[Boring] founder-led brands are dead.

Last week was Cannes Lions, which, if your social feeds looked anything like mine, was impossible to miss.

It felt like every person in business was there. Especially every person in business who’d also classify themselves as a creator.

Cannes Lions is known as a (if not ‘the’) festival of creativity. It’s the world’s most prestigious annual awards and gathering for the marketing, advertising, and creative communications industries, taking place every June at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès in Cannes, France.

And this year was all about creators. To the point where the festival literally renamed its awards.

The “Social & Influencer Lions” became the “Social & Creator Lions.”

There was a dedicated Creator Beach, Creator Lounges, endless conversations about creator marketing as a core business strategy. And of course, endless creators in attendance.

I myself was in France last week too! However at a beautiful wedding for my friends rather than Cannes Lions. Maybe next year…

Pair this with the influencer brand announcements that have truly been everywhere this year:

• Lucy Georgia (lucegeorgia) just teased the launch of Sonny Eyewear for runners.

• Emily English (emthenutritionist) has built Epetome into a multimillion-pound gut health business.

• Emma Hothersall (whatemwore) created Good Basics Club after years of styling outfits.

• James Warnock (jwarnockk) co-founded Sap Energy Gels.

• Milly Goldsmith (millygoldsmith) co-founded Sult Electrolytes (and last week launched a book).

The implied narrative of all this attention seems to clear: be a creator, build a following, launch your own brand, watch it work.

And yet at the exact same moment, I’m reading headlines like “The End of the Founder-Led Era” from Business of Fashion. I’m seeing data that says only five beauty brands founded since 2005 have crossed the billion-dollar mark (out of the 206 generating over $250 million annually). And plenty of talk about the many founder-led brands aren’t working (the apparent struggles of Molly-Mae’s brand, Maybe; the pushback creators Sophia and Cinzia receive about the price tags on their new brand, From Rooms, to name a few).

So which is it? Are founder-led brands booming or dying? Why do some work brilliantly whilst others vanish completely? And what actually determines whether your founder story becomes a strength or a liability?

Sonny Eyewear is the brand by creator @lucygeorgia, launching soon.

The confusion ultimately stems from the fact that people are using “founder-led brands” as a catch-all phrase, when in reality, there are two very different mechanics that need to be separated:

Creator entrepreneurship:

A creator already has an audience that they’ve built trust with and have established themselves as someone who understands a specific problem or topic. They then launch a product that is almost inevitable: it’s the logical extension of what they’ve been teaching and sharing all along.

Founder-led branding:

Someone isn’t known. They have an idea, decide to launch a product, and then they try to use their founder story as the primary marketing engine.

These are not the same thing. They operate on different mechanics, and the reason everyone’s confused is that we’re watching both happen simultaneously, then pretending they’re the same phenomenon.

One is very much at the moment of sunset. One seems to be rising very quickly.

How does creator entrepreneurship work?

When Emily English launched Epetome, she’d already spent years as “@EmTheNutritionist,” building a following of 2 million by sharing recipes and gut health content. Her audience already knew she cared deeply about digestive wellness, knew she had the expertise, and already trusted her judgment on the topic. When she announced a gut health supplement, it made sense.

Milly Goldsmith had nearly a million followers (across platforms) talking about wellness, balance and health after recovering from an eating disorder. When she and Henry Porpora launched Sult (an electrolyte brand for everyday people, not just elite athletes), it fit effortlessly into her existing content because the product is used for all her daily needs: when she’s hungover, rundown, busy working, racing around a city. A hydration product is the natural product for her existing lifestyle content that her audience aspires to emulate.

Emma Hothersall’s (@whatemwore) entire Instagram is outfit styling and the philosophy of investing in good basics. She built an audience showcasing different looks for different occasions, always reinforcing the concept of investing in timeless pieces she could constantly rewear in those outfits. It was therefore unsurprising that last year, she launched Good Basics Club. It was the brand she’d made her audience ask for.

Good Basics Club by @whatemwore

In each case, the audience came first. The trust was already there. The product solved a problem the audience already cared about because they’d been following someone who cared about it.

This is creator entrepreneurship. And it works because one of the core business requirements (building an audience around a specific problem, establishing expertise, earning trust) is already done.

But then what’s the other path?

Then there are founder-led businesses, which is actually the more common term.

