Hailey Bieber had heard the horror stories before she ever sat down with e.l.f. Beauty.
“I’ve heard a lot of stories from founders that had gone through acquisitions and had regrets and were not super happy with where their brand went,” Bieber said onstage at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit on Wednesday. “I went into it with a mindset of really wanting to know that Rhode was going to be safe where it was going.”
Bieber and Rater launched Rhode in 2022 and three years later e.l.f. Beauty agreed to buy the brand in a deal worth up to $1 billion, one of the buzziest beauty acquisitions in recent years. Bieber has since stayed on to lead creative and product innovation alongside Lauren Ratner, Rhode’s co-founder, president and chief brand officer.
For Bieber, the deciding factor wasn’t the price. In fact, Bieber said discussions about profit margins hate to see her coming, she told Fortune’s Ellie Austin. And in deciding to sell the brand she launched, Bieber said she wanted to know that she would still have a major role in the company she helped build.
“That was my one fear, really—that I would sell my company and then they were gonna say, ‘OK, we’re gonna put this person in and this person in,’ and then we want to make the team bigger around product development, and that I would start feeling like I didn’t have as much say,” she said. “It’s my baby, it’s our baby. We’ve grown it from literally day zero, ground up.”
‘We’re not going to fix what’s not broken‘
Bieber said she laid out every concern to e.l.f. from the beginning, including that she couldn’t imagine stepping back from the business. Their response was a happy surprise.
“They were like, ‘Oh my gosh, we want you to be more involved if you want to,’” Bieber recalled. “I feel like you never hear that from an acquirer—that they want you to be as in it as you were before, if not even more.”
Ratner said the pair worried an acquirer might start “meddling in the business,” dictating how Rhode should move forward. Instead, she said, e.l.f. was explicit about its intentions. “E.l.f. was very clear: ‘We’re not going to fix what’s not broken. You guys are doing an incredible job. You have a secret, special sauce,’” Ratner said. “‘We just want to supercharge the back end and let you guys do what you do best.’”
Bieber said e.l.f. walked her through, in detail, how it had supported the founders of every brand it had previously acquired.
“They told me, ‘We don’t want to come in, we don’t want to change anything. We really want you to continue operating exactly how you are,’” she said. “You have to trust that, and you have to follow your instinct.”
More than a year after the deal, Bieber says e.l.f. has kept its word. When Austin asked her which decisions remain exclusively hers, she didn’t hesitate.
“Pretty much all of them,” Bieber said. “Everything that they said before we were acquired, they have stuck to 100%. They have really just let us fly and let us continue to make every decision.”
If anything, her role has grown, she added. Bieber now holds the title of chief creative officer at Rhode and serves as a strategic advisor to e.l.f. Beauty as a whole, weighing in on the parent company’s products. “Any question they have for me, they can come to me and ask me, ‘Hey, what do you think about this product? Will you test this for us?’” she said. “It really has been genuinely the dream scenario.”
Why sell at all?
Rhode was growing quickly on its own, and Bieber and Ratner said a sale wasn’t on their immediate agenda. “I don’t think we at that moment were thinking, ‘This is what we’re going to do right now,’” Bieber said, adding that the opportunity “took us a little bit by surprise.” She declined to say who approached whom.
Timing mattered. Rhode was preparing to launch in Sephora, and Bieber wanted a partner that had done it before. Ratner said the brand’s lean team had reached its limits.
“We had a small, mighty, nimble team, and we felt like we had taken it as far as we could with that team,” Ratner said. “We really needed the infrastructure of a bigger partner to scale globally.”
Bieber said she, Ratner, and Ratner’s husband—Rhode’s third co-founder—reached the decision together. “When you have the synergy of all feeling good about it, it also makes the decision seem even more right,” she said.
The bet appears to be paying off. Rhode generated roughly $390 million in net sales in fiscal 2026, an 80% increase from the year before, and the company has said it wants to pass $1 billion.
Getting there depends on retail. Rhode, which built its business selling direct to consumers, entered Sephora in the U.S. last September. Ratner said Rhode is now the No. 1 brand in every retail market it operates in, including Sephora U.S., Sephora U.K., and Mecca in Australia.
A couple of weeks ago, the brand launched with Sephora in Europe across 19 new markets and more than 500 doors.
“Our first day of online sales for Rhode with Sephora EU actually surpassed the total Sephora EU Black Friday sales for the year prior,” Ratner said.
The post Hailey Bieber sold Rhode to e.l.f. Beauty after she and co-founder Lauren Ratner addressed their main fear in an acquisition appeared first on Fortune.
