For a person to be labeled as “the richest male or female”, it means so much investigation and scrutiny must have been made. In 2022, Barbadian singer Rihanna (often referred to as “Riri” by her fans), became America’s youngest self-made female billionaire according Forbes. As much as this might have come as a shock to those who thought she was just “a girl from the islands” doing music and dabbling in the beauty’preneur’ lane, it wasn’t for others, given that her source of income is not only music.
Since starting her music career professionally in 2005, Rihanna’s success as a singer was imminent. The 35-year-old made her mark and become one of the most popular female celebrities in the world in less than no time. The “Umbrella” singer has gone on to release eight studio albums, two remix albums, one reissue, seven box sets and three extended plays.
Since the beginning of her career in that time, Rihanna has sold 60 million album units and 215 million digital tracks worldwide, making her one of the best-selling artists of all time. Despite having those aforementioned numbers, they were not enough to make her a billionaire, but Riri had other plans, which eventually paid off tremendously.
As of the time of this article, she currently has 151 million Instagram followers, 104 million Facebook followers, and 108 million Twitter followers, making her the most followed woman on the platform, (not including TikTok and other social media platforms).
After amassing a mouth-watering popularity her timing to launch her cosmetic brand Fenty Beauty, was strategic. and perfect timing while she was still very much sought after as a singer. Fenty Beauty has been labeled as the most successful cosmetic brand by a celebrity.
Rihanna launched Fenty Beauty in 2017 and beauty brand has an annual revenue of $582.8 billion Fenty and a mouth watering 12 million Instagram followers, making it the world’s most successful celebrity beauty brand, according to Cosmetify. Partnering Fenty with LVMH, gave Fenty Beauty a global distribution that has been hard to match, through Sephora, one of the largest beauty retailers in the world. Shortly after launching her cosmetic line, she later launched “Savage X Fenty”, a lingerie line that celebrates fearlessness, confidence and inclusivity of women.
Many skincare and beauty brands have infiltrated the market today with little or no standards, but Rihanna’s boldness and success, sends a loud message that if one should want to venture into such a line of business, they should think of doing it the right way and with class, because with a good marketing agenda, the right strategies in place and by thinking outside of the box, entrepreneurs with good products always have a market. There is room for everyone who believes that they can also do it, but breaking the glass ceiling is not for wishful thinkers. It is not for the weak but for those who are not afraid to dream it (big) and work towards actualizing that dream.
Right now, Rihanna, the little girl from the island of Barbados, is only second to Oprah Winfrey in net worth of richest female entertainers. It’s true that many might easily get discouraged by Rihanna ‘s achievements, but many can as well look at the fact that it took Rihanna 18 years (from 2005 to 2023),to become the world’s richest female musician.This might seem as a short time to achieve such mega success, and it is, but the truth is, Rihanna spent half of her life working and she is only 35, as started working towards this from when she was a teenager while many start well into adulthood. There is no time limit in achieving success and success is relative. Just focus on your goal(s), do the leg work and one day it will come to fruition.
