Kathryn Hopkins and James Manso
7 min read
Beauty has a new billion-dollar baby: Hailey Bieber.
E.l.f. Beauty has reached an agreement to acquire Bieber’s beauty brand Rhode in a deal valuing it at $1 billion, the companies jointly revealed Wednesday.
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The news comes just a month after WWD reported that Rhode had hired JP Morgan and Moelis to explore deal options.
“They support founders, they want to help push the founders’ vision and get behind them,” Bieber said of the deal with E.l.f. in an interview with WWD. “That’s where we are with Rhode, and I’m ready to get to the next place.”
That will include international expansion — or, as Bieber put it, “more places, more faces.”
It’s not E.l.f.’s first rodeo with founder-led brands: The company acquired Naturium in 2023 and incubated in-house Alicia Keys’ Keys Soulcare, a fact that was attractive to Bieber.
“This is my baby, and to find a home for it is really not an easy process — it’s very scary,” Bieber said. “When I met the E.l.f. team, we had a lot of similarities when it came to the importance of community and team building.”
The deal marks E.l.f.’s biggest to date, and consists of $800 million in cash and stock payable at closing, and an additional potential earnout consideration of $200 million based on the future growth of the brand over a three-year timeframe. To fund the deal, E.l.f. secured $600 million in debt financing.
It also comes at a time when E.l.f., which was one of the top-performing companies on the New York Stock Exchange in the first half of last year and surpassed the significant $1 billion milestone in net sales, has faced headwinds recently. These are namely in the form of tariffs, with 75 percent of its products manufactured in China. As a result, the company’s share price is down by around 25 percent in the year to date.
In an interview, E.l.f. chairman and chief executive officer Tarang Amin revealed that he had been in discussions with Rhode since October.
“E.l.f. Beauty is on fire, and it was a desire to fuel that fire with the acquisition of Rhode,” he said. “In less than three years, going from zero to $212 million of net sales, direct-to-consumer only, with just 10 products — I would never believe that if somebody told me,” he said. “The momentum and everything that Hailey has fits our ethos as a company, of wanting to invite her into our family and her entire team and be able to transform the beauty industry.”
