Am I a Hailey Bieber fan now?! Rhode gets it.
If you hate the beauty biz, you'll hate this newsletter.
All week, I was thinking about a vaguely vaginal phone case. One I can’t have and that’s not really meant for me.
It’s been called NSFW, labia rhodius, everythignggg and a “slick-looking lip balm phone case” by a Wired writer who is either AI or should be fired.
Hailey Bieber’s Rhode has all the girlies waiting for this $35 silicone sex- and glazed-donut-positive accessory. It carries something far more essential than an AMEX black (loud budgeting takes cash & Apple Pay): Her millions-selling Peptide Lip Tint.
Join the waitlist. With an 800-number. Taylor Swift tickets may have been an easier get.
It’s easy to breeze past as a gimmick, but she and her team deserve far more credit:
It’s the Not Getting. Get it?
Much of her audience can’t get or use this. It’ll sell out in minutes and it only fits iPhone 14 & 15.
Brilliant.
Neuroscientists keep proving anticipation is where we derive joy. We crave the craving, not the getting.
And here’s the thing: capitalism optimized out our anticipation muscle.
Amazon, et. al., didn’t just crush independent retail. It also pulverized the pining spirit of the American consumer.
The Dopamine rush got sped down to a crabby insistence on efficiency and the illusion of saving money.
We are all grouchy grandpa shoppers now, monitoringRing cams and tracking updates with police-scanner vigilance. Like it really matters when toilet paper shows up.
That’s probably why product drops have worked so well for Millennial and GenZ shoppers. They barely had the exquisite torture of yearning for a thing that was hard to get access to, even if you could afford it (see me pouring over fashion mags like sacred texts pre-ecomm.)
Does your brand (or newsletter or podcast or…) have anything worth waiting for?
We crave the craving, not the getting.
It’s the Truly Ingenious Utility
How many hundreds of dollars of lip glosses and lipsticks have I misplaced over the years? I once left a makeup bag on a plane and the cost and inconvenience of replacing it still stings (RIP Smashbox Fig)
We go nowhere without our phones and her customer probably selfies multiple times per day, in Snapchats alone.
Does your brand marketing do anything besides marketing?
It’s the In Jokes
On her IG teaser, she’s giving mob wife and some sort of baby girl-Trad Wife-milk maid. She’s giving sex positivity, horniness. And the real horniness: for girlie stuff, girl’s girls and girl talk.
Like all in-jokes and group references, IYKYK. Some people will take the mob wife look at face value and see glam. Others will get that it’s already meta, smirk AND see glam.
Does your brand have that level of shared culture?
It’s the Power Clique.
Even commenters are pointing out that this is the realm of the quintessential female power group (not Boygenius): The hot ones. All it takes is $35.
Do you know what your people really want?
It’s the Throwback
This case led me to the Rhode feed. And there, amongst the typical influencer and unfiltered stuff, was a hint of what was. Again, what many younger Millennials on down have never lived:
Very print. Actually these are print: Rhode did a Pirelli calendar knockoff (!) Her mom was a model so she may be more versed in the old ways than many of her generation. But like the 90s clothes, they want it.
It’s the Psychology
She gets her audience and creates truly desirable, useful stuff for them. In a world where 40% of marketing dollars go to influencer marketing she’s doing the oldest trick in the book: giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted in a way they could not have thought of.
And the insight: Many women have a weird relationship with their favorite lippie. Oral fixation, anxiety, ritual, spell casting… we all had the friend who reapplied obsessively.
It’s REAL not Authentic™
Her brand: Being a gorgeous woman with an outrageous life, reveling in her sexy girlie-womanhood while loving Jesus, her dog and her high-maintenance husband.
So easy to dismiss. But what I read in her feed is a balance of male gaze, female gaze, self-gaze and everybody-look-at me gaze that feels both very modern and pretty eternal.
It’s refreshingly shallow in an era where moisturizer is trying to pretend it’s legitimate mental health. Pure escapism and momentary pleasure is probably measurably better for mental health than such marketing gymnastics.
It’s refreshingly shallow in an era where moisturizer is trying to pretend it’s legitimate mental health.
The beauty culture vultures go hard at people like Bieber. I’ve read accusations that her glazed donut skin and nails trends are here to dehumanize women and trying to make them edible.
I love Women’s Studies style critiques as much as the next woman who once wore a fertility goddess necklace daily. Yet I also lived for my bubble gum lip gloss in grade school.
Sometimes fun is fun—and this Rhode launch is a master class in serving your core audience in ways many could learn from.
UPDATE:
The Rhode case went so viral that low-alcohol booze brand BODY posted this with a CTA to join an online community on platform TYB. Word is if they get enough interest, they’ll produce the case outside Photoshop.
TRENDING & RELATED: LIPS INC
The lip category is killing it with 58% year-over-year growth to $207.9 million. Gloss leads this charge.
Marc Jacobs & Pat McGrath (more 90s vibes) are releasing this gorgeous red lipstick, which feels like it belongs maybe more on Capote: Feud more than next to Fenty.
Rare Beauty is another celebrity beast. It tripled revenue year over year, to $300M thanks to Serena Gomez going high touch to match the inclusion and self-love positioning, doing things like handwritten notes to superfans.
TRENDING: CORDS?
Gen Z wants the 90s. If the Rhode breakdown didn’t convince you, nor the clothes they are wearing, nor the digital camera comeback, how about this: landlines are supposedly trending.
Really, the entire world is just grasping for a reliable sense of reality and privacy that AI, post-truth and deep fakes are crushing underfoot.
Inside Joke Collabs are the new Influencer Campaigns
The Jenners – famous non-cooks—are doing an online cooking class to push a collab between their tequila and Rao sauce for a pasta alla tequila and a $50 collab kit, .
Gen Z has a sense of humor. We made it through the earnest try-hard of the Millennial bland age. We trudged through the over-long era of self-serious manifesto campaigns With a Message™ (that’s on GenX and I stand by it) this is refreshing and something AI won’t be able to do better than humans, at least for a while.
COMING SOON:
The price of authenticity in an Authentic™ world.
The Nicotine Renaissance is getting interesting—and female
Can midlife save itself from being mid? Lessons from my startup.