Daybreak - Rihanna said she'd never be a sellout. Then Reliance bought Sephora India

Episode Date: April 27, 2026

Last week, Rihanna was all over our social media feeds as she flew to Mumbai for the official India launch of Fenty Beauty. Now it is exclusively available through Reliance Retail's beauty company, Tira. This was the popstar's second visit to India in two years; the first being a private performance at Anant Ambani's pre-wedding celebrations in 2024, her first paid show in eight years. For a woman who built her entire brand on never showing up on anyone else's terms, there's something worth examining here. Fenty is valued at nearly $3 billion and India's premium beauty market is heading towards $4 billion by 2035. But the real story starts in November 2023, when Reliance spent ₹99 crore acquiring Sephora India.In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma examines if any of this was really Rihanna's choice.Tune inDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

After Rihanna's 23 Super Bowl halftime performance, her company, Savage Fenty, released a special edition t-shirt that quickly sold out. It read, Rihanna concert interrupted by a football game. Weird, but whatever. Honestly, that might have been the most accurate review of that night. At the State Farm Stadium in Phoenix, Arizona, with more than 100 million people watching, Rihanna delivered a performance that instantly entered pop culture history. Dressed in red from head to toe and visibly very pregnant,

she descended from the sky on a platform, hanging mid-air and performed for 13 minutes. And then, in classic Rihanna fashion, she turned even a pause into a business masterclass. Mid-performance, she casually touched up her makeup using her brand fenties Invisimat plotting powder. Within minutes, the product reportedly sold out globally before the Super Bowl had even ended. This, by the way, also happened to be her first live performance in seven years. Four years before this show that I'm talking about,

she had turned down the Super Bowl entirely. In a 2019 Vogue interview from then, she said, I couldn't dare to do that. I just couldn't be a sellout. I could not be an enabler. This was when the NFL was being deeply criticized all around for its response to Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback's activism against racism.

A little more than a year later though, she did something that most people who know her for her principles would find surprising. She flew to Jamnagar Gujarat and performed at a billionaire's private concert. You probably remember it. The never-ending pre-ending pre-gris. wedding celebration of Anandthambani, the son of Mukeshambani, the richest man in Asia.

Reports say that she charged them around 70 crore rupees. This happened to be her second live performance after the Super Bowl. And then, she returned again last weekend to promote her brand's exclusive deal with reliance retail. They called it Fentyhi Haveli for the official India launch. And if you've been following the coverage, it was kind of hot. to miss because of social media, most of it reads as a celebrity story. From Rihanna's outfits, the whole puja at Ambani's home feeding the cows, the Manish Malhotra

jewelry to the collabs with young, fresh Indian influencers. So, two visits to India, both of them on Ambani's terms. But there is a business story underneath all of this that is considerably more interesting. You see, Fenty Beauty generates around $600 million in annual revenue. It is valued at approximately $3 billion, and Rihanna owns 50% of that. The other 50% is held by LVMH, the French luxury conglomerate behind Louis Vuitton, Dior and, This Matters, Cephora. Meanwhile, India's premium beauty market, currently worth around a billion dollars, is projected

to hit $4 billion. by 2035. Please note that I am specifically referring to the premium beauty market in India. Reuters even called the country the last bastion of growth for premium beauty. Now, coming back to the company's revenue number, around $600 million annually, but for a company that is valued at $3 billion. So, basically, investors are being asked to trust that the best is yet to come.

And right now, the only market in the world that can deliver that kind of growth story is no prices for guessing, India. Oh, and by the way, in 2023, before Rihanna even came to India, before the Ambani wedding, before any of this actually, Reliance spent 99 cro rupees to acquire Sephora India. So today, we are going to look at how this acquisition made Rihanna's appearances in India, inevitable. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nick Da Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargheese and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time.

Today is Tuesday, the 28th of April. When Fenty Beauty launched in September 2017, it did something that the beauty industry had spent decades avoiding. It launched with Fentie Beauty. 40 foundation shades on day one, covering the full spectrum of human skin, from the palest to the deepest. The most mainstream brands at the time offered around 15 to 20. Chanel, in fact, offered only six. What happened next is history.

At Harvey Nichols in London, the store sold one Fenty foundation every single minute in the first month. Vogue reported that in 40 days, the brand had made $100 million in sales. By the end of 2018, the LVMH chairman Bernard Arnold confirmed publicly that Fenty had generated $570 million in revenue. Time magazine named it one of the best inventions of 2017. And here's the best part. It was the darker shades that sold out first.