Founder-led businesses (in my opinion), are those where the founder wasn’t known before launching the brand. Because of the term, too many people mistake this for a founder who posts content about growing their business. But that doesn’t work. Businesses take a long time to be successful, and no one is following along for 2 - 5 years of content of you making business mistakes.

Two of the most notable successful examples follow the same principles as successful creator entrepreneurs: building an audience around a specific problem, establishing expertise, and earning trust.

Allison Ellsworth wasn’t famous when she started Poppi. She was solving her own health problem (how to make apple cider vinegar taste good). She appeared on Shark Tank whilst nine months pregnant, and yes, that was a memorable moment. But what actually made Poppi work wasn’t the founder story. It was what she chose to make her content about.

She didn’t really create much content about her entrepreneurial journey. She posted about health, about feeling better, about the specific problem apple cider vinegar solves. When TikTok became available, she was one of the first brands to use it as a way to build community around the actual problem: not around her as a founder. The content was about solutions, not about business-building.

Allison Ellsworth was named in the 2025 #TIME100NEXT list

Aimee Smale with Odd Muse followed a similar pattern. She wasn’t really known before founding. But her content has always been about fashion, business strategy, how ambitious women can dress. Her initial audience follows her because she’s interesting in fashion, not necessarily just because she’s “a founder.” The Odd Muse brand then sat at the intersection of her genuine expertise and her audience’s needs.

In both cases, what made them work wasn’t the founder’s part. It was what the founder chose to make interesting.

Success in founder-led branding comes down to three things.

First: something about your offering has to be genuinely interesting. That “something” can be you (your POV, your specific take on a problem, your unique angle). Or it can be your brand positioning itself (a gap you’ve identified, values built into how you operate, an intersection no one else is occupying). But something has to be interesting, so people want to follow along and buy into you or your brand.

Second: you solve a real, urgent problem for an audience that either already exists or that you’re building as you go. And you give that audience free value first. You teach, share, demonstrate your understanding, give advice, whatever it may be for your area, all before you ask anyone to pay for a solution. This needs to be done long enough for people to actually trust your judgment.

Third: your content and brand strategy are aligned with the problem, not with your founder status. If you’re launching a crochet business, you don’t post about building a business. You post crochet patterns. You become the crochet girl (or guy). You build an audience of people who are obsessed with crochet, technique, and creativity. Then you sell them crocheted items.

If you’re launching a sauce company, you post recipes. You talk about flavour and cooking and taste. You become interesting on the thing your product actually does.

Being the founder is irrelevant unless the founder has spent time (sometimes without knowing it would become a brand) becoming genuinely knowledgeable about the thing they’re selling.

As much as I may love my matcha + pastry ritual, sharing that isn’t helping me to sell business strategy days.

Founder-led brands that fail are the ones that try to shortcut this.

It’s easy to see Hailey Bieber launching Rhodes with an existing massive audience and to assume that the model for success is to get famous and launch a product. On some level, that has truth to it. Being visible is a massive part of being successful.

But it isn’t the hard part.

The hard part is the interesting part. It’s the years of building knowledge on a topic and understanding a problem so deeply that you can spot a gap no one else has seen. It’s creating content that actually helps or inspires people before you sell them anything.

Hailey Bieber was already offering makeup tutorials on YouTube and TikTok and creating entire makeup trends (the glazed doughnut craze, anyone?) to establish herself as a key beauty influencer before she launched the Rhodes products that made it possible to recreate her looks. Rhodes was such a success because people trusted Hailey’s beauty insight, not her founder story.

So the real question isn’t “should I try to be a founder-led brand?”

Most founder-led brands fail because the founder is trying to sell on the basis of being a founder. Posting their breakfast, routines, desk setups, and day-in-the-life reels. I love watching all of this, especially the latter, but that’s because I’m a founder myself. You’re selling me your lifestyle, not your product.

Ultimately, people buy solutions to urgent problems. And they buy from people they trust to understand those problems.

So it’s not about the founder part being dead. But the myth that visibility alone is a business model is finally being dispelled.

Being interesting as a personality cannot replace being interesting about the thing you’re selling.

So ask yourself: Am I genuinely interesting about the thing I’m trying to sell? Am I interesting enough that people would follow me even if I never sold anything? Have I earned the right to ask people to buy from me by consistently giving them free value for long enough that they trust my judgment?

If the answer is no, a founder story won’t save you, whether or not you have an existing audience.

Founder-led brands might not be dead. But boring founder stories are.