Happy Sunday! 

I hope you’re currently sitting down, feet up, and a beverage in hand, ready to talk about celebrity-backed brands. It’s pretty chilly in New York, even rainy this weekend. So grab a blanket and let’s get into it!

If you missed this past week’s Limited Supply episode, Moiz and I sat down with Harley Finklestein, the President of Shopify, and we hammered him with feedback and questions. Make sure you check that episode out, wherever you enjoy podcasts: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

Ok, let’s get into today’s email…

Over the last couple of years, it feels like every celebrity and their mother has launched a brand. On the surface level, it seems like a phenomenal idea at the beginning:

  • Someone might have millions of followers and eyeballs ready to purchase.
  • You have a built-in "brand" that's created, authentically — aligning the brand with who the celebrity is.
  • The retail store distribution model becomes flipped (brands aren't trying to drive sell-through, instead retailers are scaling up inventory to be available for sell-through).
  • Retailers can rely on foot traffic, allowing the celebrity brand to act as a loss-leader product, without any discount.

For most of what we remember, celebrity brands do really well, too.

  • Onda Sparkling Tequila (Shay Mitchell), Happy Dad (NELK)
  • Houseplant (Seth Rogen)
  • Love Wellness (Lo Bosworth)
  • Feastables / Beast Burger (Mr. Beast)
  • Chamberlain Coffee (Emma Chamberlain)
  • SKIMS, Lemme, 818 Tequila, Kylie Cosmetics, SKKN (Kardashians)
  • PRIME (Logan Paul), Barcode (Kyle Kuzma)
  • Fabletics (Kate Hudson)
  • GXVE Beauty (Gwen Stefani), REM Beauty (Ariana Grande), RARE Beauty (Selena Gomez), Rhode Beauty (Hailey Bieber), JLO Beauty (Jennifer Lopez)
  • The Outset (Scarlett Johansson)

Many of these brands, if not all, are 8 or 9-figure businesses, all within 8-24 months of launching, based on sales, not just VC valuations. The concept of pairing someone with an audience or credibility with a product has attracted a ton of venture and private equity dollars over the last 3-4 years.

However, on the flip side, there are also a ton of celebrity brands that quietly closed down, or have been stripped of most of their resources and are just operating to not "fail" or "shut down". After all, building a brand is not easy at all, and just having a celebrity or a well-known creator/influencer doesn't guarantee that you will have success.

In addition to starting brands, many celebrities have begun joining companies with a formal title, such as:

  • Chief Impact Officer - Steph Shep & PLUS
  • Creative Director - Dakota Johnson & Maude
  • Chief Flavor Officer - Dua Lipa & TRULY
  • Chief Creative Officer - Jennifer Anniston & Vital Proteins
  • Artistic Director - ASAP Rocky & PacSun

And, of course, they're joining the brands with their dollars quietly too. Tons of our favorite brands, even sub-$50M brands, have a number of celebrity investors attached to their cap tables.

There are 3 things that are true in life:

  • Death
  • Taxes
  • Every successful brand would likely be successful on its own, even without the celebrity attached to it

Almost all of the companies listed above would be successful, maybe not as fast, because of the teams and product quality behind each brand. Happy Dad comes to mind as one of the real exceptions as their star power is what got them a distribution deal with one of the best/most powerful alcohol distributors.

There are really 2 things I think celebrity brands do incredibly well, which give them the upper hand. Well, maybe 3 if you include the audience, but after working with a number of celebrity brands, I think the audience part is great for the first 72 hours, maybe the first week if you play your cards right with product gifting and press. But the real brands that last have 2 main things in common:

  1. They are content machines. Click here to see the Feastables ads. What you see there are the Facebook and Instagram ads they are running. You’re supposed to be confused. While there’s nothing there, you do see a huge investment in organic content here.
  2. They are constantly pushing the boundaries, maybe even for the purpose of creating content. How do celebrities get earned media coverage, or garner more viewers/subscribers on content platforms? They just keep going bigger, and bigger, and bigger. 

