How creators are building their own brands

Bryan Reisberg, creator and co-founder of dog travel gear company Little Chonk, has unexpected advice for creators building their own brands—get off social media. “Get yourself off the platform and then get your audience off the platform,” he said, speaking at Ad Age’s NextGen Marketing Summit last week with his corgi Maxine strapped to his back. “It’s really important to diversify and it also allows you to learn so much more about your audience and engage with them in a different way.” Little Chonk hasn’t sworn off social media, as it regularly posts for more than 71,000 Instagram followers (Maxine has 1.4 million). Still, Reisberg said he has seen success engaging with consumers through his pet health-focused newsletter “Dog Juice,” which has a 50% open rate and 70,000 subscribers. “It becomes a place where we can learn as much as humanly possible about our audience and what they give a shit about, and they get to find out what we give a shit about,” he said. “We can dive into the science and we can do a lot of testing for new products that we have coming out. It’s been a huge part of our business and we’ve learned a lot from it.” See all of Ad Age’s 2025 Agency A-List winners here Newsletter platforms such as Substack and Beehiiv saw a surge in creators turning to the written word last year as they looked for alternate platforms where they could break through. Then, in turn, the creators attracted brands interested in sponsoring those newsletters. More recently, brands have started to create their own newsletters focused on trends related to their industry as they look for alternatives to saturated social media platforms. Read more: How to capture Gen Z’s attention in unexpected places Plus: 12 tips for Gen Z marketing ‘You have to think long term’ Ashley Alexander, creator and CEO of matcha brand Nami Matcha, affirmed the importance of newsletters for creators building brands as she spoke on a panel with Reisberg. Alexander has used her newsletter to field product ideas from those who sign up, whom she dubs the “matcha mob.” It’s also served as an avenue for sending exclusive content, like unlisted YouTube videos, to fans of the brand. “Thanks to the matcha mob, we actually did a launch prior to my public launch,” she said. “We sold out nearly everything, just to people on the email list … we have like 50,000 people on the email list, which is crazy. To this day, it’s still a really key part of our business.” Creators have turned to newsletters to free themselves from the mystery of appeasing social media algorithms, which is also why creators such as Alexander and Reisberg started their businesses in the first place, said Victoria Bachan, global president of talent management company Sixteenth. “Where you’re posting your content and the algorithmic changes, you can’t focus on that being your tried and true way of making money,” she said. “You have to think long term. You have to think of the next step and that’s why these [brands] are both very natural extensions of their social brand into more of a physical manifestation.” Alexander and Reisberg also discussed the push and pull of being a creator and CEO simultaneously. With most of a creator’s income coming from brand deals, business owners have had to insert their own brands into partnerships. Reisberg’s Little Chonk, for example, partnered with Squishmallow to host a dog block party called Chonkfest in June. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Squishmallows (@squishmallows) The event’s 1,500 tickets sold out, enough to get Squishmallow interested in sponsoring the next Chonkfest in May, Reisberg said. Alexander had success getting Shopify to host a pop-up event last year in SoHo, which allowed Nami Matcha to experiment with selling its products from a cafe for the first time. View this post on Instagram A post shared by ashley alexander (@aaashleyk) “It’s very easy to loop my brand into certain things, like with Shopify,” she said. “A lot of brands have no problem if I’m like ‘I want to put my matcha in a video as well.’” Brands may need to get comfortable allowing creators to insert their own products into content, as those building businesses often turn their personal accounts into a kind of second brand account. “It’s really tough because you’re starting a business,” Reisberg said. “I’m not just the marketing engine for Little Chonk, I’m the CEO for Little Chonk. Every decision trickles through me … I don’t know what balance is.”

How creators are building their own brands

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