Investing In Creator-Led Brands, At Peak Creator-Led Brand

More creators than ever are launching their own beauty, apparel and F&B products. I provide a framework for investing in creator-led brands, and make some predictions on the future of the space.

In our last article, “The $5 Billion Creator HoldCo,” we wrote about investing in the holding companies that own all of a creator’s assets, from content earnings to creator-led brands.

This next article is about investing in creator-led brands. In 2025, more creators than ever are launching their own beauty, apparel and food & beverage products — and looking to raise venture capital.

(Small note: I broadly define a creator as any YouTuber, athlete, actor or other celebrity with a large audience.)

On one hand, it’s a great time for creator brands to raise VC funding. In the last six months, CPG saw more exits than any other sector, from Poppi ($1.95B) to Siete Foods ($1.2B) to Simple Mills ($795M) to LesserEvil ($750M). Consumer VC investment activity is rebounding from its 2022-23 slump. And probably most importantly, there are major secular tailwinds: Consumers continue to spend more time on social media and put more trust in their favorite creators over corporate brands.

Hence many creator brands are thriving. A couple data points that bullish investors are recently pointing to are: Hailey Bieber’s Rhode exploring a sale around $1B, and MrBeast’s Feastables hitting $250M in revenue. So just as we’ve seen massive outcomes like Rihanna’s Fenty ($2.8B valuation) and Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS ($4B) over the last decade, we’ll likely see new household-name creator brands emerge over the next decade.

But there’s one glaring problem: In 2025, it feels like we’re at peak creator-led brand.

The Information put it well:

“On Tuesday, makeup artist Mikayla Nogueira, who has over 16 million followers on TikTok, announced a skincare line, Point of View. The same day, TikTok and Instagram star Alix Earle helped relaunch SipMargs, a line of canned margaritas. Pash, a lotion brand from reality star and influencer Harry Jowsey, started selling Wednesday, as did new iced lattes from actress Millie Bobby Brown’s coffee brand. And last week, longtime creator Brent Rivera announced his new chip brand, Levels, at a food industry conference. Have we officially hit the saturation point for creator brands?”

To make it worse: Creators are launching overlapping products and making categories more competitive. Take sports drinks… In the last three years, Logan Paul & KSI launched Prime, Messi launched Mas+ and Alex Cooper launched Unwell. Either the TAM gets subdivided; maybe Paul & KSI win Gen Zers, Messi wins soccer players, and Cooper wins women. Or, more likely, it gets harder for any brand to become a category leader like Gatorade. We’re seeing similar competitive dynamics play out across clean beauty, better-for-you snacks, and fast fashion lines.

Meanwhile, consumers feel less novelty around buying creator-led brands, and more skepticism around cash grabs – while investors are both sobered by the 2020-21 DTC boom, and increasingly aware that a creator’s massive audience doesn’t equate to a new brand’s success.

This all begs the question: How does one invest in creator-led brands, at peak creator-led brand?

Below I share my framework for analyzing creator-led brand investments, and a few predictions for where the space will go over the next decade.

Here are the five most important questions I’d ask when evaluating a creator-led brand investment:

1. Does the business have strong underlying fundamentals outside the creator?

These are the table stakes. No matter how large the creator’s audience, the creator-led brand must have the same strong fundamentals that VCs would look for in any non-creator-led brand. The CEO and rest of the team must be top-caliber, with experience building in their category. (Creators often run into trouble if they’re creatives and not traditional entrepreneurs by nature, and if they hire friends instead of seasoned executives). The product must be great and differentiated from those of competitors. Otherwise consumers will trial it once for the novelty and churn. The supplier relationships must provide strong gross margins. And lastly, sales metrics should speak for themselves. LTV-CAC ratios, diversification across retail and DTC channels, sales velocity, and customer retention are all key metrics. The predominant trend of the last few years is consumer VCs are moving later-stage to have these proof points. Fewer VCs are underwriting 10-20x outcomes around pre-seed / seed, and more funds are underwriting 3-5x from Series A and beyond. One cautionary case study for investors is KSI & Logan Paul’s Prime Hydration. The drink surged to $1.3B sales in year 2, but declined 48% in 2024. It’s still likely a great outcome for the first investors. But for later stage investors, Prime is a reminder that there are many more factors at play than a buzzy, creator-led launch.

