Rhode Skin is winning attention and losing customers
Why the prettiest brand in the room can't get people to come back — and exactly what to do about it
$1 billion. Sold-out drops. A phone case that broke the internet.
So what's the actual problem?
Rhode Skin is one of the cleanest celebrity brand launches of the last decade. Hailey Bieber went from 0 to a $1 billion acquisition by e.l.f. Beauty in May 2025 in 3 years. The Peptide Lip Treatment became a cultural object. The glazed donut aesthetic shaped a generation of beauty content. The phone case made a moisturiser into a visible, social object.
But attention and loyalty are not the same metric. What's sitting underneath all that buzz is a completely different story. First time buyers who don't come back, a product experience that lands just short of its promise and a brand that hasn't figured out how to make itself essential to someone's daily routine.
The attention game? They're undefeated.
Rhode is not struggling to be seen. One Hailey Bieber Instagram post generates more organic reach than a quarter's worth of paid media for most competitors. The visual language is airtight with soft greys, warm beiges, clean type setting an effortless, elevated, quietly confident vibe.
Collabs with Krispy Kreme and Erewhon turned the brand into a lifestyle signal, not just a SKU. The viral phone case that holds a lip treatment turned a $29 product into a piece of personal identity. TikTok Shop cleared over $1 million in the first half of 2025. Sold-out drops happen on a regular cadence. The hype machine is operational and well maintained.
People are buying. The problem is why.
The first purchase is simple. Affordable entry. Nothing above $38. Low-friction checkout, Sephora availability since late 2024, nonstop UGC making you curious enough to try. Rhode removes every barrier between curiosity and cart.
Customers do convert but just for a trial run. They want to see if the Hailey Bieber thing is real. They're participating in a moment, a trend. That's a completely different buyer than someone who chooses a brand because they can't picture using anything else and only one of them sticks around.
The gap between what it promises and what actually happens
Rhode's marketing signals glazed, dewy, luminous skin, like a lifestyle upgrade that happens to come in a tube. The packaging is premium. The collabs are curated. Hailey's skin is aspirational. Rhode is not selling a product. It is selling Hailey's lifestyle.
Then the product arrives. And it's fine. Actually, for some products, more than fine. But fine isn't enough to bring people back. Fine doesn't change the way you feel about a brand.
Multiple reviewers said products worked exactly as described. Hydrating, dewy, clean-feeling. What they didn't say was: I found my thing. The feeling that turns a trial into a habit is almost entirely absent from how people talk about Rhode's skincare. The lip treatment is a different story. The Glazing Milk is a different story. But most of the line? People try it, rate it okay and drift back to whatever they had before.
The Creator Roster Isn't a Community. It's a Mailing List.
The pattern is consistent enough to look like a system. A drop happens, the same roster posts a quick unboxing or a three-second swatch, Rhode reposts the story, and those creators disappear until the next PR package. Nobody integrates the products into their real routine between launches. The content cycle mirrors the hype cycle exactly — which tells you that a significant portion of Rhode's creator ecosystem isn't a community of real users. It's a distribution network wearing the aesthetic of one.
Then there's the representation gap. Rhode's influencer pool skews heavily toward one aesthetic — tan, aspirational, affluent — in a brand positioned as accessible and priced for an everyday buyer. Customers have flagged that shade testing in PR seeding appears segmented, with very pale and very deep skin tones largely absent from content entirely. The community has been filling that gap themselves, doing the honest comparison work Rhode's own creator program was never designed to do.
When your actual buyer is a middle-class person trying to figure out if a $29 serum is worth it, aspirational imagery doesn't inspire. It alienates. And in a saturated skincare market where switching costs are zero, making your customer feel like an afterthought is just a retention problem waiting to compound.
When a brand promises you a glow-up while selling a product, it's setting an expectation. The higher that bar sits, the harder the landing when the product shows up and it's just... meh. Rhode's products do work but customers walk in carrying the weight of its heavy influencer-driven promise, one that feels like a steal at that price point and walk away with a moisturiser. A good one. But still just a moisturiser.
This is the gap Rhode must address. You can't dial down the aspiration randomly that's what drives sales. But there has to be a balance between what's promised and what's delivered, or else sales start manufacturing disappointment instead of repeat purchases.
This isn't a brand feeling. It's a P&L problem.
Rhode's retention issue is bleeding into unit economics right now. It costs 5–7x more to acquire a new customer than to keep one. Rhode is paying that premium on repeat and calling it growth.
Rhode isn't becoming part of anyone's actual routine
Beauty retention is brutal by default. The average brand keeps 20–30% of customers for a second purchase. That number drops even further when growth is driven by hype.
The customers who do come back are almost exclusively buying the Glazing Milk or the Lip Treatment — 2 products with a genuinely habitual use case. The rest of the lineup is doing trial volume without building repeat behavior. One hero product doesn't make a loyal customer base.
