e.l.f. Beauty and Chipotle Lean on Global Loyalty to Fuel Growth

Nineteen countries in a single day. That is how fast e.l.f. Beauty is about to grow the footprint of rhode, the skincare line it bought from Hailey Bieber last year, when the brand lands on Sephora shelves across Europe on September 30. The move takes rhode from three countries to 22 at once, and the timing is not an accident.

e.l.f. Beauty paid roughly $1 billion for rhode in 2025, and the bet always hinged on distribution catching up to demand that already existed online. Chief Executive Tarang Amin has said that roughly 74% of rhode's social media followers already live outside the United States, while international sales account for only about 20% of the direct-to-consumer business. That gap is the whole thesis: the audience arrived years before the product did, so e.l.f. skips the expensive, slow part of building a brand from scratch abroad. It just has to get boxes onto shelves.

Chipotle is running a similar playbook, just with burritos instead of lip gloss. Weak domestic traffic has weighed on the stock, and the company has leaned harder into international partners to open new growth channels rather than wait out the U.S. slowdown. It entered Mexico this year through a development deal with Alsea, which operates thousands of restaurant units across Latin America and Europe, and added restaurants in the Middle East through Alshaya Group. In Canada, sales have nearly tripled over five years with unit economics on par with U.S. stores. Management still talks about reaching 7,000 domestic locations over time, so this isn't a retreat from the home market. It reads more like a hedge against it.

What links the two names is the idea that a loyal customer base, built through culture and social reach, can be exported faster and cheaper than a brand built cold in a new country. Local partners such as Alsea and Alshaya absorb the operational risk of unfamiliar real estate and regulation, freeing Chipotle and e.l.f. to focus on product and marketing. Whether that formula produces the kind of multiyear compounding that turns a stock into a genuine long-term winner is unproven at scale for either company. e.l.f. remains the smaller, choppier name of the two, still absorbing tariff-driven cost pressure at home even as it pushes abroad. Chipotle carries the steadier base but needs its U.S. traffic problem to actually stabilize before the international story can carry the stock on its own.