Three months ago, I was summoned to a hotel suite in lower Manhattan. The invitation was secretive—at first, it only mentioned a “VIP founder” who was launching a brand in 2026.
It turned out to be Alix Earle, the social media star with more than 14 million followers across TikTok and Instagram. If you haven’t heard of Earle, you probably haven’t been paying attention; the 25-year-old has been in four Super Bowl commercials (plus Bad Bunny’s halftime show). One was for Poppi—a brand that she took equity in as part of her endorsement fee, and then benefitted from its $1.95 billion sale to PepsiCo. She’s spoken to students at Harvard Business School twice, where she talked about her experiences working with brands and lessons for aspiring founders on successful influencer marketing. When she works with brands, she helps them understand her audience, especially Gen Z women.
Back to the secret meeting: yesterday, Earle launched her first brand, called Reale Actives. It’s a skincare brand designed for acne-prone skin, developed with Imaginary Ventures; its CEO is Andrea Blieden, an alum of Kiehl’s and the Body Shop. When Earle was first posting on TikTok, she made videos about her struggle with her skin, sometimes showing herself bare-faced with serious breakouts. Those videos helped her gain her first million followers.
Earle has brought her attention economy expertise to this rollout. For months, her followers noticed unlabeled products in the background of her content. She created a new Instagram account with the handle “wtfisalixdoing,” which drove interest in her secret project—and then became an account for the brand, which already has more than 500,000 followers. Last night, she appeared on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon.
In December, she sat in her hotel suite with an array of green-packaged skincare products spread out in front of her. She’d had a day of back-to-back meetings with the press. And as is the danger of an influencer-founder brand, we soon got a behind-the-scenes scoop; later, she posted a TikTok about how she’d had food poisoning the night before and could barely make it through the day of meetings. (I couldn’t tell!)
We talked about what led her to this particular brand. “I didn’t want to just rush into anything or just do anything for a paycheck, so I was kind of trying to just take my time and figure out what I really felt passionate about,” she told me. “A lot of the opportunities were for me to jump on board with something that had already kind of been built, and I knew that I wanted to start building something from the ground up, so I didn’t end up going in that route.” Skincare wasn’t her top choice for a brand of her own because of her past complex relationship with her own skin, but she was convinced of a gap in the market: skincare for acne-prone women and girls that is still cute and fun to display on a counter (not the medical vibes of Proactivs past). “With this brand, we want to embody the girl who wants to go out and not stop living her life because of her skincare,” Earle says.
Aspiring founders who can’t get booked on late-night might not be able to follow the exact same playbook as Earle. But there are certainly lessons to be drawn from her ability to drive mystery and hype even for brands launching without a built-in audience of 14 million.
Stay tuned for more from my conversation with Earle; as one of the most popular influencers in the world, she has a wealth of insight into how brands can reach consumers today.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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