I’ve covered Rhode’s evolution beyond skincare for the past three years. Almost three years ago to the day, I wrote about its first move into color cosmetics with the launch of Peptide Lip Tints. Since then, the brand has expanded into blush and lip liners, while viral products like the Lip Case have turned beauty into a wearable accessory.

Up next? A limited-edition collaboration with Alexandra Leclerc that pushes Rhode even further into fashion. Announced yesterday, the collection centers on Pocket Pearl, a miniature, shimmery Pocket Blush in three shades that can be attached to a butterfly charm and R-shaped carabiner, alongside a golden-brown Peptide Lip Tint scented like tart apple candy. The collection arrives September 15 exclusively on rhodeskin.com .

A miniature blush hanging from Leclerc’s handbag looks more like part of the outfit than a beauty product. For Rhode, it represents a larger strategy: turning efficacious products into objects of desire and each launch into a world consumers want to enter.

It also reflects the increasingly blurred boundaries between beauty products, fashion accessories and cultural collectibles.

The partnership with Leclerc—the fashion influencer, model and art historian—dates back to 2024, when she starred in Rhode’s Lip Case campaign. She later co-hosted the brand’s Miami dinner during Formula 1 in 2025. A longtime Pocket Blush user, she helped develop the new shades, scent and charms.

That progression, from customer to muse to collaborator, offers a window into how Rhode operates. It borrows fashion’s tools of desire—emotional storytelling, visual codes, talent casting and anticipation—to build a world consumers want to enter.

“When Hailey and I started the brand, neither of us were from a traditional beauty background,” Lauren Ratner, Rhode’s cofounder and a former Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, told me over Zoom. Bieber was a fashion model; Ratner led marketing at Reformation and previously worked at Michael Kors.

“We felt like there was an opportunity to build a brand that talked to the consumer in a different way, in a really highly visual way,” Ratner continued.

That fashion influence is visible in Rhode’s Pocket Pearl teaser the day before the announcement. The TikTok and Instagram post featured the miniature blush hanging from a gold chain against black quilted leather, styled more like a luxury handbag charm than a beauty product. The caption read simply, “charmed" (no shade or description).

Pocket Pearl also arrives amid fashion’s broader embrace of bag charms, which have transformed handbags into expressions of personal style.

The trend reflects a broader shift in how beauty products are designed—not only for use, but for display. Rhode was early to that behavior: the Lip Case established its beauty-as-accessory concept in February 2024, and Pocket Pearl moves it from the phone to the handbag.

It’s an approach more familiar to fashion than skincare: communicate through visual codes, reveal selectively and let anticipation become part of the experience.

“Not only do people want our skincare products and our beauty products to put on their faces and incorporate into their routines; they also want to wear our products,” Ratner said. “I actually think it also shows this marriage of fashion and beauty, which is what we had set out to do at the beginning.”

Rhode connects those visual ideas through a strategy Ratner calls “surround sound.”

“In my mind, it really is this idea of enveloping the consumer in a campaign and a world,” she explained. “It’s this 360 flywheel with the consumer in the middle.”

For last summer’s Lemontini launch, a beach campaign flowed from Rhode’s digital channels into influencer-gifting totes, yellow e-commerce boxes and a branded beach club in Mallorca.

Rhode’s recent summer collection pushed that strategy further. Led by Pocket Bronze and Highlight Milk, the launch was supported by the “summer station,” a traveling R-shaped kiosk that began in Newport, Rhode Island, before moving through Dallas, Vancouver, Copenhagen, and the Amalfi Coast.

Part retail installation and part content engine, the kiosks offered access to a physical piece of the Rhode universe. The company wasn’t merely taking products on tour; it was taking its world.

For digitally native beauty brands, physical activations increasingly function as both retail and media: places to sell products, generate content and give an online community something tangible to participate in.

The collection generated Rhode’s largest waitlist, with more than 700,000 sign-ups, and drove $27 million in DTC sales in one day. It acquired 90,000 new customers, while more than 70% of sales came from existing customers.

That mix points to a business generating new demand while retaining an established customer base. A 2025 report from McKinsey and The Business of Fashion found that consumers rank product quality as their top purchase consideration, while public-facing founders sit among the lowest. Although a famous founder can accelerate awareness, the report concluded that staying power depends on product efficacy and a shared aesthetic point of view.

The world creates desire; the product sustains the business.

“You can generate a big, buzzy launch and bring in a lot of eyeballs with someone like Hailey, but to have sustained demand and to build a robust business where people keep coming back is the strength of the product,” Ratner said.

Four years after launching and one year after its acquisition by e.l.f. Beauty , Rhode is working toward $1 billion in global retail sales. It ranked as the No. 1 skincare brand in the US by earned media value in 2025 for the second consecutive year, according to CreatorIQ , with EMV increasing 68% year over year.

According to the Business of Fashion , Rhode became Sephora’s bestselling brand in the US, Canada and UK less than a year after entering retail and has announced an expansion into 19 European countries.

As Rhode becomes more accessible, its talent strategy helps keep the brand surprising. That can mean identifying emerging talent at a cultural inflection point or placing established names in unexpected contexts. The brand approaches these partnerships more like fashion casting than influencer endorsement.

Sarah Pidgeon appeared in a campaign as Love Story placed her at a cultural inflection point. Harris Dickinson became the brand’s first male face, while Claudia Schiffer brought ’90s iconography into its contemporary world.

“A lot of it is instinct, and a lot of it is gut,” Ratner said. When casting talent for campaigns, she and Bieber ask whether someone has a genuine connection to Rhode, a distinct point of view and will feel fresh to consumers.

There is also an element of surprise and delight in Rhode’s playbook, often created by bringing together two things that wouldn’t ordinarily occupy the same world.

“We married a gas-station donut with a peptide lip treatment,” she said. “The marriage of those two things created this friction and this stickiness that’s really interesting to the consumer.”

But cultural omnipresence can present its own risk: the more frequently a brand appears, the less special each appearance can feel. Rhode’s answer is concentrated, strategic visibility rather than constant visibility.

“Where are our moments to show up in a meaningful, impactful way and create that surround sound and cultural buzz?” Ratner explained. “You can’t do it every month.” Between those larger moments, the brand focuses on sustaining attention rather than trying to continually recreate the same intensity.

That restraint may become even more important as Rhode grows beyond its famous founder. Bieber’s goal, Ratner shared, was always to create a brand larger than herself. Doing so rests on two things: “really strengthening the product and building out this world of Rhode.”

Rhode’s real innovation may not be a phone case, miniature blush or viral collaboration. It is the system Ratner and Bieber have built around them—combining product efficacy with fashion’s emotional pull, cultural instinct with discipline, and the ability to feel everywhere at once without being everywhere all the time.

“Oftentimes, what you say no to is more important than what you say yes to,” Ratner said.

“Being disciplined and knowing the spaces that are for you and the spaces that are not for you, and feeling very confident in that, to me is an important part of brand building now, and I think in the future too.”