We Speak Brands

Selena Gomez Takes Rare Beauty Into Fragrance, Accessibility First

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

Rare Beauty founder Selena Gomez at the Toronto International Film Festival. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

From the day Selena Gomez launched Rare Beauty in September 2020, the brand has been built around one idea: makeup that makes room for real people, with a portion of every sale feeding the Rare Impact Fund’s mental health work. That philosophy extended into a new category on August 7, 2025, when Rare Beauty released its first fine fragrance, Rare Eau de Parfum, and designed the bottle for hands that most fragrance houses never think about.

The scent itself, created with perfumer Jérôme Epinette, opens with caramel, pistachio and pink pepper before settling into vanilla, ginger and cocoa and a warm base of sandalwood, tonka bean and soft musks. It launched at $75 for 50 millilitres exclusively at Sephora and on the brand’s website, alongside four Fragrance Layering Balms at $19 each that let wearers build their own signature.

The quiet revolution is the packaging. Gomez, who has spoken openly about living with lupus and the dexterity challenges that can come with it, spent around two years developing a bottle designed with accessibility at its core: easy to grip, easy to open, easy to spray, no wrestling with tiny caps. In a beauty aisle where luxury usually means heavy glass and awkward hardware, Rare Beauty treated ease of use as the luxury.

It is a fitting next step for a brand valued at a reported $2.7 billion without ever chasing hype for its own sake. Rare Beauty grew by listening: to customers who felt unseen by beauty advertising, and now to customers who simply could not open the bottle. Gomez built the brand she needed. Fragrance is where that promise gets personal.

We Speak Brands

On Now Sprays Its Shoes On With Robots, and It Is Scaling Fast

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

We Speak Media

On's Cloudboom Strike racing shoe, the line built on the brand's LightSpray innovation. Photo by Rmason75, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

A typical athletic shoe upper takes around two hundred steps to make. On’s newest racing shoes take one, performed by a robot arm with a spray nozzle. On July 3, 2025, the Swiss running brand inaugurated the world’s first LightSpray factory at its headquarters in Zurich, a 1,400-square-metre facility where four robotic arms spray a continuous filament onto a midsole, fusing upper and sole into one piece in a few minutes, with no gluing or stitching.

LightSpray was four years in the making, developed by a team of around twenty colleagues, including materials scientists and roboticists, working out of the On Labs in Zurich. The technology first appeared before the Paris 2024 Olympics on the Cloudboom Strike LS, a shoe weighing about 170 grams that has since been worn at the front of major marathons, including by New York City Marathon champion Hellen Obiri. Because the sprayed upper has no seams and uses minimal material, On says the process dramatically cuts waste and emissions compared with conventional shoe-making, while moving production closer to the runners who buy the shoes.

The Zurich plant turns out to be a pilot for something much bigger. In February 2026, On opened a second LightSpray factory near Busan, South Korea, with thirty-two robots and roughly thirty times the production capacity, starting with shoes beyond racing, such as the LightSpray Cloudmonster 3 Hyper, while the research and development that feeds both plants stays in Zurich.

It is a fitting arc for a brand born in the Swiss Alps in 2010, when former professional triathlete Olivier Bernhard teamed up with David Allemann and Caspar Coppetti to build shoes around pieces of garden hose. Fifteen years on, On is not just selling shoes. It is reinventing how a shoe gets made.