Influencers Are Starting to Become Investors in the Brands They Promote

For years, the relationship between creators and brands has been relatively straightforward: a company pays a creator to talk about a product, the creator puts that product in front of their audience, and once the campaign has finished, both sides move on or negotiate another deal.

That relationship is beginning to change.

Some of the biggest creators are no longer satisfied with simply being paid to promote businesses, because if their audience, credibility and ability to influence purchasing decisions can genuinely help a company grow, there is an increasingly obvious question being asked across the creator economy:

why shouldn't the creator own some of the business they are helping to build?

That question is helping create a new type of creator partnership, where influencers are becoming investors, shareholders and longer term commercial partners in the companies they would previously have simply promoted.

According to Vogue Business, creators including Alix Earle, Sofia Richie Grainge and Hannah Bronfman have built investment portfolios across consumer brands, technology companies and creator platforms, showing how the relationship between influence and ownership is beginning to move much closer together.

Alix Earle shows what this model can look like

One of the clearest examples is Alix Earle, who has accumulated investments across companies including wellness energy drink Gorgie, ready-to-drink cocktail company SipMargs, prebiotic soda brand Poppi and supplement company Cymbiotika, which she joined as an investor in August 2026 after previously using and talking about its products.

The Poppi investment is particularly interesting because it demonstrates what can potentially happen when a creator participates in the ownership of a company rather than simply taking a campaign fee.

Earle became an investor in Poppi in 2024, before PepsiCo agreed to acquire the company for approximately $1.95 billion in 2025, meaning she had positioned herself not simply as somebody being paid to generate attention for the brand, but as somebody with a financial interest in the long term value of the company itself.

The financial details of her individual stake have not been publicly disclosed, so it would be wrong to assume how much she personally made from the acquisition, but the structure illustrates why equity can be so attractive to creators who believe their influence can materially contribute to the growth of a business.

A sponsorship pays for today's influence.

Ownership potentially allows a creator to participate in tomorrow's value.

It is happening beyond one creator

Earle is far from the only example.

Sofia Richie Grainge recently invested in self-tanning company Dolce Glow, having previously become an investor and founding curator at affiliate shopping platform ShopMy, while Hannah Bronfman has reportedly backed more than 70 startups across categories including beauty, health and consumer products.

Fashion and lifestyle creator Jordan Grant has invested across companies including virtual try-on technology company Doji, health business Julie and creator platform Komi, while the broader trend stretches beyond conventional influencers, with Charli XCX becoming both a shareholder and global ambassador at technology company Nothing earlier this year.

None of this means creator investment suddenly appeared in 2026, because celebrities and influential online personalities have been investing in businesses for years, but what is changing is the extent to which investment is becoming connected directly to the commercial value of a creator's audience.

The creator is no longer necessarily being brought in after the product has been built simply to advertise it.

Increasingly, creators can become part of the business itself.

Why brands would give creators equity

From the company's perspective, there is a fairly simple reason why this can make sense.

A creator with the right audience can potentially provide much more than impressions.

They can introduce a new company to millions of consumers, provide credibility in a crowded category, generate sales, create content, provide feedback on products, help shape marketing strategy and, in some circumstances, make an unknown product culturally relevant incredibly quickly.

Vogue Business reports that creators are increasingly being brought further upstream into areas such as product development, consulting and marketing strategy rather than simply being hired at the end of the process to publish promotional content.

If a creator is capable of providing that much value, giving them a financial interest in the company can create a very different relationship.

Instead of negotiating individual posts and deliverables every few months, both sides can potentially benefit from the same outcome: making the company more valuable.

For the creator, greater company growth can increase the value of their investment.

For the company, the creator has a reason to remain interested in the brand beyond the end date of a campaign.

That does not mean every influencer deserves equity simply because they have followers, because the real question for a business is whether that particular creator can materially change the company's trajectory, but for creators with audiences that closely match a company's customers, the proposition becomes much easier to understand.

Creators are starting to recognise the value of their distribution

There is also a bigger creator economy story underneath all of this.

Creators have spent years building distribution.

A creator with hundreds of thousands or millions of engaged followers effectively controls access to an audience that companies might otherwise spend significant amounts of money trying to reach through advertising, retail marketing, PR and other channels.

Historically, much of that value has been monetised through sponsorship fees.

A creator might receive £10,000, £20,000 or considerably more for a campaign, produce the content, generate attention or sales for the company, collect their payment and leave.

If that creator's involvement contributes to a business eventually becoming worth hundreds of millions of pounds, however, their participation in that upside traditionally ends with the campaign fee they negotiated.

Equity changes that equation.

Instead of asking only, "How much will you pay me to promote this?", sophisticated creators can increasingly ask, "What am I helping you build, and should I own part of it?"

That is a much more powerful business question.

The traditional brand deal is not disappearing

None of this means creators should suddenly stop accepting conventional sponsorships and demand shares in every company that approaches them.

In many cases, cash will remain considerably more valuable.

Private company shares can be extremely difficult to sell, a startup can fail completely, and an ownership stake that looks exciting on paper could ultimately be worth nothing, while a creator accepting equity instead of guaranteed payment may effectively be exchanging income they could use today for the possibility of a financial return many years into the future.

That distinction is particularly important because the economics of the creator economy remain highly uneven, and most creators are nowhere near the financial position of its biggest stars.

For somebody relying on brand partnerships to pay their bills, guaranteed cash can understandably be more useful than an illiquid stake in a startup that may never be acquired or go public.

The model therefore makes most sense when creators can afford to take the risk, understand the company they are investing in and genuinely believe that both the business and their involvement can create long term value.

Ownership also changes what audiences need to know

There is another important consequence when the person recommending a product also owns part of the company selling it.

A traditional sponsored post has an obvious commercial relationship attached to it, but ownership can last for years, meaning a creator may financially benefit from the growth of a company long after an individual campaign has ended.

That makes transparency increasingly important.

Vogue Business notes that an equity stake represents an ongoing financial relationship, meaning creators need to think about disclosure whenever they discuss businesses in which they have a financial interest, rather than treating investment as something that only needs to be mentioned when the deal is initially announced.

As creator investing becomes more common, audiences may therefore need to become familiar with a new type of disclosure.

Not simply #ad.

But I'm an investor in this company.

The creator economy is becoming an ownership economy

The most interesting part of this trend is not that wealthy influencers have discovered startup investing.

It is what this tells us about how the creator economy itself is maturing.

Creators initially monetised attention through advertising revenue and sponsorships, before affiliate marketing allowed them to participate directly in the sales they generated, social commerce platforms such as TikTok Shop turned some creators into powerful retail channels, and creator-led brands demonstrated that audiences could be used to launch entirely new businesses.

Investment is another step along that same path.

The creator begins as the person attracting attention.

Then they become the person generating sales.

Then they become the person helping shape the product.

Eventually, they can become one of the people who owns the company.

For brands, agencies and creator managers, this could gradually change how partnerships are structured, because the most valuable creator relationship of the future may not necessarily be the person willing to publish three TikToks for a campaign fee.

It could be the creator willing to spend several years helping build the company because they have something much more valuable than a sponsorship contract riding on its success.

They own part of it.