Cofounder of Hailey Bieber’s Rhode Talks Sephora, World-building

Lauren Ratner’s road to Rhode wasn’t totally linear, but every turn had its purpose.

The brand’s cofounder, who became its president and chief brand officer at the end of 2023, initially met founder Hailey Bieber through both of their husbands. At that point, working at Reformation after a stint at Michael Kors, “we clicked,” said Ratner. “I understood her vision, her taste, her aesthetic. We speak the same visual language.”

From cocreating that vision pre-launch to overseeing the brand’s lightning-fast growth path (it was the youngest beauty brand in industry history to sell at a valuation of $1 billion, in a landmark sale to E.l.f. Beauty), Ratner didn’t take a traditional beauty route — and that’s what gave her a competitive advantage.

“Hailey and I have both come from a fashion background, and when we built Rhode, we weren’t following a traditional beauty playbook, and that allowed us to stand apart,” she said, nodding to the megawatt campaigns with the likes of Claudia Schiffer, a social strategy that entailed leveraging stars and fanatics alike, and immersive pop-up and retail experiences, which now entail a gondola at Sephora.

Here, Ratner talks moving the cultural needle with Rhode’s creative, the opportunities and challenges in launching a celebrity brand, and which rulebooks she’s rewriting next.

Beauty Inc: How would you describe your professional trajectory, and how did your past experiences shape your present?

Lauren Ratner: My background has always been in brand marketing, world building and working directly with founders to bring their vision to life. I started my career at more established companies, like Michael Kors in New York, where I learned the foundation of what marketing is, how does a 360-degree global marketing campaign and launch come together.

The majority of my time has been spent at companies in a high-growth start-up phase, like Reformation and Rhode. I met Hailey through my now-husband, Michael, when he was directing Justin’s YouTube series. When we met, she was interested in building a skin care line and we started to actively explore the idea. We clicked. I understood her vision, her taste, her aesthetic. We speak the same visual language, and we ended up hitting the ground running. Michael, myself and her started building the business from the ground up for the last five years.

From a product standpoint, she wanted to offer these intentional, curated skin care essentials and a brand that was reflective of her world. We wanted to build a brand that was highly visual and talking to the consumer in a new and fresh way, because we felt there was a whitespace for that. Our close creative relationship helped me bring her vision to life effectively.

We spent months ideating around what Rhode would look like, what it would sound like and what it would feel like. I have always been obsessed with storytelling and how you communicate an idea, even from writing essays in school. I’ve been identifying how we bring this brand to life through crafting a world-class creative, innovative product and an innovative content strategy.

B.I.: What was it like jumping from fashion to beauty; how are they similar and how are they different?

L.R.: I love both industries, and there’s a lot of overlap. Both beauty and fashion are about creating a connection with the consumer through emotion around something you do every day. You get dressed, you also do your beauty and makeup routine. Both industries are focused on visual identity and telling stories with product.

For a brand marketer and builder like me, there’s so much fun within those verticals. At Rhode, we were deeply inspired by fashion, particularly ’90s fashion, in the way that we shoot our campaigns and bring them to life. We communicate with our consumer in such a highly visual and creative way, it’s reminiscent of fashion.

An interesting difference is to note that my past experience in fashion was highly focused around product newness, whereas with Rhode, we’re building these hero, core, evergreen products. We only launched with three products and it took us a full calendar year to put out another one. We’re building deeper stories with consumers around each of those, and our newness comes much more from content, storytelling and activations than new product.

B.I.: You have made a brand that leverages Hailey’s star power but also stands on its own. How did you approach that?

L.R.: Hailey has a real connection to her consumer, and we always knew we wanted to build on that relationship and build a world of Rhode for consumers to be a part of. We wanted to build a brand universe that was totally immersive — something exciting and sexy, but also really approachable, like Hailey. 

I’m obsessed with content, so it was always important for me to create real stickiness with our visuals and our messaging that our consumer just couldn’t get enough of. We started building the world online with campaign imagery, and we started translating it offline with photo booths and pop-ups. Most recently, our Majorca activation, we not only created as a physical destination but branded every element.

Hailey was obviously the face of the brand to launch, but we’ve continued to bring in new ones, whether it’s Precious Lee, Tate McRae, Claudia Schiffer, Harris Dickinson. It’s allowed us to build a brand beyond Hailey by tapping into new audiences. 

B.I.: What are the opportunities in building a celebrity brand, and what are the challenges?

L.R.: The opportunities around celebrity brands are huge, particularly one like Hailey with a massive following and connection to those followers. We launched Rhode and on Day One had a massive built-in audience. It let us amplify our message, it accelerated our business.

When we launched in 2022, it was a crowded marketplace and we ran the risk of being pigeonholed as another celebrity brand. Thankfully, Hailey’s goal was always to build a bigger brand than herself. She wanted someone to pick up a Rhode product and not necessarily know it was associated with her.

We built an advisory board with chemists and derms like Ron Robinson and Dhaval Bhanusali to help us create products that were highly efficacious and focused on skin barrier health using hero ingredients that felt fresh, like peptides. We curated this product road map. Really, it’s the product philosophy that resonated with consumers.

B.I.: What are the key learnings from the high-growth period since launch?

L.R.: We learned that the product philosophy worked, we knew consumers wanted a routine. We learned the world we built was resonating. We learned that the combination of content, community and commerce was really working. We were building high-impact creative in bite-sized chunks that felt really personal, and we created desire for our products.

We built that playbook so when it came to launching products through immersive, large-scale campaigns, we created this surround sound. You couldn’t escape it online. We’ve always empowered the community to be creators, and we encouraged our community to be a part of every launch conversation and create opportunities for them to storytell with our products.

B.I.: The brand reached a new inflection point this year with the acquisition by E.l.f. Beauty. What was it like to sell the brand?

L.R.: We knew we had a really powerful brand, and we had amazing global potential. We felt it was important to find a partner to help us take Rhode to the next level. It’s our baby, we love it. It was important to find a partner that could execute a successful retail launch because we knew that was our next step, and help us expand globally, because that was always our goal. It was also important to find a partner that understood Hailey as a founder, that understood myself as a cofounder, the identity and vision of Rhode. E.l.f. was that partner.

B.I.: How did you decide Rhode was ready for retail, and why did you go with Sephora?

L.R.: Our Rhode pop-ups and IRL activations have been a hugely successful part of the brand. We always knew there was an appetite for the consumer to shop in this IRL setting. From Day One, we did see this global interest in the brand, so it was important to find the retail partner that will help us expand globally. Sephora, to us, is a like-minded beauty destination. They really care about brand equity, they really care about founder spirit, and they wanted us to come to Sephora with our own brand expression intact.

B.I.: What’s next? Are you exploring different categories, different geographies, and how are you evaluating those opportunities?

L.R.: We’re focused on successfully launching into retail and continuing to put out these great products we’re known and loved for. Being part of the E.l.f. Family helps us accelerate this ability to reach more people through our products and widen our distribution globally, so we’re focused on that.