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If you’re finding value in our Creator Economy newsletter, I encourage you to consider subscribing to The Information. It contains exclusive reporting on the most important stories in tech. Save up to $250 on your first year of access. Hello! It seems like more creators than ever are starting their own lines of makeup, skin care, snacks and more, with at least three new brands this week alone. 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? I’ve been hearing more and more complaints over the last few months from VCs and other investors who are tired of being pitched on a never-ending flood of creator and celebrity brands, as I reported in this story. Investors are saying that many new launches aren’t differentiated enough from existing products, or worse, are low-quality and simply don’t look or taste good. And if you look at the celebrity brands announced recently, you’ll notice that most don’t follow the same path as now well-known brands like Skims or Goodles, where celebrities or creators are closely involved from a brand’s beginning and raise money from investors like any other startup. Sure, Point of View was launched with backing from the consumer-focused VC firm Imaginary Ventures. (Imaginary has invested in other brands with celebrity ties including Skims, Good American, Westman Atelier, Bero, Mila and Ayoh Foods.) But other recent creator launches are happening through rebrands or partnerships as opposed to stand-alone startup brands. Sip Margs, for instance, has been around since 2021, and only recently roped in Earle as a new investor ahead of a big marketing and distribution revamp. Earle said she’s been helping with the brand’s marketing and social media presence, as well as hosting events to promote it. Other recent investors in a $3 million round include Fanatics founder Michael Rubin, DJ Steve Aoki and Palm Tree Crew, the DJ Kygo’s investment firm. Pash appears to have been developed with C-Care, a contract manufacturer of makeup and skincare products (Pash’s mailing address on its website is the same as C-Care’s facility in Maryland). Florence By Mills Coffee, Brown’s coffee brand, operates through a licensing deal with Collab Coffee, a white-label coffee supplier that has also developed brands for TikTok creator Chris Olsen and the Dungeons & Dragons game franchise. And Levels, Rivera’s chip brand, was developed by brand incubator Redbud Brands, which has helped create and launch other brands including Cay Skin, a skincare brand fronted by model Winnie Harlow. It will be interesting to see how the latest crop of creator brands sell with fans. There’s plenty to be said for having a built in social-media following to hawk your products to, and there have been some creator success stories like MrBeast’s chocolate brand Feastables, which had a reported $250 million in sales and $20 million in profit last year, or influencer-founded skincare brand Summer Fridays, which sold a stake to private equity in one of last year’s only deals by a beauty startup. But the most successful brands have been able to build products whose appeal is bigger than just the famous face attached to them, in part thanks to getting hefty investor checks early on and spending money on developing unique goods. Now, Kim Kardashian no longer fronts every Skims campaign, and not every Sephora shopper knows Selena Gomez cofounded Rare Beauty. It will be hard for newer creator-fronted energy drinks, snacks or skincare lines to claim the same distinction. Here’s what else is going on… See The Information’s Creator Economy Database for an exclusive list of private companies and their investors. Fixated, a creator management firm, received $12.8 million in new funding, the company said Wednesday, with $10 million from Eldridge Industries. Fixated represents creators including comedian Zach Justice and the Twitch streamer Sketch. M.M. LaFleur, a women’s clothing brand, moved its newsletter to Substack, joining a growing roster of brands that are using the platform for marketing. Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, announced a forthcoming podcast, “Confessions of a Female Founder,” on Thursday. The series will premiere April 8 and feature interviews with female founders as well as details from Meghan about her lifestyle brand As Ever. The podcast is launching through a partnership with Lemonada Media. Oracle has emerged as a leading contender to help run TikTok as part of a deal the White House is orchestrating to comply with the impending divest-or-ban law, my colleagues Jing, Juro, Anissa and Sri reported this morning. Both ByteDance management and the White House are in support of Oracle playing a key role in any deal that gets done, they reported. But at the same time, ByteDance’s leaders want to retain a hands-on role in TikTok’s operations and are hopeful that President Trump will approve a deal similar to the company’s existing Project Texas partnership with Oracle, but many details of the sale process are still murky, even to potential bidders. Those are the royalties Spotify said it paid to artists in 2024. Nearly 1,500 artists earned more than $1 million from Spotify last year, the company said. Meta won a legal victory on Wednesday against former employee Sarah Wynn-Williams, following the publication of her book “Careless People” last week. Meta has argued that the book’s contents, which allege sexual harassment and other toxic behavior by top executives at the company, are prohibited under a non-disparagement agreement Wynn-Williams signed. Meta has repeatedly denied the book’s allegations and said that Wynn-Williams was fired for poor performance. An arbitrator ruled that Meta had provided enough evidence that Wynn-Williams had potentially violated her agreement with the company, and the author and Meta will now begin private arbitration. Wynn-Williams, formerly a director of global public policy at what was then called Facebook, must pause book promotions and sales, according to a filing Wednesday, as well as “amplifying any further disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments” and retract all previous disparaging comments “to the extent within her control.” The order does not appear to limit any activities by the book’s publisher, Flatiron Books, or its parent company, Macmillan. Thank you for reading the Creator Economy Newsletter! I’d love your feedback, ideas and tips: kaya@theinformation.com. If you think someone else might enjoy this newsletter, please pass it forward or they can sign up here: https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/creator-economy | 
