But for all the advantages Bieber has as a founder, her place in culture can also be challenging to navigate. There are corners of the internet dedicated solely to criticizing everything she does—from how her hair looks in a photo to the way she talks about her marriage or parenting her son, Jack, to what she wears in a Rhode campaign.
“I just think being in this position in general, there’s a lot of judgment,” she says. “It does feel hard sometimes, having every single thing be looked at and picked apart.” Experience has taught her that there’s no stopping people from inventing narratives. “They create a story for you, and it can feel really uncomfortable and bizarre sometimes, because I’m like, it’s just not even real,” she says. To her, there’s only one solution: “I need to live my life and continue to move forward regardless.”
This past year was a major test—Bieber experienced her first full year of motherhood while also navigating the sale and in-store retail launch of her company. “There’s a lot of change happening at once,” she says. “It really showed me—as a woman, as a businesswoman, as an entrepreneur, as a mom, as a wife, as a friend—really what my capacity was, because I felt really stretched in a lot of ways.”
Selling Rhode was not a given—Bieber was aware she had options. And E.l.f.’s namesake brand, a mass drugstore line with hundreds of products, most of which cost $10 or less, wasn’t an obvious match. But the companies aligned in their “disruptive” approach to marketing, says E.l.f. CEO Tarang Amin, and the value proposition for each side was clear. E.l.f., which also owns Alicia Keys’ Keys Soulcare, Naturium, and Well People, gets access to Bieber’s reputation and insights, as well as Rhode’s Sephora presence, customer base, and growth. Rhode gets to tap into E.l.f.’s operational and distribution capabilities to scale and achieve Bieber’s goal of expanding into retail around the world. Plus, for Bieber, the price was right. She had said in internal meetings that she would not sell for less than $1 billion. The transaction was ultimately $800 million in cash and E.l.f. Beauty stock for Rhode’s equity holders, and an additional $200 million contingent on Rhode’s performance in the first three years of the partnership.