Sephora's US website ran out of stock of 8 of its 10 darkest shades within six days of launch. Shoppers reported that even the store testers were gone. This was evidence of a market that the industry had simply never bothered to serve. In fact, I would go on to say that they spent decades deliberately pretending that it did not exist.

But when Fenty showed that it was a money-making opportunity, the beauty industry responded immediately. Within a year, Dior, CoverX, Mabeline, Cover Girl, all had rushed to expand their shade ranges. This came to be called the Fenty Effect,

a term that entered the industry vocabulary to describe what happens when a brand treats inclusion as a product requirement rather than a marketing gesture. All of this because ultimately the brand was born from truth. Rihanna had faced the problem herself. In an interview during the launch, she said, and I'm quoting,

there needs to be something for a dark-skinned girl. There needs to be something for a really pale girl. There needs to be something for in-between. You never know. So you want people to appreciate the product and not feel like, oh, that's cute, but it only looks good on her. That directness is what separated Fenty from every celebrity beauty brand before it. The credibility came from Rihanna herself.

And it is also why, eight years later, Fenty's most important new market is India. Our country has one of the most diverse ranges of skin. It also has one of the most deeply entrenched cultures of colorism. Which explains why Unilevers Fairen Lovely, a skin lightning cream that was introduced in 1975, held 70% of India's skin lightning market. Roughly half of all skincare products sold in the country

are designed to lighten the skin. Some matrimonial websites even now allow families to filter prospective brides by their skin tone. This is the cultural context that Fenty walked into. We are talking about a market where the beauty industry had for decades been telling women with darker skin that their complexion was something that needed to be fixed. So, a brand whose founding argument was opposing this very issue, India was the obvious next chapter.

It's just that the business had not caught up yet. So, on March 2nd, 2024, Rihanna performed at Anandth Ambani's pre-wedding celebrations in Jamnagar. The timing immediately sparked speculation that the Ambani performance was the opening move in a Reliance deal. Industry publications reported that rumors were already circulating that Fenty would partner with Sifora India, which Reliance had quietly acquired the previous year. But five days later, Fenty Beauty launched in India on Nica's cross-border store and the rumors faded. And then, 17 months later, Fenty left Nica and signed exclusively with Reliance. In our next segment, we will look at what happened.

Reliance's Tira Beauty launched in 2023. It was Isha Ambani's pet project, a luxury beauty platform. built to bring premium global brands to the Indian consumer. The same year, Reliance also acquired Sephora India from Arvend Fashions for 99 crore rupees. Globally, Sephora is majority owned by LVMH, which co-owns Fenty Beauty as well. That acquisition gave Reliance a direct commercial relationship with Fentie's own business partner. So when it came to Fentie's India future, the conversation was simply not between

Reliance and Rihanna. It was also between Reliance and LVMH, two entities that now had a structural reason to work together. Rihanna's performance at the Ambani pre-wedding celebration was four months after this acquisition. So we don't know exactly when Reliance and LVMH started talking or whether the wedding was where the conversation began or simply where it continued.

Nobody has really said anything on record. but what we do know is what happened next. Five days after the performance, Fenty launched on Nica's cross-border store. But there was a catch. Basically, Fenty's products would be shipped from abroad with a 500-rupee delivery fee and ID verification on every order. There was no physical retail presence and no beauty counter and basically no in-store shade matching experience.

Fenty knew that this would obviously become an issue in-house. the long run. Reliance, meanwhile, had Tira's growing network of luxury stores, Sephora India's established footprint and the combined reach of 50 stores across 16 cities. So over the following months, the gap between what Nica could offer and what Reliance could became harder to argue with. By early 2025, Fenty had disappeared from Nica. And a few months later, in August, it launched exclusively with RELMAN. Reliance. And then, less than a year later, which was last weekend, Rihanna was in Mumbai for Fenty Ki Haveli, and for most of it, she was seen with Isha Ambani. See, Rihanna is a sharp

businesswoman running a $3 billion brand with a giant like LVMH. So she understood what this partnership meant. India's premium beauty market is heading towards $4 billion by 2035. And like in most sectors in India, only reliance has the kind of infrastructure that can give Fenty the growth that it needs, the story that it needs to tell its investors. So, the commercial logic that way is pretty sound. But what is harder to quantify is what it means for a brand that was built on Rihanna's values, the very specific idea of when and for whom she decides to show up. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's

first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters, and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague, Snitha Sharma, and edited by Rajiv Sien.