Rihanna was successful as a singer, but she didn’t become a billionaire until she came up with a smart business idea. It was astonishingly simple – but had a great signal effect.
Rihanna has now officially arrived at the billionaires’ club: According to the business magazine “Forbes”, the 33-year-old should be heavy with an estimated $ 1.7 billion. This makes her the richest musician in the world. But all the money doesn’t come from just singing “Umbrella, ella, ella”. The singer owes the super-rich status of her cosmetics line Fenty – and a clever business idea.
Robyn Fenty, as Rihanna’s real name is, founded the brand in 2017, and success came almost overnight. And thanks to a decisive unique selling point: Back then, Fenty was the first cosmetics company to offer make-up in 40 different skin tones. “Every woman should find herself in this brand,” said Rihanna at the time. As a result, the models for the brand were more diverse than usual. In the meantime, Fenty has expanded the color palette to 50 different skin tones. The brand deliberately focuses on diversity and inclusion and hit a nerve with it. In the first year she made over half a million dollars in sales, outperforming other celebrity brands such as the Kardashians. The whole thing had a signal effect, since then numerous cosmetic brands have followed suit and expanded their range of skin tones.
Rihanna is a billionaire thanks to Fenty
This is why the industry also speaks of the “Fenty Effect” and it is actually hard to imagine that consumers had to fall back on such a limited range four years ago. Especially people with darker skin tones hardly had a choice in the usual drugstore chains. The fact that before Rihanna no other celebrity or corporation came up with the simple idea of addressing this huge target group can only be described as foolish. Since then, the cash register has been ringing for the singer.
About $ 1.4 billion of her fortune comes from her makeup sales, and she owns half the brand. The other half is collected by the luxury goods company LVMH. Rihanna’s story is somewhat reminiscent of the success of Hollywood star Reese Witherspoon. In 2016 she discovered a similar blind spot in her industry and founded her own production company: “Hello Sunshine” exclusively produces stories written by women and with women as protagonists. Because women are still underrepresented in Hollywood. As it became known this week, Witherspoon has now been able to sell the company for $ 900 million – an insane deal based on its success with the previously often disregarded target group.
So it’s no wonder that Rihanna continues to expand her brand according to her ideas. She also founded the underwear label Savage x Fenty and a luxury fashion line. The latter did not survive the Corona crisis, but a new business area is already in sight: Your brand only announced last week that it would be launching a perfume in August. The Fenty fragrance should be unisex and thus once again appeal to a particularly large target group. The fans will have to wait even longer for new music. Rihanna’s last album “Anti” was released in 2016 – and thus before the start of Fenty.
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I am a 24-year-old writer and journalist who has been working in the news industry for the past two years. I write primarily about market news, so if you’re looking for insights into what’s going on in the stock market or economic indicators, you’ve come to the right place. I also dabble in writing articles on lifestyle trends and pop culture news.
