Good morning! We wrapped up our Most Powerful Women Summit yesterday with a packed schedule, hearing from Ms. Tina Knowles, Citi CEO Jane Fraser, Rhode founder Hailey Bieber, and more.If you’ve ever refreshed beauty brand Rhode’s website during a product launch only to see “sold out,” Hailey Bieber wants you to know that wasn’t the plan.
“We’re not creating FOMO on purpose,” Bieber said onstage yesterday at the
Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, in conversation with Fortune Daily’s Ellie Austin. “I do think sometimes brands will do that as a strategy ploy. It’s not something that we’re doing on purpose.”
Instead, she described the scarcity as more of a demand-forecasting problem the brand is working on. In Rhode’s first six months after its 2022 launch, the company was only able to sell product for 11 days before it sold out, cofounder Lauren Ratner explained. The pattern held this summer. Rhode had added about 160,000 new customers in the three months before its bronzer launch, Ratner said. Rhode sold out of some of its best-selling SKUs and heard about it from frustrated shoppers online.
“There’s only so much predicting you can do,” Bieber said. “Of course we forecast as a company… and because the consumers are so incredible, it always exceeds what we thought it was going to be.” She added that the brand has repeatedly had to tell its community “sorry,” and then aim to do better on the next product drop.
Some improved forecasting could come through its
acquisition by e.l.f. Beauty, which agreed to buy Rhode last year in a deal
worth up to $1 billion. Ratner said e.l.f. Beauty has helped “supercharge on the back end,” opening up more distribution centers and diversifying its manufacturers.
“A lot of that is because of the sentiment we’re seeing online from consumers,” Ratner said.
Part of why Rhode keeps selling out so quickly is that its products tend to go viral in ways even its founders don’t predict. Take the
iconic phone case with a built-in lip gloss slot, for instance: “I personally did not think that was going to be as big as it was,” Bieber said. “I thought it was going to be an added accessory that was going to be fun.”
What Ratner said is deliberate about the brand’s virality, though, is speed. She said she and Bieber can watch a minute-long edit and pick the three-to-five-second clip that will resonate with viewers, and Rhode’s social team can turn a phone toward Bieber for sign-off rather than wait on layers of approval.
“If you don’t get something up in real time or that same day, the conversation’s passed,” Ratner said, adding the team doesn’t sit in meetings looking at the return on investment on any of it either. Bieber went even further by saying “a conversation about margins hates to see me coming.”
That instinct-first approach has paid off. Rhode posted about $390 million in net sales in fiscal 2026, up 80% year over year. It’s the No. 1 brand at Sephora in the U.S. and U.K., and the company’s
next target is $1 billion in net sales.
Sydney Lake
sydney.lake@fortune.comThe Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’
s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world.
