There’s not much that influencer Victoria Tyler doesn’t post on social media about her nearly four-year journey living with the autoimmune disorder known as ulcerative colitis. She posts about the good times, the bad times and the absolutely ugly days of her life, garnering her over 400,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok combined.
Her experience was part of her pitch to become a brand ambassador for Savage x Fenty – pop and R&B singer Robyn Rihanna Fenty’s lingerie company in El Segundo – whom Tyler tagged in a post on April 7. Within three weeks of her pitch, Tyler received a welcome package and recently made her first post, sporting a Savage two-piece set, bearing her surgical scar and ostomy bag.
“It definitely felt like validation,” Tyler said, fighting back tears.
“(But) I don’t consider myself an influencer because I don’t know that I’m influencing anyone to do anything. I am just sharing my real-time experience,” Tyler said. “It’s my own reality TV show. Brands will see the authenticity, and they want to be a part of it.”
Showcasing Tyler’s story and many other social media influencers like her is what has made Savage revolutionary in the lingerie sector, making the case that all people – regardless of their shade, shape, or size – deserve to feel good in their skin.
Yet Savage’s branding and advertising has also been diverse and radical, highlighting the burgeoning creator economy.
Tyler is one of more than 50 million social media content creators, including influencers, artists, podcasters, videographers and the like, based on estimates from San Francisco venture capital firm SignalFire.
In beauty and fashion alone, influencers have become a powerful force in these industries, revolutionizing how brands engage with consumers, impacting trends and purchasing decisions.
“Beauty and fashion were absolutely the primary drivers of creator culture,” said Alex Rawitz, director of research and insights at CreatorIQ, a San Francisco influencer marketing platform that helps brands manage and analyze influencer partnerships.
Once excluded from the inner sanctums of the premier fashion shows, influencers are now at the forefront, dismantling traditional industry norms. In a survey of 1,138 companies across industries, CreatorIQ reported that 94% believed creator content drove more returns on their investment than traditional digital advertising.
Nearly three-quarters of the organizations, or 74%, increased their creator marketing investment in 2024. Creator marketing investment has increased 143% over the last four years.
Los Angeles beauty and fashion brands have been among those leading the charge. The city’s biggest beauty and fashion brands, even those started by mega-celebrity superstars like Fenty, have made huge bets on social media influencers, adding them to their marketing strategies.
And it’s been paying off in driving greater brand awareness, expanding their audiences, bolstering engagement with their customers, and thus in the end, boosting overall sales revenue.
“It’s just going to explode even more,” said Kristina McInnis, who is an influencer
and brand marketer and public relations expert at her Mid-Wilshire agency KCMConnect. “We are starting to hit our stride.”
Outside of Savage x Fenty, Anastasia Beverly Hills, Skims in Hollywood and Rare Beauty in El Segundo are among a few of the game changers in the influencer world.
Content is king
The creator economy has soared since 2019. The influencer industry is worth about $250 billion, Goldman Sachs estimated in a 2023 analyst report. Growth in digital media and content creation technology have bolstered the market of influencers, along with the emergence of social media platforms like TikTok and more embracing the established platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Creators are producing everything from short-form videos to live streaming.
In short, content is king, said Rawitz. Content also comes first.
“Brands look for connections with consumers via creators. Creators essentially act as a bridge between brands and consumers, and a more effective bridge than what we’ve had before,” he said. “Creators are capable of driving that authentic connection with consumers.
“(Influencers are) capable of creating content that resonates with consumers, that is relevant to their needs and interests, and on the business side, it also drives revenue,” he added. “That represents the content-first element.”
Take Rare Beauty, released in 2020 by singer and actress Selena Gomez. Similar to Fenty, Gomez set out to redefine beauty standards, encouraging self-acceptance, natural beauty and mental health awareness. In its mission statement, the company states: “We believe in the beauty of imperfections. We champion authenticity and positivity. We lead with transparency to build trust. We believe there is power in being vulnerable.”
The company partnered with influencers to share that message. Mackenzie Dudzik, who has more than 200,00 followers on Instagram and TikTok, was tapped to be one of the first to promote a new blush color for Rare Beauty. While the company offered her some sample ideas on what to do, the final post it was all Dudzik’s creation.
“These brands know what they want. So, they’re coming to you with exactly what they’re looking for while giving you creative freedom to do it your way,” said Dudzik. “Authenticity is super important.”
Fashion designer Sonjia Williams echoed that view. The relationship between herself and her customers “has to be organic,” she said.
Williams built a strong following on her social media platforms after her appearance as a contestant on on Lifetime’s hit show “Project Runway: All-Stars.” She nurtured those relationships by posting on her personal Instagram page about her downtown clothing line Something by Sonjia.
