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Welcome to the era of creator-led brands
Hyper
August 07, 2024
This week the HYPER team is going global — Clayton is completing his move to Amsterdam, and Oren is exploring Guangzhou.
We’ll be dropping some Field Notes in the next few issues. In the meantime, we’re also exploring how new tools are making the intensity of creative work easier and calling out some specific examples of breakthrough creator-led brands and what you can learn from them.
Find all your creative assets in a few clicks 🖱️
“We live in unprecedented times”
Kidding, we won’t do that to you again.
But foreal. It’s wild to think that 10 years ago, social media roles barely existed.
The creator economy wasn’t a thing.
And If you said omnichannel, we’d just look at you crazy.
But we went from 0 to 100 real quick.
And for modern brands, creative roles have turned into a catch-all for managing 10 different jobs.
You have to make a video, but you need to sift through hours of footage first.
You need to publish across 4 channels, but you’ve gotta tag the assets that will live on which channel.
You decide which stills make it into your spring marketing campaign, but you’re stuck manually organizing all the images by category.
How are you supposed to be creative when you spend your days in the weeds of tedious administrative work?
Air understands this ⚡
That’s why the homies at Air dropped Paige, an AI-powered creative ops platform that transforms the way you manage, organize, and leverage your visual assets.
From raw footage and final cuts to PDFs, imagery, and documents, Paige’s powerful search engine parses through alllll the booooring stuff for you.
That way, you can spend less time on admin and more time on being creative.
This month, Air is launching an AI-Expert service that will:
Automatically import, organize, and tag your digital assets into one place 🗄️
Customize an AI model that understands how to use your creative assets better than you do 📌
Scale the creative operational foundation and help you go from 1 to 100 📈
Designed by creatives, for creatives.
Get early access 👀
Who: Air is looking for creative teams that already have a foundation in AI and want to improve their company's use of AI to supercharge creative assets.
How many: Because each team gets its own account manager, they’re onboarding 20 organizations for this cohort (brands or agencies).
When: The program begins in September and runs for 12 months. By the end, you’ll be using AI to automate your asset management on a whole new level.
Learn more about the program and apply here.
This segment is in partnership with Air.
The era of creator-led brands
After a decade of DTC growth where the money flowed like Monopoly, and countless VCs routinely handed anyone with a half-baked idea $5M and a term sheet, those days are gone.
And gone are the days of your strategy to be the next Warby Parker, Away, or Harry’s.
Look, the ZIRP life was good.
Your ROAS was relatively predictable; everything was sleek ads, sexy branding, and vanity metrics, and the growth-at-all-costs mentality created a kind of euphoria that was never sustainable.
From an era driven by sleek ads, sexy branding, and vanity metrics, we’re now in a new wave of brand building, and so let’s dive into why we should be excited about this.
Creator-led brands
Personally, this collective reset is exactly what we’ve needed to help reframe the brand landscape.
The reality is that consumers are smarter than ever. We’re being sold products on every channel imaginable, and the levers brands used to pull to convert customers don’t work the way they used to.
That’s where creator-led brands step in.
What’s a creator-led brand?
It’s a brand that exists as a byproduct of the creator making content that revolves around a consistent niche.
The creator posts content about their niche and builds an audience—and eventually community—centered on that content.
So much of why we’re seeing creator-led brands win is because…
People trust people.
You build rapport with a person first, and then you’re more willing to support whatever they make next.
Here are three different examples of this at play right now.
Founders Huw and Becky Thomas launched Paynter from London as a creative project during the pandemic to explore what making a single, simple product would look like if they documented the process end-to-end.
What I love about this duo is how they’ve communicated their message using an analog medium rather than jumping onto short-form video content (which there’s nothing wrong with). Early on, they committed to dropping four 4 products a year, one every three months.
And that product is the chore coat.
A simple, utilitarian piece of clothing that works for any occasion. They perfected the fit and then started releasing new ones in batches. Something unique about their products is that no two jackets are the same.
They’d take fabric deposits up front to cover their costs, which allowed them to have enough coverage since all products are made to order. They’d get the products manufactured at a factory in Portugal and document every step of the process in their newsletter, which has built a massive email list over time.
Then, they drop the product, and each batch sells out in minutes.
Customers love following their jacket’s “journey” at each stage. As a consumer, it humanizes the experience and takes things being transactional.
It’s giving visions of Supreme without the noise and chaos, but 100% worth the hype.
Ultimately, this can be a great path for many other creators who want to take a slower, steady route to building a brand, especially if there’s no “rush” to what you’re creating.
Marcus Milione, Minted — New York, NY
Marcus is the perfect example of owning the creator-brand conundrum.
Where most owners focus on building a brand while not wanting to be its face, Marcus has embraced that role, realizing that the success of the brand rests in his ability to build a community through open and honest content.
And Minted NY—his own brand—is simply that. It’s an amalgamation of his love for clothing and running, a marriage of the two, with a New York accent.
He’s been with his followers every step of the way, bringing them into the fold, asking for feedback, giving behind-the-scenes looks at the creation process, sampling products, and so on.
And all of this is done through the lens of his journey as a runner, from testing new hoodies and hats to his most recent run of collabs with the iconic Saucony.
Marcus has it dialed in, and everything feels authentic to him and what he’s building towards. Opposite from Paynter, Marcus’s entire approach is built on short-form video, and that’s part of why he’s grown as a creator over the last few years.
This is also why Oren’s personal brand has skyrocketed over the last 12 months. He’s now launching Valuable Studios as a creative outlet for the content he already makes, and it gives him a tangible use case to present what he does in a practical brand way.
Nicole McLaughlin — New York, NY
And then there’s Nicole, a different proposition from the other two altogether.
All her content rests on the Instagram account she made In 2018, where she turned her hobby into a career by upcycling products and objects and turning them into sustainable fashion.
Old volleyballs into slippers.
Camera bags into bralettes.
Baguettes into Carhartt knit caps.
Everything she makes involves repurposing what already exists to make the most of it rather than creating net-new waste.
Her workshops, held globally, teach the potential of repurposing items and support community connections. She’s even building a non-profit to give design resources to young people, linking companies with surplus materials to schools in need.
She’s already collaborated with HOKA, Puma, Calvin Klein, J.Crew, and others on projects and has more on the way.
Nicole is a great example for the makers out there—true makers with creative talent for cutting, sewing, welding, branding, patching, quilting, and whatever else you people do.
Follow your passions, find a niche, use what you’re good at, be consistent with it, and document the process.
People will always find you.
You don’t need a million customers
Just focus on finding 1. And then 10. And 100. Then 1,000.
So much of what defines your growth as a creator these days is just being known for one specific thing.
If you’re starting out, make content about one thing. Just talk about one thing. One topic. One category. That’s it. And as you build, you’ll begin to cultivate an audience around what you do.
And that’s where things get fun, because opportunities, products, and ideas will naturally flow your way as a result of the content you’re making within that niche.
As for the brands and products… there will always be big brands. The difference now (from even a few years back) is that:
Creators have the ability to grow and create livelihoods for themselves surrounding their passions
There’s no need to build the next Warby Parker or Casper Mattress– you can just build a 1-10-million dollar brand with decent margins and low overhead, and you’ll have a good life.
So get moving.
Inquiries? Shoot us a note here: [email protected]
We’d love to chat!
Oren & Clayton ❤️ you