The trade desk for the creator economy.
When a creator stops taking brand deals and starts building the brand. We cover the companies creators own and operate — the consumer-product launches, the funding rounds, the retail deals and the flops — and the numbers behind whether any of it actually works. From snack empires to apparel labels to DTC coffee, this is the business of turning an audience into a balance sheet.
Coty’s 8-K pegged Kylie Cosmetics at $177M in trailing revenue; months later its filings let Forbes reset 2018 sales to ~$125M against the ~$360M the family had promoted — the gap a public-company audit forced open.
The court counted the 284 posts the founder submitted as his own and found 206 — nearly 75% — were marketing Bang, then handed the accounts to the bankrupt company.
FaZe closed its de-SPAC at about $725 million, then disclosed in the same proxy that sold the deal that it expected to miss its own revenue forecasts by 20% — GameSquare bought the whole company for roughly $17 million.
Congo Brands committed to buy 18.5M cases of Prime a year — a $67.7M bottler suit and Prime's 71% UK revenue drop show how far real demand fell short.
Hailey Bieber's Rhode ran so far past its earnout thresholds that e.l.f. marked the liability up $57.6M — flipping Q4 to a $49.4M GAAP loss on 35% sales growth.
e.l.f. held marketing near a quarter of net sales while L’Oréal’s ad-and-promo ran 32.4% — and rode 28 straight quarters of growth to $1.31B. Here’s the always-on creator engine closing the gap.
The week's biggest moves in creator-led business — no noise, no advertorial.