New York Singer, actress, entrepreneur – and: self-made billionaire. All of this applies to the 33-year-old artist Rihanna. The artist achieved world hits with “Umbrella”, “Diamonds” and “Stay”, but she became a billionaire mainly thanks to her perfume and fashion brands. And she is still expanding: soon she plans to open physical stores with her underwear brand Savage X Fenty.
Rihanna, who also played a leading role in the Hollywood film “Ocean’s 8”, is part of a growing number of celebrities from sports, music and Hollywood who are also making a name for themselves as entrepreneurs. This includes tennis player Serena Williams as well as actresses Gwyneth Paltrow and Jessica Alba. But Rihanna is by far the most successful of them.
Rihanna launched her first perfume back in 2011. In 2015 her participation in the streaming service Tidal became known. In the same year the singer from Barbados founded her own beauty and stylist agency and later also a photo agency. In 2016 she announced that she would now produce her music under her own label, Westbury Road Entertainment.
In 2017, Rihanna founded her own cosmetics company, Fenty Beauty, under the umbrella of the French luxury conglomerate LVMH, in which she holds half the shares. At LVMH, Rihanna is not only the first woman to create her own brand for the conglomerate, but also the first woman of color to run an LVMH brand.
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The special thing about her approach: The color palette of her lipsticks, eye shadow and foundation cover all skin colors with 50 shades. Their advertising also targets dark-skinned women. A clientele that other big brands have long treated as marginal business.
Cosmetics and underwear in all colors and sizes
Only online and in LVMH-owned Sephora stores, the products were an instant hit. That was certainly also due to the more than one hundred million followers Rihanna has on Twitter and Instagram, which she uses as advertising platforms. According to LVMH, Fenty Beauty had sales of 550 million dollars in its first year – more than the brands of other celebrities such as “Kylie Cosmetics” by Kylie Jenner, Kim Kardashian West’s “KKW Beauty” or Jessica Albas “Honest”.
After the successful start in the cosmetics business followed with Savage X Fenty, the own underwear brand. Here, too, Rihanna takes the inclusive approach: from white to black, from thin to fat, from woman to man to transgender. The sizes of the asymmetrical lace catsuits and thongs range from XS to 4XL.
While the underwear brand Victoria’s Secret has finally stopped its shows with the perfect models with angel wings, Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty shows are now causing a sensation. For the first show in 2019, Rihanna chose the Barclays Center in Brooklyn and not a chic location in Manhattan during New York fashion week. The last two shows ran as a kind of mega music video on the streaming service Amazon Prime.
The shows are not only more aggressive, they sometimes border on sadomasochism. The singer and entrepreneur stages the shows as a festival of diversity: She not only lets ex-top model Cindy Crawford and Lourdes, Madonna’s daughter, appear in latex bras, but also plump black and transgender models.
The singer Bia raps “Whole Lotta Money” in green underwear, and Ricky Martin also appears in it. “Rihanna celebrates diversity,” said the homosexual singer, who wants to be outfitted by Rihanna for his next tour.
Savage X Fenty: From pure online retailer to physical stores
So far, customers can only order the bodies, suspenders and bras online. But soon there will also be stores of their own for the quite affordable underwear: “You will also see some stores in 2022,” said the Co-President of Savage X Fenty recently to Bloomberg.
With this, Rihanna is following the same path as other e-commerce providers who, in addition to their presence on the Internet, also want to reach people with physical deals. With Amazon Go, Amazon 4 Star and Whole Foods, Amazon has several physical stores under its roof. And the online glasses retailer Warby Parker and the mattress brand Casper have long since opened real shops where customers can look at and test the products.
That Rihanna not only works with music greats like Drake, Jay-Z, Paul McCartney, Kanye West and Shakira, but can also compete with billionaires from the business world, was by no means foreseeable in her childhood. The singer grew up as one of three siblings and three other half-siblings in Barbados. Her father was addicted to alcohol and drugs and beat Rihanna’s mother. As a young girl, she said she always ended up seeing a doctor because of severe headaches that only subsided after her parents’ divorce.
Rihanna’s net worth is estimated at $ 1.7 billion
The breakthrough came when an American talent scout spotted her in a singing competition at her school in Barbados and brought her to the United States shortly afterwards. She quickly convinced the producers there who signed her.
Today she not only has her own production, but an entire fashion empire. Rihanna’s fortune is estimated by Forbes at $ 1.7 billion. This makes her the richest musician in the world and the second richest entertainer after Oprah Winfrey.
According to Forbes, $ 1.4 billion of that came from LVMH’s 50 percent stake in Fenty Beauty. Another 270 million can be traced back to their underwear line. In February, Savage X Fenty raised $ 115 million. The company is valued at $ 1 billion.
Rihanna founded the company in 2018 as a joint venture with the Techstyle Fashion Group. Her investors include Marcy Venture, which belongs to the rapper, music producer and entrepreneur Jay-Z. The private equity firm L. Catterton, whose investors include LVMH’s Bernard Arnault, also holds shares.
When asked by a photographer what it feels like to be a billionaire, Rihanna recently replied simply: “God is good.”
But Rihanna also has a flop among her start-ups: Together with LVMH, she also tried a fashion brand for the upper segment in 2019. It should offer fine collections in all sizes. But the launch of the new brand fell in the middle of the pandemic, when the demand for expensive night clothes collapsed. LVMH and Rihanna discontinued the company after the last collection in November 2020.
Rihanna has had less time for music recently. She has not produced a new album since Anti in 2016. But that could change soon. In a promotional interview for her skin care brand Fenty Skin, she said her fans can expect her ninth album “sooner than they think”.
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