2. Does the creator convert product?

It’s insufficient for a creator to have high name recognition and a large social media following. The creator must have an ability to convert fans into paying customers. This is a function not of audience size, but of audience engagement and community. One tactic to assess this is analyzing engagement metrics (comments, likes, etc). Some A-listers have massive follower bases especially on Facebook and Instagram but get relatively little engagement on posts. Another tactic is reviewing a creator’s past endorsement deals and understanding how efficiently they converted sales for that brand. This proves that the creator doesn’t just have wide name recognition, but deep loyalty and intent from their fans.

3. Does the creator have a right to win their market?

Here’s an interesting case study of a failed creator-led brand… A few years ago, a “hype house” of teenage male Tik Tokers got pretty popular. They posted a lot of workout videos. So they decided to launch a pre-workout energy drink. Sales flopped. Turns out their most avid followers weren’t other teenage guys going to the gym, but rather teenage girls who had parasocial crushes on the Tik Tokers. That story signifies a larger trend. Too many creators have launched products that a) don’t serve their audience, and/or b) don’t solve a consumer pain point. Some venture studios spend hours reading a creator’s DMs and comments and doing follower interviews just to understand who a creator’s fans are and what product they might want. A creator must have an unfair advantage for their brand to win their product category. One example I really like is Mark Rober. His YouTube videos combine science and engineering content – and his company CrunchLabs sells $30-80 subscription boxes that provide hands-on STEM projects for kids, teens and adults and comes with explanatory content.

4. Will the creator put in the work?

Launching a brand entails a totally different workload than participating in a sponsorship or sweat equity deal. The creator can’t just record evergreen ads and sit back. They must be working 24/7 from launch and beyond to promote their product. Otherwise the brand will fall out of consumers’ minds. A good example is how Tom Holland promoted his new non-alcoholic beer brand BERO: he discussed it on podcasts and Jimmy Fallon and gave tens of interviews, on top of in-person events. Another tactic that’s growing more popular is the creator attending pitch meetings with Walmart, Target, and other large retailers. These appearances can have huge impacts on landing strong retail partnerships. Making time for all these jobs is easier said than done. Hollywood actors have demanding filming schedules, athletes have long seasons, and A-list YouTubers are just as busy. The creator must have both the time and the drive to fully promote their brand.

5. Can the creator be phased out from the brand over time?

One unique aspect of CPG is that the strategic acquirers are clearly defined. In software, it’s nearly-impossible to predict a seed-stage startup’s eventual acquirer. But in food & bev, for example, you can predict it’ll be Pepsi, General Mills, or one of ~15 other acquirers. These corporations struggle to develop new brands from the ground up, so they often acquire emerging brands. But the main question they’ll ask creator-led brands is: Can the brand itself continue thriving without the creator? Take the example of Diageo acquiring George Clooney’s Casamigos. Diageo had to be confident that if Clooney cashed out and took a step back from marketing, then Casamigos would continue to appeal to consumers. (It’s worth noting that acquirers often structure these deals with years-long performance earn-outs). Acquirers also face key man risk if the creator runs into scandals or falls out of popularity. The creator serves a critical role to bring the brand from 1-2. But to go from 1-10, the creator must eventually unwind their personal brand themselves from the product’s brand. A great example is SKIMS. Kim Kardashian appeared in the first ads in 2019, but six years later the brand has its own strong identity and a huge roster of A-list ambassadors from Rosalia to Neymar, as well as an official partnership with the NBA and WNBA. Check out the launch video for SKIMS Mens: the brand has a strong identity without even mentioning Kim.

Over the next decade, I believe investors will hold higher bars for the five criteria above.

I also have two predictions for creator-led brands over the next decade…

Prediction #1 is: Major creator-led brands will emerge in new product categories.

