It turns out influencers are good at more than just attracting millions of followers and generating high engagement rates with their short-form video content. They can also move product — and lots of it.
Over the past several years, influencers have moved beyond posting #sponsored content on their feeds to launching brands of their own. And the success of those brands is a testament to the strength of influencers’ relationship with their followers, and their ability to convert those followers into paying customers.
“Most new brands struggle with the ‘cold start’ with consumers,” Natalie Silverstein, Chief Innovation Officer at Collectively, a content marketing agency that specializes in influencer marketing. “Influencers don’t have that problem. They have established warm leads. Their audiences are primed to buy.”
There are the influencer beauty brands, such as Jeffree Star Cosmetics (from the popular makeup influencer) and Huda Beauty (from beauty influencer Huda Kuttan). There are multiple influencer food and beverage brands, including Prime Hydration, a sports drink line from Logan Paul; and Sourse, chocolate vitamins from former Modern Family star Sarah Hyland. Kim Kardashian (SKIMS) and Emily Ratajkowski (Inamorata) all have fashion labels. And the wellness space is full of influencers peddling their health products, such as Bloom Nutrition.
Indeed, an Attain study of purchase behavior over the past year shows that influencer brands can be as strong as the legacy brands they’re trying to displace. SKIMS, for instance, has an average transaction amount ($104.44) that is slightly higher than Lululemon ($100.38) — although Lululemon’s average spend per customer is notably higher ($183.99 to SKIMS’ $143.57), according to Attain’s analysis.
Some influencers have even been brave enough to extend their brands IRL and open old-fashioned, brick-and-mortar shops. YouTuber David Dobrik opened a pizza restaurant, Doughbrik’s, in 2022 on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Early this year, lifestyle influencer Emma Chamberlain opened a cafe, also in Los Angeles, the first physical extension of her Chamberlain Coffee brand.
Ariadna Jacob, founder of the influencer marketing agency Influences, attributes the success of influencer brands to the speed at which they create content. Most influencers share at least one video a day with their followers, a cadence that legacy brands, which have lengthy creative and legal approval processes, simply can’t keep up with. “There aren't that many brands that can move that fast,” she says.
The volume of content, and the personalized, educational nature of the videos shared, create deep bonds between the influencer and their audiences, and that makes for a ready retail opportunity.
“Influencers really understand community,” Jacob says. “It’s not just about selling, it’s about helping you make better purchase decisions around whatever you’re doing.”
Silverstein says legacy brands are looking to the influencer competition for inspiration, and trying to emulate influencers’ rapid-fire content production strategies. “Legacy brands are investing in a lot more creative marketing and being less precious with every piece of content that goes out into the market”
The influencer as retailer model has proven so lucrative that many traditional celebrities have co-opted the strategy for themselves. The celebrity to influencer pipeline model was pioneered by Gwyneth Paltrow, whose women’s wellness brand Goop has received $75 million in venture capital funding and was once valued at $250 million. She has since been surpassed by Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty, a cosmetics brand that was valued at $2 billion last year, and Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics, worth more than $1.2 billion. Ryan Reynolds is a part owner in a number of businesses, including Mint Mobile (cell phone service), Wrexham AFC (Welsh soccer club) and his gin brand, Aviation, which he sold to beverage giant Diageo for $610 million. The O.G. influencer Kim Kardashian owns a shapewear brand, SKIMS, that’s worth a reported $4 billion. Tom Holland debuted his non-alcoholic beer brand, Bero, last fall. And Seemingly everyone — George Clooney, The Rock, Kendall Jenner, Nick Jonas, Eva Longoria, Kevin Hart, those two guys from Breaking Bad — have tequila brands.
“The point of making art is not to win an award. The point of making art is to start a brand of tequila that’s so popular you never have to make art again,” comedian Nikki Glaser quipped while hosting this year’s Golden Globes awards.
The sheer preponderance of influencer owned brands — not to mention that several of them have eye-popping, multi-billion dollar valuations — gives credence to the influencer as retailer model.
It also raises the question of whether the influencer retail market is saturated. It would seem that the market couldn't absorb yet another cosmetics or tequila brand. “Beauty is quite crowded, and still there continues to be a cycle of relative winners and relative losers,” Silverstein says.
Prime, the sports drink hawked by the Paul brothers, has had trouble making inroads in the crowded sports drink category. Its average spend per customer ($9.43) is approximately a third of Gatorade’s ($27.16). Alani Nutrition, a line of energy and fitness drinks, also has an average spend per customer ($16.45) about a third of its competitor Vital Proteins ($46.23).
The ultimate goal for influencer brands, according to Silverstein, is to no longer be associated with their influencer founder. That is, the brand becomes so strong that it can succeed on its own, without the association of its influencer namesake. Silverstein points to fragrance brand Phlur, founded by beauty influencer Chriselle Lim, as a brand whose image supersedes its founder.
To be closely associated with a singular online personality is to risk losing brand equity. Social media trends are, by nature, ephemeral, and an influencer’s popularity change on a whim. The real success, then, is not to be an influencer brand at all, but to be like the brands they are challenging.
