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Rishabh Jain
Managing Director
BlissClub | Confetti's Verdict ⭐⭐⭐⭐ ½
Confetti Design Studio has analysed Rhode to understand how a rejected trademark application for Bieber Beauty led Hailey Bieber to name her skincare line after her own middle name instead. She built the brand in 2022 with entertainment executive Michael D. Ratner and brand strategist Lauren Ratner, launching with just three products and taking ten million dollars in sales in the first eleven days.
Three years later, Rhode became one of the fastest beauty brands in the sector's history to sell at a billion dollar valuation, and it now sits inside a listed company that needs it to keep growing at the same pace. The audit asks whether the taste that built Rhode can survive becoming someone else's growth engine. This audit is as per September 2026.
Rhode named nearly everything after something you would want to eat.
Glazing fluid, glazing milk, barrier butter, strawberry glaze, salted caramel, jelly bean and date cake all sit on the same shelf.
Hailey Bieber coined the phrase glazed donut skin years before the brand launched, and it entered everyday language on its own. That single phrase has done more for Rhode's positioning than any paid campaign the brand has run since.
The naming carries the personal story well too. Hailey Bieber's own middle name is Rhode, chosen only after her first application for Bieber Beauty was turned down.
Rhode's packaging looks dermatological, while their brand language reads as if it were a dessert menu.
The bottles are minimal and clinical in tone, with none of the pink or playful cues the product names might suggest.
The photography also leans on strawberries, doughnuts and glazed textures so the sensory promise of each name is visible before a customer even reads a word.
Most brands under this much attention would have made the packaging match the playful names, and lost the credibility that makes the products feel effective, but Rhode went the other way.
The $38 Lip Case turned a lip balm into a phone accessory people carry all day.
It launched in February 2024 to a waitlist of more than 440,000 people and sold out almost immediately, generating over nine million dollars in revenue on its own.
Rhode more than doubled its customer base in the year that followed.
The case turns packaging into a billboard the customer carries everywhere, and it pushes refill purchases of the lip balm inside it, which is a stronger commercial structure than most beauty merchandise ever achieves.
Only around fifteen per cent of the creator content about Rhode mentions Hailey Bieber by name.
Despite that, Rhode ranked number one in year-over-year earned media value growth among US skincare brands, up 367 per cent, and number one in engagement growth in the category.
Most celebrity beauty brands fade the moment the celebrity stops being interesting, and Rhode built a community large enough that it no longer needs her name on every post to keep selling.
Rhode priced itself between drugstore and high end brands in the makeup-up and skincare niche, and built its whole product line between that pricing gap.
Products sit mostly between sixteen and thirty eight dollars, which is somewhere between drug store brands like Maybelline but nowhere near high end brands like Charlotte Tilbury.
And that middle position lets the brand cater to a wider range of budgets and consumers.
The brand also folded skincare and makeup into one line rather than treating them as separate businesses, and added mini sizes so customers who could not afford full size products still had a way in.
That combination of positioning and sizing is doing more to protect Rhode's customer base than any single hero product.
Rhode's first Pocket Blush range shipped with shades that did not work on deeper skin tones.
Creator Golloria George called the shades out as ashy in August 2024, and the video reached almost twenty million views before Rhode responded.
Hailey Bieber called George personally, compensated her for shade consulting, and worked with in-house chemist Ron Robinson to launch two new shades, Date Cake and Plum, within about a month.
The response was handled pretty well, but for a brand like Rhode, this should not have needed a public complaint to reach the customers it was already claiming to serve.
The brand launched with three products in 2022 and now sells sixteen at Sephora, where its North America launch outsold every previous launch in the retailer's history by two and a half times.
Glossier and Summer Fridays both faced the same test of turning a tight, drop-driven catalogue into a retail assortment, and neither has fully kept the sense of scarcity that built its following.
Colour cosmetics is where e.l.f. needs Rhode to grow next, and that category runs on constant newness.
Brands like Charlotte Tilbury and NYX compete on shade breadth and frequent drops, which is the opposite of the tight, ten to sixteen product core that built Rhode's credibility.
Everything that made Rhode desirable at launch is now under pressure from the exact thing that makes it valuable to its new parent, which is scale.
Rhode's Sephora launch in North America outsold every previous launch in the retailer's history.
A UK rollout is next, and each new market raises the same question of how much of the brand's register survives the move into a shared retail shelf.
Confetti's view is that the clinical-versus-edible packaging contrast is Rhode's most defensible asset, and it should be protected in-store as carefully as it has been online.
Rhode is the rare brand that got almost everything right at a small scale, built on one clear idea and three products. The naming, the packaging contrast, the lip case and the community it built beyond its founder all worked in the brand’s favour.
What holds it back from a full score is that none of this has been tested yet at the scale e.l.f. now needs, particularly in colour cosmetics, where the discipline that built Rhode works against the newness the category rewards.
If you are building a founder-led beauty or personal care brand that wants to launch via sensory marketing and stand out in the niche, this is exactly the work we do. Get in touch with Confetti Design Studio.
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