Creator brands have historically concentrated around the same few product categories. According to one 2022 report, beauty and apparel brands made up 63 of the top 100 creator brands. In the last few years, food & beverage brands have also become more common.

There are reasons for this category concentration. First, CPG & apparel lend themselves to creators – because these companies differentiate relatively more on marketing than on product. Second, the barriers to entry to launch a consumer goods brand have drastically decreased thanks to Shopify, Amazon, Stripe and many more e-commerce tools. Third, creator brands rarely create net-new products; rather, creators sell things consumers already want. Everything “better-for-you” has been a dominant consumer trend of the last decade. Hence many creators have launched better-for-you skincare and snack lines.

All that said, I believe we’ll see creators launch brands in new product categories – outside beauty, apparel and F&B. Creators just need to identify the right consumer trend to capitalize on.

One consumer trend I’m watching is the rise of GLP-1s weight-loss drugs. Already, 6 percent of American adults are taking GLP-1s, and that number’s expected to balloon. Weight-loss is a very emotionally-charged experience. Creators who have gone on weight-loss journeys could sell everything from muscle preservation supplements to GLP-1-compatible workout programs to GLP-1s themselves. See how Charles Barkley partnered with the GLP-1 telehealth provider Ro.

I also believe that we’ll see more creators sell not just physical goods – but software products. Why? First, software’s ceiling is higher. VCs generally underwrite CPG investments from $200M-600M, and underwrite software investments to $1B+. Creators can simply drive bigger outcomes with software.

Second, many of the same fundamentals of creator-led marketing apply. With B2C software, we’ve already seen several creators launch fitness apps; examples include Kayla Itsines’ Sweat and Chris Hemsworth’s Centr. Here, the creator’s value-add is pushing consumers to download and engage with the app.

With B2B software, similar to how a creator can attend their brand’s upfront meetings with retailers, a creator can play a role in B2B sales. For example, a couple years ago Robert Downey Jr. partnered with Aura, a unicorn cybersecurity startup. He joined as an investor, brand ambassador and board member with the goal of raising awareness among consumers about how they can protect themselves and their families online. It’s worth noting that as of last week, MrBeast is supposedly recruiting Stanford computer science students “to build something that will fundamentally transform how digital content spreads across the internet.”

Prediction #2 is: Creators will find innovative ways to promote their own brands.

On top of entering new product categories, I believe creators will find new ways to promote their products.

Historically, creators promoted their brands simply by posting on their Instagram, Tik Tok, etc. But creators are finding more innovative ways to activate their audiences.

Social media clipping is one emerging strategy. Here I wrote about how the crypto casino Stake has used clipping to flood X with its logo. Another example I love is how Drake and PartyNextDoor promoted their latest album $$$4U. Using Whop, they created a bounty program, which encouraged fans to make short-form videos with their songs, and paid out up to $1,000 per viral video. The campaign helped many of the songs become trending audio on social.

I also think creators will leverage brand-new platforms and tools to sell products. My colleague Yash recently wrote an article, “The Convergence of Content and Commerce.” He explains how AI tools can make it significantly easier to generate and test marketing assets. For example, Icon can ingest a brand’s existing media assets, generate tailored scripts, assemble ads that are 80-100% complete, and offer fine-tuning with their built-in editor. Yash’s article also touches on the growth of live-shopping platforms like Whatnot and Tik Tok Shop.

Lastly, as digital creators professionalize as businesses, I believe creators will more strategically cross-promote products across their flywheels. To return to point of “The $5 Billion Creator HoldCo,” one thing MrBeast has done extraordinarily well is promote Feastables across every channel possible – from his Amazon series to his YouTube content to his collabs with other creators. I believe more creators will follow this 360 degree marketing playbook.

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To recap, I think it’s an exciting time to invest in creator-led brands. But in 2025, we’re living at the peak of creator-led brands. So launching and investing in the space requires a different playbook than what’s worked in the past.

If you’re building, operating or investing in creator-led brands, please reach out. I’d love to hear your thoughts.