Less than three years after its launch, Hailey Bieber’s skincare brand Rhode is being acquired for $1 billion.
It’s a massive windfall for the 28-year-old founder, and one that she says was only possible because of her willingness to make mistakes while building her business. Indeed, Bieber explained in a 2022 appearance at the Forbes Under 30 summit that she started Rhode with the understanding that things wouldn’t always go smoothly.
“Be prepared for the mishaps and be prepared to make mistakes,” she said. “It’s OK for that to happen, and you can learn from it. It will help you to drive your brand forward.”
In the case of Rhode, one early problem arose when Bieber was choosing the color of the packaging of her products. Though she selected a particular shade, she didn’t realize that in the production process the carton could come out slightly lighter or darker than intended.
“The cartons the product came in were not the color that I exactly wanted them to be, and I was very sad about it,” she explained. “In hindsight, it was actually really not a big deal and was just something that I had to learn was part of the process and that we can fix moving forward in the future.”
Bieber, who called herself “a crazy perfectionist,” said she needed to learn to “accept the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect launch.”
“What I’m learning is that mistakes are really part of the process and you have to accept those mistakes,” she said, adding: “I think our mistakes actually help make us better as people when we choose to learn from them. And I think when you have a brand, it helps you create an even better brand.”
Bieber’s willingness to embrace mistakes is straight out of billionaire Warren Buffett’s playbook. In his annual letter to shareholders this year, the Oracle of Omaha said he learned a valuable lesson from the late Charlie Munger about how to approach mistakes.
Rather than try to cover them up or pretend they didn’t happen, Buffett said Munger taught him that mistakes should be promptly recognized and corrected.
“The cardinal sin is delaying the correction of mistakes or what Charlie Munger called ‘thumb-sucking,'” Buffett wrote. “Problems, he would tell me, cannot be wished away. They require action, however uncomfortable that may be.”
Mistakes, like bad investments, are what Buffett said makes success all the more exciting.
“If you played golf and you hit a hole-in-one on every hole, nobody would play golf, it’s no fun,” Buffet said in 2019. “You’ve got to hit a few in the rough and then get out of the rough. That makes it interesting.”
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