for me.”

She acknowledged that given her limited assortment, not every product has worked for each shopper.

“There was a pair parts of feedback that perhaps a certain product didn’t work for a certain person or their skin type. For me, I take it like a dagger to the center, because I would like each person on the planet to find it irresistible. But the fact is, when you may have a brand, not every little thing goes to work well for everyone,” she said.

Bieber added, “We are able to just hope that in the long run, that with more products that we put out, that they will find something else that works for them. Everybody’s skin is so different, persons are sensitive to various things, and other people have allergies that you may have to contemplate.”

The brand’s assortment is vegan, cruelty-free and gluten-free.

“Straight away, we’re within the means of sampling recent stuff and attempting to work out what will be the subsequent launch. We’re focused on eventually giving people an ideal cleanser and more great products for the skin without doing probably the most and giving people too many things to select from,” she said. “At a certain point, I feel it reaches a level of being unnecessary.”

That’s where Bieber’s own experience as a beauty consumer has played into her vision. 

“I’m really not concerned about overwhelming my consumer and my audience in any respect. As a one that has at all times really loved and enjoyed consuming beauty products, I get very overwhelmed, to at the present time,” she said.

Bieber confirmed that the brand’s next category — makeup — would still be easy and skin-first. “I’ve at all times loved a extremely edited collection of clothes as well. I need to make the experience very user-friendly, very curated, very edited, very straight-to-the-point. That’s what our launch cadence goes to follow.”

Concurrently, the ambition is to make Rhode products available more consistently, with fewer sellouts.

“We’re beginning to level out by way of our restock plan, we never could have planned for such an unbelievably positive response before it was even launched,” Bieber said. “Personally, certainly one of the challenges is that there’s a lot demand for it in other territories, and we really need to get it to everybody, it just takes planning.”

That’s where Bender is available in.

“Rhode launched with only three products. As an entire, there’s such intensity around newness and [creating] more in beauty,” Bender said. “In point of fact, all of us recognize that the world doesn’t need more products, it needs products that work higher for it. Taking that mentality forward means continuing to push meaningful innovation, but never to launch recent units for newness’ sake.”

Bender said the learnings from constructing Versed, a pioneer of “clean” beauty within the mass channel, do apply, but acknowledged that the expansion strategy — Versed entered 1,400 Goal doors in 2019 — wouldn’t align with Rhode’s brand ethos.

“It is a brand that you just mainly need to throw away every preconceived notion on the market. That’s huge, because we don’t must follow the playbook that other brands often feel forced into,” she said. “We control a number of our own news cycle, and we control all of our own demand.”

Finding stability in a recent paradigm of brand-building, though, has had a learning curve. “We’ve already crossed the eight-figure sales mark in only 11 days of selling, so the demand has just blown out of the water what was forecasted based on other businesses,” Bender said. “Our replenishment lead time began at about six months. When you do the maths, we launched in June, you place an order in June, you’re getting that in December.”

“We’ve been sorely out of stock,” Bender said. “That’s partially because we didn’t need to overcommit to inventory after which have excess we’d must move through in other ways.”

And while inflation and a looming recession have impacted consumer spending broadly, persons are still willing to shell out for beauty. Based on holiday data from the NPD Group, beauty was the one category that posted sales and unit gains during Black Friday week.

Accessibility is top-of-mind for each Bieber and Bender, and it’s also informing the evolution of Rhode’s distribution strategy. “My goal for the brand was at all times that the primary yr can be d-to-c because I desired to see the way it was going to do,” Bieber said, counting data and sales insights from the positioning as vital assets to the brand’s development.

Eventually Rhode will go into brick-and-mortar stores. Whether via a wholesale partnership or the brand’s own doors, though, stays to be decided. “I don’t know 100% when that’s going to be, but it would be a gaggle decision,” Bieber said. “I would really like it to be accessible in stores. Whether meaning we stay d-to-c until we will do our own brick-and-mortar pop-ups, or whatever it’s, or if we go into an already established retailer. Possibly, eventually, it’s each. But I would like it to be at a degree where you may walk in somewhere and have the opportunity to buy Rhode.”

From the operational standpoint, Bender is equally bullish. “The community appetite is there, and we absolutely shall be an omnichannel brand, by way of being at the suitable points of distribution,” she said. “I also really imagine that we’ll have our own points in the long run, including real-world opportunities to see and feel the product, that we curate and construct.”

Despite myriad celebrity entrants into beauty in recent times, starting from Ariana Grande to Travis Barker, Bender sees Bieber’s star power because the secret sauce. 

“She is a component beauty influencer, part product enthusiast, part entrepreneur. She is the de facto beauty whisperer of this generation of ladies,” she said.

A recent evaluation from SpaSeekers named Bieber 2022’s leading celebrity beauty icon, citing a 421 percent increase in searches for her makeup looks on Google and greater than 167 million views on TikTok.

“[The landscape] is wildly crowded and what meaning is as brand leaders, we have now to search for unfair benefits. We’ve to search for the explanations that when everyone else fails, we’ll succeed, we shall be at the highest of not only a listing of 10 brands or 100 brands, but of 1,000 brands,” Bender said.

“[Hailey] is actually intimately involved in our product development and our creative, those are huge benefits that she brings our company due to how well she understands where our consumer and culture is headed. In fact, she also plays a job in shaping that,” Bender added.

Bieber has also created a litmus test for discerning when a product is able to launch. “The largest telltale sign for me is that if I run out of a sample, and my skin is missing it and craving it. That was how we go to the Peptide Glazing Fluid.”

That product sold 36 units a second throughout the most up-to-date restocks, in line with the brand.

Bieber’s influence is in a position to drive Rhode’s share of wallet without traditional growth methods, like launching superfluous products, Bender said. “She has such access to one of the best experts on the earth, access to all probably the most incredible brands,” she said. “There are such a lot of ways to bring excitement and produce that novelty back to the conversation that don’t necessitate recent product.”

The goal isn’t simply to wield influence to drive sales. Bender cited values — each Bieber’s and Rhode’s — as a core reason she decided to affix the corporate.

“June 24 was a extremely key date in my decision process. It’s when the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, and it might have been Rhode’s ninth day in business,” she said. “The primary brand I saw make any public statement was Rhode. Any brand leader who goes through these times knows there isn’t a playbook, they usually were not only able to speak, they were able to speak before everyone else.”

In an identical vein, the brand also has the Rhode Futures Foundation, which, as of the brand’s June launch, pledged to support 1,000 women and their families by 2023, in line with its website, via partnerships with the Accion Opportunity Fund, Black Mamas Matter Alliance and the LIFT Family Goal Fund.

“We’ve already met that goal before the top of the yr,” Bieber said.

The opportunities ahead are myriad, and Bieber continues to advertise products from other beauty brands across channels.

“The space of beauty is so large and vast, it’s large enough for everyone. I don’t feel that there’s any sense of competition if I share any individual else’s product,” she said. “I can’t expect that other persons are going to embrace me if I don’t embrace them as well. The wonder community is so special and delightful and different, and my hope is to be supported by other individuals, and due to this fact I would like to have the opportunity to support them, too.

“I actually have had an incredible time lending my face and my name to other brands, and that has only facilitated me being up to now in my life and my profession, and I feel very, very thankful for that. But I did reach a degree where I used to be like, ‘I’m going to place all in to my very own project.’”

Her sense of ownership — financially and creatively — is what drives her. As she told WWD prelaunch in May, “I’m the bulk owner of this brand, I put probably the most money into this brand myself. There is no such thing as a reason for me to chop corners and bulls–t with this brand. I won’t, and I didn’t with these products.”