Rhode Beauty: Hailey Bieber's Masterclass in Distinctive Assets

Rhode generated $248 million in earned media value in 2024 while spending approximately 11% of revenue on marketing. The beauty industry average is 20% to 40%. That gap is not a rounding error. It is the entire thesis.

In May 2025, e.l.f. Beauty announced it would acquire Rhode for $800 million upfront plus a potential $200 million earnout, valuing the brand at up to $1 billion. At the time, Rhode had 10 products, all priced at $38 or less, and was selling exclusively direct-to-consumer. It had been in existence for three years.

Beauty Independent called the deal a "huge gamble on fame." That framing is understandable but incomplete. What Rhode built was not just fame. It was a textbook application of the principles Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp have spent careers documenting: distinctive brand assets, tight control of memory cues, and earned mental availability at a scale most paid media budgets cannot touch.

The Problem With How Marketers Think About Celebrity Brands

The instinct when evaluating a brand like Rhode is to chalk it up to Hailey Bieber's follower count and move on. That explanation is both true and useless. Plenty of celebrities have launched beauty brands. Most of them are already forgotten.

What separates Rhode is not that Hailey Bieber is famous. It is that the brand was built with the discipline of a company that understood why distinctiveness works, even if it never used that vocabulary publicly.

Chapter 14 of Never Always, Never Never draws a clean line between differentiation and distinctiveness. Differentiation asks consumers to evaluate product attributes and conclude your brand is superior. Distinctiveness does something simpler: it makes your brand easier to recognize and recall in moments that matter. As Byron Sharp and his colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have shown, most brands in a category offer broadly similar products at broadly similar quality levels. Consumers do not experience the fine distinctions marketers obsess over. They reach for what is easiest to retrieve from memory.

That insight is what Rhode understood. The phone case is the clearest example.

The Phone Case Was Not a Product. It Was a Memory Hook.

Rhode's lip phone case, a phone case designed to hold the brand's lip balm, became one of the most discussed beauty accessories of 2023. It was not groundbreaking engineering. It was an object that made the brand physically present in daily life and visually distinct in social feeds.

This is exactly what Jenni Romaniuk describes in her work on distinctive brand assets: colors, shapes, packaging, and objects that function as memory hooks. They give people a shorthand they can recall instantly, even when they cannot remember your brand name or product details. The phone case was that shorthand made physical.

Consider what the phone case accomplished strategically. It attached Rhode to a category entry point that no other beauty brand owned: the moment you reach for your phone. Most lip balm brands compete for the "dry lips" entry point. Rhode competed for a dozen moments simultaneously, anywhere a phone appeared, which in 2023 was everywhere.

This is the same logic behind Ogilvy's Guinness-and-oysters campaign, described in detail in Never Always, Never Never. Ogilvy did not argue Guinness was tastier than Budweiser. He linked Guinness to a specific moment, eating oysters, so that when that moment arose, Guinness came to mind automatically. Rhode did the version of that for a generation that documents every moment with a phone.

The phone case also generated earned media at a scale the brand could not have purchased. When something is visually distinctive and occupies a space people photograph constantly, it spreads without a media plan. Rhode's $248 million in earned media value in 2024, with 367% year-over-year growth, was partly a product of this dynamic.

Minimalism as a Distinctive Strategy

At acquisition, Rhode had 10 products, all under $38. For a brand doing $212 million in net sales in the 12 months ended March 31, 2025, that SKU count is almost absurd by beauty industry standards.

Most beauty brands pursue breadth. More SKUs means more shelf presence, more occasions, more potential buyers. Rhode went the opposite direction, and it worked because a narrow lineup forced consistency. Every product reinforced the same aesthetic: glazed, dewy, minimal. The look became a brand asset as recognizable as a logo.

This connects to one of the most important but underappreciated points in Chapter 14 of Never Always, Never Never: the real challenge with distinctive assets is not creating them. It is sticking with them. An asset only compounds in memory when it is repeated consistently across time and context. Brands that constantly reinvent their visual identity reset the clock on salience every time.

Rhode did not reset the clock. Three years in, the aesthetic was as coherent as it was on launch day. That consistency, more than any individual campaign, is what built the brand's recognizability.

Earned Media Efficiency and What It Actually Measures

The $248 million in earned media value Rhode generated in 2024 deserves scrutiny, not just applause. Earned media value is a constructed metric, and its methodology varies by provider. But the directional signal is clear: Rhode generated an extraordinary volume of unpaid brand coverage relative to its size and age.

