Hailey Bieber, E.L.F., and the Meghan Markle Mistake

Let’s start with the obvious: Justin Bieber looks like someone who wandered out of an Urban Outfitters fitting room in 2013 and never made it back. Every paparazzi shot of him tells the same story—oversized sweatshirt, inexplicable towel, haunted energy. He looks like the human embodiment of a YouTube apology video that starts with “Hey guys…”

And yet, beside him floats Hailey Bieber. Glazed, composed, ageless. Looking like she just stepped out of a campaign shoot for peace of mind. She’s not just surviving the chaos—she’s converting it into capital. Because while Justin is clearly in the midst of a slow-motion identity crisis, Hailey just closed a billion-dollar deal with E.L.F. Beauty. Her skincare brand, Rhode, didn’t just land—it hit.

Most people didn’t even see it coming. But that’s the brilliance of her entire strategy: don’t dazzle. Dominate quietly.

Strategic Positioning 101: How Hailey Outplayed the Tabloid Machine

Let’s rewind. Before she was Mrs. Bieber, Hailey Baldwin was just another celebrity adjacent. A last name with vague cachet. A presence in fashion week front rows. She was known, but not known for anything.

But where other women fought for Justin’s attention, Hailey simply became inevitable. She didn’t scream in the comments. She didn’t start Twitter wars. She showed up. In the same friend circles. At the same church. On the periphery until the periphery was the center.

As we unpacked in this deep-dive on the increasingly tangled dynamic between her and Justin, Hailey’s approach was less romance, more chessboard. When Selena Gomez bowed out, Hailey didn’t step in with fanfare—she stepped in like she’d always been there. And maybe, in her own quiet, strategic way, she had.

She wasn’t competing with Selena for affection. She was betting on Justin’s exhaustion.

That’s not shade. That’s insight. Because while the world was tracking drama, Hailey was building the emotional infrastructure of someone who could stay.

The Billion-Dollar Glow-Up: How Hailey Flipped Rhode Into an Empire

Celebrity brands fail all the time. Rare is the one that survives Sephora shelves and TikTok dupe wars. Even rarer? The brand that makes it into boardrooms and billion-dollar acquisition deals.

But that’s exactly what happened when Hailey sold Rhode to E.L.F. Beauty in a move that sent the beauty and business worlds into a collective “Wait… what?” The headlines called it a win for minimalist skincare. What it really was? A branding masterclass in how to go from accessory wife to founding visionary.

The coverage of Rhode’s billion-dollar sale made the deal sound clean and straightforward—of course it did, that’s the Hailey aesthetic. But what it actually signaled was a shift: from influencer to institution. She’s not just a celebrity face anymore. She’s the blueprint.

And the timing? Impeccable. Justin has never looked more adrift. The contrast is the brand. She’s the calm in the PR storm, the stable one, the one who doesn’t need to perform her pain for clicks.

Meghan Markle Tried to Lead the Narrative. Hailey Just Edited Hers.

So let’s talk about Meghan Markle.

A woman who once walked into the royal family with enough potential energy to launch a thousand TED Talks. A woman who could have been the quietly powerful one. Instead, she became the loudly complicated one.

Look, the Meghan story is nuanced—but the brand strategy is not. Where Hailey gave the public silence, softness, and just enough mystique to stay commercially desirable, Meghan gave them everything. The trauma. The drama. The declarations. The Spotify deal. And then the end of the Spotify deal.

We took a look at what could’ve been in our piece on Meghan’s lost potential to become a branding powerhouse, but here’s the shorthand: Meghan’s downfall isn’t that she was wrong. It’s that she was loud about it.

There’s a difference between being vulnerable and being overexposed. Hailey understood that.

Meghan wanted to be beloved. Hailey just wanted to be consistent. And in 2025? Consistency wins.

What They Knew, What They Missed

What do Hailey and Meghan have in common? Both married men who are publicly unraveling. Justin is on a continuous loop of “emotionally unwell at Erewhon,” while Prince Harry is the Duke of California Discontent. Both men struggle with identity, legacy, relevance. Both carry the burden of boyhoods shaped by cameras and trauma.

But only one of their wives learned to stop trying to fix it.

Hailey’s brand doesn’t pretend Justin is fine. She just doesn’t comment on it. Her silence is strategic. Her absence from the drama is the selling point. Meghan, on the other hand, keeps trying to explain Harry to us. Like we’re the problem. Like we just don’t get it.

Here’s the thing: we do. We just don’t care.

We’re not investing in your marriage. We’re investing in your image. And the more you try to control the narrative, the more it slips. Hailey knows that. Meghan never figured it out.

Final Take: Branding Is a Survival Strategy. Hailey Understood the Assignment.

Hailey Bieber didn’t build her empire by being the loudest or the smartest. She built it by being unshakeable. When the world turned her into a meme, she turned herself into a mogul. When her husband spiraled, she launched a product line. When the headlines circled, she booked another brand campaign.

She did what Meghan Markle still hasn’t learned to do: she made the noise work for her—without adding to it.

Rhode didn’t succeed because the products were revolutionary. It succeeded because the image was. Calm. Clean. Controlled. The anti-chaos.

And in a world where everyone is oversharing, overreacting, and overbranding—Hailey Bieber’s strategy was to do less. But do it perfectly.