“I didn’t tell all of my followers to follow my brand page because I want everybody who follows me or the brand page, (I want it) to be authentic,” she said. “I wanted them to actually like the brand, who wanted to shop (and) who were interested in what I was creating.”
She did indeed gain that following, and last Monday, she kicked off a brand ambassadorship with many of the influencers and fashion bloggers who’ve followed her for more than nine years.
Fenty: a brand marketing pioneer
Fenty, though, is considered the pioneer when it comes to brand marketing on social channels. She proved to be a force with the launch of her San Francisco beauty line Fenty Beauty in 2017, and then again with El Segundo-based Savage in 2018.
Fenty Beauty targeted Gen Z by investing in a TikTok strategy, including a Los Angeles content creation house in early 2020. It later closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Savage kicked off a summer social media campaign in May 2020, featuring Megan Thee Stallion in the brand videos dancing to her song “Savage.” The campaign, titled #SavagexTheeStallion, exploded and resulted in an ultimate viral moment tagged #SavageChallenge.
Fenty’s keen attention to inclusivity and diversity “reframed the conversation,” said Rawitz. She “catered to a lot of consumers and a lot of creators who were neglected.”
Tyler shared a similar view and added: “Any company that aligns themselves with me, they’re making a bold statement for the inflammatory bowel disease community. It’s important that we see ourselves.”
Staying authentic
Los Angeles beauty and fashion influencer Christian Chanel, who has promoted Savage and Fenty Beauty on her social channels, said the brands have to align with her core belief of showing her “girly pops” how to be their best selves.
“I am not going to put a stamp on anything that I don’t believe in,” said Chanel, who owns downtown hair company Raw Essence. “I have turned down so many brands because they were not in alignment (with my mission) or because I don’t use the product or I wouldn’t use the product.”
There’s not much that Chanel doesn’t share with her “girly pop” on her social media channels TikTok and Instagram. Between her fits for the day and experiences with beauty products and facial treatments, Chanel puts it all out there, which has garnered her more than 100,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok.
“Literally, I film everything,” said Chanel, who began her journey as a social media influencer in the mid-2000s. “I love for my content to be very community-led and viewer-led because at the end of the day, I am providing them a service.”
Measuring authenticity
Such authenticity can be challenging to measure, as well as the impact of branded content.
CreatorIQ analyzes five key metrics to determine how potent creator content has become across all major social media platforms, including the number of ambassadors, post counts, engagement, impressions and earned media value of an organization’s brand.
“EMV is best understood as a relative metric that tracks social media buzz for brands based on CreatorIQ’s panels of creators,” Rawitz said. Impressions “represent the potential visibility of content about a brand to all the followers of its broader creator community. The same viewer can be counted multiple times.”
Engagements encompass “the total number of likes, comments, shares, clicks, views and other forms of active user response that content about a brand received within a given time period,” he said.
Each metric feeds into the other – the ambassador’s post to the engagement with that post to the impressions of it regarding the number of likes, comments and views to EMV. Combined with the evolution of technology and social platforms like TikTok, it “is more algorithmic in that it’s predicting what you’ll engage with and what you’ll want to see based on your past history of content consumption,” Rawitz said.
“So, what actually matters the most is the content itself … The content itself is what ultimately converts new audiences and allows a creator to serve as that more effective bridge between brand and consumer.”
Rare Beauty remained one of the top-earning celebrity beauty brands in the U.S. based on EMV in 2024, with more than $636 million, though down 4% year-over-year from 2023. It’s still well above the $74 million seen in 2020. Savage, on the other hand, garnered more than $46 million EMV, a sharp drop from its peak of more than $287 million in 2020.
Both companies are still quite profitable. Savage reached more than $1 billion in total valuation in February 2021, according to Forbes. Rare Beauty is now at $2 billion as of March 2024, Bloomberg News reported.
Is there room for growth?
Creator brand marketing is ever evolving. Analysts are expecting even more growth. A Goldman Sachs 2023 report estimated that the creator economy alone will reach nearly $500 billion in revenue by 2027, the report also showed that analysts expect the number of creators to grow globally at a 10% to 20% compound annual growth rate over the next five years.
Overall, that could be a boom for the Los Angeles beauty and fashion scene in the future.
In the CreatorIQ survey, companies and agencies were less focused on the number of followers an influencer had but more on the “content that creators can produce for brands at scale.”
With that, McInnis added that she expects to see more content creators embracing the established platforms like YouTube and Pinterest. She expects to see even newer platforms developed.
“There are so many different evolutions of what we’re seeing,” she said. “This is just the beginning … people are now craving more in-depth content.”