We're days from closing the Casa Noon Creator SPV. As of this morning, we're oversubscribed, AKA we’ve hit our investment goal (like whaaat?!) so we've decided to raise the cap slightly; there's a little room left for the right creator partners, and that's it.
Half of me is mindblown by how well this has been received, and how many creators and people connected to the creator economy wanted to join us, but the other half is a creator, and this is exactly the type of investing I personally want to be doing as well.
The round closing isn't really what I want to talk about.
I want to talk about why a round like this can even exist now — and why I think it's one of the clearest signs yet of where the creator economy is going.
When a creator invests, they bring so much more than money.
I cannot wait to tell you about our brand-new Casa Noon Creator Investor group — we'll announce the full list soon!
The mix is what I love most: some are content creators, some are founders building in everything from finance to AI to trade-school education (and all of them create content), and some are small business owners driving real sales through social.
All of them have a deep belief in the creator as the future of brands.
A brand's highest cost is almost always getting noticed: ad spend, customer acquisition, building awareness from zero (in full transparency, we haven’t spent a dollar on Meta or Google ads yet; the little budget we’ve had has gone towards affiliate and rewards programs like ShopMy and TYB).
Creators don't have a visibility problem.
We come with an audience, taste people trust, and reach you can't buy. So when a creator takes equity early, they're putting in capital and the thing that's actually hardest for a brand to get.
That's the whole reason I built this round the way I did.
I didn't want a handful of big names on the cap table. I wanted our community to own a piece of what they're already championing, at an entry point that isn't reserved for people with a fund.
Leading the round is my friend Jaclyn Ling; she’s the CEO and co-founder of Bento, which has worked with 80K+ creators and knows that investors have never taken creators seriously as founders or investors. We’re determined to change that.
And the timing isn't a coincidence. Forbes just wrote about creators moving from the guest list to the cap table. Cherub named a Chief Creator Officer. The version of this where creators are a line item in someone's marketing budget is ending.
If you’re a creator, you’re not only a channel for someone else's brand; you can be an owner of one.
Of course, this isn’t just happening at Casa Noon.
The creator-built brands getting acquired for hundreds of millions: Rhode, Summer Fridays, and the wave of founder-led beauty brands that started on Instagram and ended up in someone's portfolio.
The Phia cap table read like a festival lineup, where the investor list basically was the marketing. It's the same pattern we’re going to keep seeing over and over: the people with the audience are moving from promoting the thing to owning the thing.
Look at where the money and the rooms are going, too.
CMOs are shifting close to a quarter of their budgets toward creator partnerships this year. At Cannes, where I'll be reporting from in a couple of weeks, creator passes are now the fastest-selling ticket category, outpacing the traditional agency crowd for the first time, and the festival built a multi-day program just for creators. The industry is reorganizing itself around the people it used to treat as silly hobbyists on one end and a media buy on the other.
This is exactly why we run the Cult Brand Accelerator.
If you're a founder with a following, you've already cleared the hardest, most expensive part of building a brand: getting people to notice you and trust you.
Most founders spend years and a lot of money trying to get there. You're starting with it. And most people sitting on that kind of audience have no idea what it's actually worth.
But an audience isn't a business on its own. You still have to have the lore, you have to build the thing underneath it, create a brand world people want to belong to, have a POV and offers that actually make sense, and the structure that lets you raise or sell when the moment comes.
That's the work we do in the Accelerator: turning a following into something that compounds. The summer cohort starts in July, btw, if you’re interested in joining, we still have space.
As for Casa Noon: I’m so proud of what we’re leading with our Creator Investors.
And I continue to celebrate the product we’ve made. Shape named Sabbatical the “best Retinol Alternative.” Town & Country named us a Best Travel Product and a Best Beauty Launch, Byrdie called it one of the best launches as well, and Beauty Independent profiled the brand. All editorial, none of it paid.
An SPF is coming later this year, and there are a couple of retail conversations I'm not ready to jinx yet.
We'll announce our creator investors in the next few weeks, and tbh I am SO DANG EXCITED about who's joining us.
This email is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security.
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