I have been in this space since 2021. Back then I genuinely had to search for new stories and brands to write about. Now a new brand launches or a new funding round gets announced almost every single day. I have more content than I can post. More deals landing in my inbox than I can evaluate. The space I started covering when it was still niche has become one of the most active categories in consumer.

This week I am breaking down why that is happening, what is driving every celebrity and creator to want their own brand right now, and what that actually means for the space.

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More celebrities and creators are launching brands right now than at any point in the history of this space. New brands across skincare, beverages, supplements, food, tech, and wellness are being announced almost daily. Funding rounds that would have been unusual two years ago are now routine. The category has gone from something I had to explain to investors to one that every serious consumer investor is actively paying attention to.

The reason is not complicated. The exits made it impossible to ignore. Kim Kardashian built SKIMS and watched it reach a $5 billion valuation. Hailey Bieber built Rhode and sold it to e.l.f. Beauty for $1 billion three years after launch. Rihanna built Fenty Beauty into a $2.8 billion empire. MrBeast built Feastables to $250 million in annual revenue by year three.

And then there is Selena Gomez. Her net worth crossed $1 billion, with estimates suggesting around 80% of that came from Rare Beauty alone. Not from music. Not from acting. From a brand she launched in 2020. That number is the one that changes minds. Celebrities and creators are waking up to the fact that real generational wealth is not being built on stage or on set or through content. It is being built through ownership.

The ones who understood that early are sitting on life-changing outcomes. The ones who watched from the sidelines are now moving fast to catch up. And everyone watching them move is feeling the same pull. I call it the celebrity brand FOMO effect. The fear of being the famous person who did not build a brand when everyone else did.

I see this directly from where I sit. When I first started working with celebrities and creators in 2021, helping them structure equity deals with startups, I was mostly talking theory. Why equity beats endorsement fees. Why ownership creates generational wealth. And when I needed practical examples, I kept returning to the same handful: Aviation Gin, Vitamin Water, On Running. Those were the examples because there simply were not many others yet. The space was early. 

That world no longer exists. From a content perspective, I now have more happening in this space every single week than I can cover posting once a day. A new launch that deserves a full breakdown. A funding round that signals something important. A pivot or a failure that illustrates a pattern worth examining. The problem is no longer finding stories. It is choosing what to leave out.

From a deal flow perspective, the number of celebrity- and creator-founded brand opportunities landing in my inbox has increased significantly year over year. More celebrities are actively seeking investors who understand the category. More experienced operators are coming in to co-found alongside famous names. The pipeline is deeper and more active than it has ever been. For HotStart, more deals means more opportunities to find the ones worth backing. But it also means more noise to sort through.

Here is the part the FOMO effect consistently obscures. The same pattern that drove hundreds of celebrity tequila brands into existence after George Clooney sold Casamigos for a billion dollars is now playing out across every consumer category. People see the exits and rush to replicate them without asking whether the fundamental ingredients that made those exits possible are actually present in what they are building.

The reality has not changed. For every SKIMS, Fenty, and Rhode, there are hundreds of celebrity- and creator-founded brands that will fail. Not because the celebrity was not famous enough. Not because the launch was not big enough. But because the product did not earn repeat purchases. The category was wrong. The operational team lacked the experience to scale. The brand had no genuine reason to exist beyond the famous name. Or the celebrity treated it as a revenue stream rather than a business they were actually building.

Similar to traditional startups where roughly 95% do not survive their first three years, the celebrity brand space follows a similar pattern. The volume of launches going up does not change that ratio. It just means the absolute number of failures will increase alongside the absolute number of successes.

There is also a harder dynamic emerging. As more celebrity brands fail and more customers get burned by products that did not deliver, the baseline skepticism toward new celebrity brand launches increases. Customers who tried a celebrity product that disappointed them are not neutral the next time around. They are suspicious. That accumulated skepticism from the failures of the FOMO era may actually push the failure rate as a celebrity brand higher in the years ahead. The bar for earning consumer trust is rising as the volume grows.

The flood of new brands is genuinely exciting for us at HotStart. More launches means more opportunities to find the next Rhode, the next SKIMS, the next Fenty before the rest of the world catches on. But more opportunity also demands more discipline. When the pipeline is thin, every deal gets serious attention by default. When the pipeline is full, the risk is getting swept up in the volume and mistaking activity for quality.

The frameworks we use have not changed and they matter more now than ever. The brands worth backing are not the ones with the most famous founders or the biggest launch days. They are the ones where the celebrity or creator has a genuine connection to the problem the product solves. Where the product earns repeat purchases from customers who have never heard of the founder. Where the operational team has actually built and scaled companies before. Where the market is growing with real room for a new entrant. And where the celebrity is genuinely in the room making decisions, not just a famous face attached to a deck. Those things do not become less important as the volume grows. They become more important. Because the market is getting better at identifying cash grabs and punishing them fast.

The comment was right. The volume is increasing. A new brand launches or a funding round gets announced almost every single day. The exits that made this space famous have created a wave of celebrities and creators who all want to build the next Rhode or the next SKIMS.

That wave is real and it is not slowing down. But it carries everything: the businesses that will define the category and the ones that will disappear within three years. The exits that triggered the gold rush were built on genuine celebrity-product-market fit, real operational discipline, and celebrities who treated their brands as businesses rather than revenue streams.

For every one of those, there are hundreds that will not make it. That has always been true in this space. It will remain true as the volume grows. At HotStart, our job is to find the ones that will. Not the most famous. The most fundamental.

This week, I'm joined by John Foraker, co-founder and CEO of Once Upon a Farm, the fresh organic baby and kids food brand he built alongside actress Jennifer Garner that recently IPO'd at a $724 million valuation on the New York Stock Exchange.

John breaks down how he and Jennifer joined the company together in 2017 after a 30-minute meeting that lasted four hours, and what it actually looks like when a celebrity co-founder is genuinely all in. Jennifer isn't just posting to her millions of followers. She's on weekly leadership calls, in sales meetings with major retailers, and following up on deals at 11pm from a makeup chair on set. We also talk about why he chose to go public instead of selling, how they went from 300 to 10,000 distribution points in a single year, and what most celebrity brands get completely wrong about building for the long term.

Now available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

About HotStart VC

HotStart VC is launching a new fund to invest in brands founded by celebrities and creators. We’re building the go-to platform for creators and celebrities launching brands, providing capital, strategic support, and the infrastructure to scale.