The combination of those 2 traits not only builds a brand in a hyper-authentic format, but it also allows for a constant flow of content, optimized natively for your feed, not for whatever an agency creative director thinks is the right thing to do. The latter point is more true for brands aligned with digital creators versus traditional celebrities. 

From my own experience, there's also a lesser "barrier" to creating content when the DNA of the leadership is content, versus living in an excel sheet with goals of direct traffic and Facebook ad spend numbers.

So, what's the biggest lesson from these celebrity brands?

Become a content machine. As a brand, be vulnerable and open. Express your brand to exactly the customer you're going after. Be loud and proud of what you're selling. 

In past emails, I've shared other ways to work with creators, influencers, celebrities, etc.:

  • Product Seeding. This is gifting your product to a list of people who would, ideally, open/unbox your product for content to be posted on their channels.
  • Product Co-Creation. Snif does a great job of this — bringing together their supply chain, operations, and marketing with a celebrity/influencer brand, creating a win-win scenario and a new SKU for everyone's customers/audience.
  • Whitelisting. This is creating content with someone, whether it's a small DIY production (like this) or a full-blown campaign (think Kevin Hart and Hydrow Rowing).
  • Content Creation. With no intention to post, you can work with creators to create content for you, oftentimes at a fraction of the cost of a massive production agency.
  • Build a brand. If you have a brand you're already building, go take it to a celebrity or co-found a brand from scratch with someone who has an audience.

I know this email was a bit less actionable, but over the last week I've gotten so many emails and DMs about celebrity brands, how to get a celebrity on board, does it matter, etc. So, hopefully, this helps.

On to some fun stuff...

Vendor of the Week:

#paid x measurement — The new addition to the #paid family to help you understand if your influencers are influencing.

Once you get a mass-influencer campaign going, there are a few things you can do yourself to make sure you’re attributing sales in the most effective way:

  • Vanity coupon codes
  • Vanity URLs that expand to include UTM parameters
  • Post-purchase surveys to indicate how someone discovered the brand

However, that doesn’t mean all your bases are covered. That’s why #paid launched a measurement tool, developed in partnership with some of the world’s most trusted measurement consultancies, providing you with third-party, unbiased research. These parter companies include platforms like TikTok and Facebook, but also companies like Nielsen, Dig Insights (research firm), NetBase (social listening), and more.

Under one umbrella of #paid, you can create a campaign, recruit your creators, organize and approve the content, pay the creators, run the content as whitelisted ads for your brand, and then understand the measurement and impact of the entire campaign. 

Click here to get a demo of #paid’s measurement product today!

LP of the Week:

Speaking of celebrity and influencer brands, here is one of my favorite LPs we’ve made to date for a celebrity-backed brand. They wanted to drive more sales of Cold Brew, my favorite Chamberlain Coffee product, and we helped them do that.

Click here to see Chamberlain Coffee’s Cold Brew Bundle LP


If you want a landing page like this, ready for Black Friday, click here to hire HOOX.co to build you a landing page (wireframe, copywriting, designing, developing, and we’ll give you a live URL in 2 weeks).

That’s All for This Week:

I hope today’s email helped with some thinking or provoked some thoughts about how you can further your brand, either by working with a creator or by realizing that the content is the real secret.

Also, Workweek wants to give you $100 to shop on Amazon! Have thoughts on what marketing trends we'll see in 2023? Fill out this survey to inform the 2023 State of Marketing Report and get a chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card. This report will analyze marketers' biggest challenges and priorities for the coming year, as well as predictions of some of the major marketing trends that we'll see in the next 12 months.

I hope you have an amazing upcoming week! Stay hydrated. Get enough sleep. Get a sweat in. Text a funny meme to 3 people you haven’t talked to in over a year. 

I’ll see you next Sunday!