Influencer Brands Are Making a Comeback

The influencer-to-founder pipeline is in the midst of a renaissance.

The latest wave of creator-founded fashion and beauty brands gaining traction — among them TikToker Morgan Stewart’s basics line Renggli, Aimee Song’s Amiya, Cass DiMicco’s accessories brand Aureum Collective, Mary Orton’s baseball cap label Chord and Lindsay Silberman’s Hotel Lobby Candle — is reviving the category with some modifications to the business model.

This cohort of brands has mostly avoided big-name investors and retail partners; more brands are self-funding. The brands are rarely named after their founders (or the online moniker they rose to fame with), the goal being to create products that will appeal beyond followers (though a degree of self-promotion on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube is still part of the playbook). Their launches were less splashy and their growth slower than the likes of brands from influencers such as Arielle Charnas’ Something Navy and Julia Berolzheimer’s Gal Meets Glam, who parlayed their high follower counts into fashion brands that quickly secured consumer attention and nationwide distribution deals, and faded just as fast — but that’s by design.

“We don’t want to be an influencer brand that peaks because there’s this massive hype in the beginning,” said Cecilie Moosgaard, who started the jewellery brand Lié Studio with her twin sister Amalie. “It’s difficult to maintain momentum in the long run.”

This generation’s success has reignited investor attention. Slow Ventures announced in February that it started a $60 million fund specifically focussed on creator-led brands. Beauty TikToker Mikayla Nogueira, who debuted her Point of View skin prep label last month, received a pre-launch investment from Imaginary Ventures, which previously backed Skims and Glossier, among other brands. She told The Business of Fashion she was open to the investment because Imaginary Ventures was willing to give her “every bit of creative freedom.”

Others say they like being in the driver’s seat, even if it means having less money for marketing, or not having an experienced retail hand to tap for advice on logistics.

“It’s so much more powerful to have a human connection [to a brand] and you’re much more likely to support something when you know someone’s intentions and who they are,” said DiMicco. “If it’s a woman’s accessories brand, just knowing that it’s not a bunch of 50-year-old dudes from a venture capital firm behind it, makes it more personal.”

What They’re Doing Differently

The boom in splashy launches from early influencers in the 2010s came with backers eager to capitalise on the selling power of marketing’s shiny new toy. Despite early success, within just a few years, many shuttered or sold amid tensions between influencer and partner. Even the first wave of TikTokers couldn’t make it work; Morphe, the beauty company that launched labels with Addison Rae and Charli D’Amelio, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2023.

“There was this idea [that] if you put an influencer on a brand, it will surely do well if they have high engagement,” said Julianne Fraser, the founder and CEO of Dialogue NYC, an influencer marketing agency. “But there’s so much more that goes into building a brand.”

The general conclusion was that influencer-fronted brands were more potential than profit.

Retailers like Nordstrom and Revolve, who once invested heavily in building and selling influencer-fronted labels, pulled back from the strategy.

Having watched their peers get burned, this generation of creator founders is also more wary of those sorts of deals. They prioritise freedom above all else to avoid being held to an impossible standard for growth or butting heads on category expansion or marketing.

“In many cases, those business models are not sustainable,” Orton, who self-funded Chord’s launch last year, said of the team-ups that defined the previous era of influencer brands. “You really don’t have control over the product you’re putting your name on and they’re not lucrative in the long-term.”

Running the business themselves also gives founders more of a say in whether to be forward-facing in marketing. Some visibility is necessary. The Moosgaard sisters appeared in most of the e-commerce photos in the brand’s early days; as Lié Studio has grown, they’ve been able to hire models. DiMicco said that posts that feature her on the brand’s Instagram, too, inevitably perform the best.

Some self-promotion is necessary, but “no one wants a founder to be constantly selling to them all day,” said Silberman. To make it feel more natural, founders say they try to incorporate their brands into their content organically. Founder and CEO Madison Orlando, for instance, shares behind-the-scenes peeks into the day-to-day of running her fashion brand Artless Forever, while DiMicco’s followers see how she incorporates her Aureum belts into her everyday outfits, alongside an Alaïa bag or a Helmut Lang blazer.

“There’s a balance there, because people do love to see you, but you can also fall into the trap of the brand being attached to you,” said Orlando. “You don’t ever want to be limited to just you. You want it to exist outside of you.”

Of course, these shifts mean that expectations must be managed, too. While their existing audience can provide an initial “springboard” to jumpstart sales, said Orton, the reality of running a self-funded business means that marketing budgets are more limited and you can only scale so quickly. It’s less about making an instant splash and more about sustaining momentum.

“A lot of creators fall into this trap of comparing all the events that have gone to seeing all the beautiful mail they’ve received, and wanting their brand to get that right away,” said Silberman. “I’m guilty of that too, but you have to be realistic about where you are.”

The Influencer Advantage

Though “influencer brand” and “celebrity brand” are often used interchangeably, what makes an influencer-led brand distinct is that their greatest asset isn’t the size of their audience, but rather their deep understanding of their shopper.

“I’ve been close to my customer for a decade across all categories, and so I understand her in a different way,” said Orton. She’ll post polls on Instagram so followers can vote on upcoming colourways for new launches, which serves as something of an in-real-time free focus group.

That understanding helps build human connection between company and consumer. “People don’t want to just follow brands and be a number. They want to feel like they’re part of something,” said Lucy Robertson, global head of brand marketing at influencer marketing agency Buttermilk. That sort of built-in community is something that every brand today is chasing — creators have already spent years building it.

They also know how to create content that performs on social media, an advantage at a time when other digitally native brands are struggling to see the same sort of return on investment from performance marketing. More than that, they understand how to build influencer relationships (and are usually friends with a lot of them already) — both Silberman and DiMicco said that organic influencer mentions have been a major sales driver.

Time spent building a brand inevitably impacts its creator’s career — Silberman said that building Hotel Lobby Candle has forced her to be less present on Instagram Stories, but it also helps her avoid creative burnout. And operating a brand does provide a career path that would allow an influencer to, one day, step back from the public eye if they wanted.

“Influencing is much easier than growing a company, but I don’t think it is as rewarding,” said Moosgaard.