We Speak Brands

Three Years, Ten Products, One Billion: Hailey Bieber Sells Rhode to e.l.f.

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

Rhode founder Hailey Bieber. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Most beauty brands take decades to reach a billion-dollar exit. Hailey Bieber did it in three years with a lineup so small you could count it on two hands. In May 2025, e.l.f. Beauty announced it would acquire Rhode, the skincare brand Bieber launched in June 2022, in a deal valued at up to $1 billion, the largest acquisition in e.l.f.’s history. The deal closed in August 2025 at $600 million in cash and $200 million in stock, with up to $200 million more tied to Rhode’s future growth.

The formula was restraint. Where rivals flood shelves, Rhode released a short list of essentials, the Peptide Glazing Fluid, the Barrier Restore Cream, the Pocket Blush, and let limited drops and Bieber’s own social reach do the marketing. It worked at a scale the industry had to respect: Rhode generated $212 million in net sales in the twelve months ending March 31, 2025, selling direct to consumers with no retail footprint at all.

Bieber is not walking away. She remains the brand’s Chief Creative Officer and Head of Innovation and serves as a strategic adviser to the combined company, the architect of the brand still setting its direction. What changed is distribution. In fall 2025, Rhode landed in Sephora stores across North America and the United Kingdom, the biggest brand debut in Sephora’s history, putting products that used to sell out online onto shelves anyone can walk up to.

For e.l.f., it is a bet that the next decade of beauty belongs to founder-led brands with communities, not just customers. For Bieber, it is proof that a famous name only opens the door. The products, the discipline and the timing did the rest.

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.