The deeper question is why. Earned media at scale is almost always a downstream consequence of upstream brand decisions. Rhode generated coverage because:

• Its aesthetic was visually coherent and consistently photogenic, making it easy to feature
• Its products were genuinely accessible (nothing over $38), widening the pool of people who could and would write about them
• Its distinctive assets, including the phone case and the glazed skin aesthetic, gave creators a recognizable visual language to participate in
• Its DTC-only model created scarcity and launch anticipation, which the media ecosystem rewards with coverage

This is mental availability built through earned attention rather than paid reach. The principle is identical. Repeated exposure to a brand's distinctive cues strengthens memory structures that make the brand easier to recall in buying situations. Whether that exposure is paid or earned is irrelevant to the neuroscience. Rhode just found a cheaper path to it.

At 11% of revenue on marketing versus an industry average of 20% to 40%, Rhode's margin profile looked fundamentally different from its competitors. That efficiency is what made the e.l.f. acquisition at approximately 4.7x revenue on the headline value defensible to investors, even for a three-year-old brand.

The Physical Availability Question Rhode Had Not Yet Answered

Rhode was sold exclusively direct-to-consumer at the time of the acquisition. That model supported brand control, launch scarcity, and pricing discipline. It also meant Rhode had only partially solved the growth equation.

Byron Sharp's framework, which Patrick Gilbert covers in Never Always, Never Never, holds that brand growth requires both mental and physical availability. Mental availability means being recalled when a need arises. Physical availability means being easy to find and buy when someone acts on that recall.

A DTC-only model caps physical availability. If someone thinks of Rhode at a drugstore because they forgot to reorder, the brand loses that moment. E.l.f.'s retail distribution footprint is the obvious answer to that problem, which explains a significant part of the acquisition rationale beyond just brand valuation.

This pattern has appeared before. Warby Parker built strong mental availability through its DTC model and cultural relevance, then discovered that physical retail was not optional for sustained growth. Rhode is at the same inflection point, just earlier in the curve.

The Harder Question: Is This Replicable?

Beauty Independent framed the e.l.f. deal as a gamble on fame continuing to translate into sales. That critique has merit, but it conflates two separate risks.

The first risk is genuine: Rhode's earned media efficiency depends on Hailey Bieber remaining culturally relevant. That is not a formula. It is a person. If the cultural moment shifts, the earned media flywheel slows, and the brand's economics change materially.

The second supposed risk, that Rhode's marketing approach is inexplicable, is weaker. The strategy follows a coherent framework: tight creative discipline, consistent distinctive assets, limited SKUs that reinforce rather than dilute the brand identity, and a founder whose personal brand generates category entry points the company would otherwise have to buy.

What is not replicable is the founder. Hailey Bieber's specific combination of cultural positioning, existing audience, and aesthetic credibility is rare. But the underlying mechanics of what she built are not magic. They are, as Chapter 14 of Never Always, Never Never argues, the same mechanics that made Guinness work in the American market in 1950: claim a distinctive position, attach it to specific moments, and repeat the cues until they are burned into memory.

Most founders attempting this will fail not because the framework is wrong, but because they will not maintain the discipline. They will add SKUs too fast, change the aesthetic, chase trends, and dilute the assets they built. Rhode did not do that. Whether e.l.f. will maintain that discipline post-acquisition is the real question worth watching.

At AdVenture Media, the brands we see succeed with earned-media-first strategies share one trait with Rhode: they build visual systems distinctive enough that consumers can describe the brand to someone else without using its name. That is the green beanie effect, and it is harder to engineer than it looks.

What Rhode Actually Teaches Marketers

The Rhode story is not a celebrity brand story. It is a distinctive brand assets story with a celebrity as the founder.

The takeaways are specific:

• Narrow your assets before you expand your products. Rhode locked in a visual identity before it had more than a handful of SKUs. That sequence matters. Most brands do it in reverse.
• Category entry points beat product features. The phone case did not sell because it was a better phone case. It sold because it owned a moment of daily life no beauty brand had claimed.
• Consistency is the compounding mechanism. Jenni Romaniuk's research shows distinctive assets build salience through repetition. Rhode's three-year visual consistency is worth more than any single campaign.
• Earned media is downstream of brand discipline, not a strategy on its own. Rhode did not set out to generate $248 million in EMV. It built something visually coherent and culturally specific, and coverage followed.
• Physical availability will be the next test. The mental availability work is largely done. Whether Rhode translates that into durable market share through e.l.f.'s retail network is the chapter that has not been written yet.

The e.l.f. acquisition is the market's verdict on what was built in three years. A billion-dollar headline value for 10 products under $38, sold only online, founded in 2022. That is not a gamble on fame. That is the market pricing in what happens when someone builds mental availability correctly from day one.