Two years after starting in direct-to-consumer distribution, the skincare brand connected to Hailey Bieber is believed to be settling on either Ulta Beauty or Sephora. Beauty industry chit-chat pegs Ulta as Rhode’s pick, but Sephora is the talk of TikTok as its preferred retail path.

AvidAI CEO and co-founder Brooke Yoakam, who delivers branding and marketing insights on TikTok under the handle @thebrandblueprint, predicts Rhode will land at Sephora in a December video that’s garnered over 340,000 views. She says, “I’m still so shocked that Rhode is not in Sephora yet or Ulta…I need to be able to buy these lip treatments in person. I think Summer Fridays does so well because they are online and in Sephora, and so I think when Rhode gets into Sephora, they’ll have huge competition.”

Not dissimilar from Bieber BFF Kylie Jenner’s social media prowess that laid the groundwork for Kylie Cosmetics’ sale to Coty, Bieber has an uncanny ability to use TikTok and Instagram to stoke viral trends and product frenzies. Rhode’s $29 Peptide Glazing Fluid amassed a waiting list of 100,000 people prior to the brand’s launch in June 2022.

Also at launch, three flavors of Rhode’s $16 Peptide Lip Treatment sold out in three days and accumulated a waiting list of 440,000, according to the publication Glossy, which reported that customers were closing in on snapping up 1 million Peptide Lip Treatment units by August last year, putting the product’s sales at nearly $16 million. Before it was available in February, some 200,000 people were on the waiting list for Rhode’s product-cradling Lip Case, the only iPhone case that’s caused almost as much mania as a new iPhone release.

Bieber will no doubt make the windup to Rhode’s retail debut a marketing home run. In advance of it, we decided to dig into what the brand’s retail plans could be. For the latest edition of our ongoing series posing questions related to indie beauty, we asked nine retail strategists, consultants and investors the following questions: Do you think Rhode will launch at Ulta or Sephora this year, or should it pursue another distribution strategy altogether? What advice would you give the brand on its brick-and-mortar strategy?