What's missing is a system that makes Rhode someone's default choice. Not just a trend. That only happens when a product becomes genuinely irreplaceable or when the brand stands for a clear point of view the customer actively identifies with. Rhode hasn't locked either in at scale yet.
What I would actually do about it
The problem isn't storytelling or community. Rhode currently sells trends and skincare goals packaged products. What actually builds retention is selling a structure that removes decision fatigue in a saturated skincare market. When a brand tells you exactly when to reach for it, what to skip and how to adjust when your skin changes, it stops competing with other products and starts competing with uncertainty. That's a much easier fight to win.
Build usage decisions into the product story
Rhode tells you what's in the bottle. Customers ask when do I use this? With what? Instead of what I already have? That confusion kills repeat behavior. The fix is telling people when to reach for something, when to skip it and what that depends on then carrying that beyond the product page into every piece of marketing content.
Use honesty as a brand weapon. Be loud about it
Every skincare brand tells you what the product can do. Almost none tell you when it won't work. Rhode's current FAQ is buried under the lifestyle photography. It reads like a legal disclaimer. The fix is moving that information upstream into creator briefs, ad creatives and pinned content where decisions actually get made.
Fix the influencer strategy. It is a visible credibility problem
The same roster, the same script, the same window. Customers have clocked it and stopped trusting the content. The representation gap of pale and deep skin tones largely absent, skewed shade testing is costing real sales. Rhode needs to restructure PR seeding around actual users, not just a safe set of content creators.
Fix customer service. It's destroying the retention Rhode does earn.
One resolved complaint has a statistically higher chance of producing a loyal repeat customer than any brand marketing because it turns a negative experience into evidence that the brand actually cares. The cost of fixing this is a fraction of the acquisition spend required to replace every customer it's losing.
Adaptive pathways instead of static routines
Instead of "AM routine / PM routine," Rhode could offer context-specific guidance on the website, in UGC, in creator briefs, in email. The same pathways that live on the site should be the brief every creator gets. This is what makes a brand feel irreplaceable.
Same product. Different frame.
Watch what shifts when the messaging stops performing and starts actually helping.
Select a product to see the rewrite
What this could actually look like on Rhode's site
Live prototype of the decision layer Rhode should own. Pick a skin state. Get an honest, specific answer.
How's your skin feeling right now?
Pick your skin's current state and get a customised routine for yourself.
This is the kind of guidance Rhode could put on every product page, every email and in every creator brief. It changes people's perception of Rhode from a product catalog to something credible in an ocean od identical skincare selling marketing gimmicks.
From hype copy to copy that earns trust
The FAQ buried at the bottom of some product pages feels like a hidden disclaimer trying to cover liability, instead of helping the user. Requiring the customer to scroll past claims and lifestyle photography to find anything resembling a caveat.
No brand knows every reaction but they do know the common irritants from testing. Most hide behind legal minimums and trade secrets. Saying it upfront wouldn’t hurt the product. It would expose how rare real transparency is. Publishing them wouldn’t weaken the product. it would signal a brand willing to be bold and honest where most choose to hide behind a grand ingredient list.
When customers know what to expect through honest content and the product delivers on that accurate promise, repurchase rates improve. Brands that feel straight with you command a price premium over time and keep customers longer.
Rebuilding the influencer problem from the brief out
Restructure PR around actual product users, not just reach. Prioritize micro-creators and everyday buyers who will use the product beyond the unboxing window. Brief all creators on what to cover that is not already on the product page. Skin state guidance, incompatibility warnings, realistic result timelines, honest edge cases without heavy base products applied first. Make "when not to use this" a content pillar, not a disclaimer. One creator, one product, one honest use case per week is more valuable than 10 identical unboxings.
For products with documented irritation complaints, address them proactively in a pinned post or creator video.
Expand the influencer range deliberately to include undertones, skin types and aesthetics that reflect the actual buyer, not just the aspirational image. Track creator content beyond the first 72 hours of a drop. If a creator never mentions the product again, that's a signal about the value of that relationship.
Scripted, homogeneous creator content is eroding trust faster than it's generating it. Customers who've learned to ignore launch content are making decisions from third-party reviews and community platforms instead. These are environments Rhode has no control over and no positive presence in. Shifting even a portion of PR budget toward genuine everyday users generates content with longer shelf life, higher credibility and better conversion for the customers who actually need persuading. Representation gaps cost real sales: a customer who can't find their skin tone in any creator content is a customer ignored.
Customer service as a retention tool, not a cost center
Establish a public-facing response protocol for negative reviews on Trustpilot and similar platforms. Genuine acknowledgement and resolution, not defensive replies. Set internal SLAs for complaint response and actually staff them. Use documented complaint categories (lost returns, defective products, ignored emails) to identify whether this is a logistics, CS team or policy problem and fix the root cause. Consider proactive outreach for flagged orders, which costs almost nothing operationally and generates outsized goodwill.