Unpacking Commerce | August 2026
Emerging trends, analysis, and more.
Welcome to the latest edition of Unpacking Commerce, our newsletter about emerging trends in retail, brands, and new commerce.
This month, a single 12-minute read: studios building brands with internet creators. How the model works, what the industrial job actually involves, and what decides whether any of these brands is still on the shelf in three years.
☀️Summer read: “Brand Studios”, explained
In its first 12 months on shelf, a drink launched by the French YouTuber Squeezie sold €23m - nearly four times what its whole category had been worth the year before it arrived. That is not luck, and it is no longer a one-off: studios are now building these brands to a formula. Whether that produces a lasting business depends on one thing - whether the loyalty attaches to the name on the bottle, or to the drink inside it.
1. What happened
🥤 In May 2025, a fermented tea drink appeared in French supermarkets. Kombucha was a curiosity here, sold mainly in organic shops, and the whole category was worth about €6m a year. Six months in, Ciao Kombucha had done €8.9m and close to 3 million bottles. At 12 months, it had sold €23m, as measured by Circana, a firm that reads supermarket checkout data and reports what shoppers actually paid.
The name on the bottle is Squeezie, one of the two largest YouTubers in France with around 20 million subscribers. He co-created the brand and is a shareholder, but he did not build the company behind it. A Paris studio, Banger Ventures, did - and it is the studio rather than the drink that is worth understanding.
2. How the machine works
🏭 A brand studio builds consumer products with creators and does everything except supply the fame.
The recipe has to survive industrial production and a year on a shelf. The factory is rarely your own: new brands usually rent capacity from a co-packer, a contract manufacturer that makes other people’s products, and co-packers work to minimum order quantities, so you commit to a production run and pay for it before knowing whether anyone will buy. Then come the food regulations, nutritional labelling, and packaging that satisfies both the law and the pallet dimensions of a distribution centre.
The part that kills most new food brands is the last one: getting on shelf and staying there. Shelf space is finite, so for a product to go in another comes out, and that decision belongs to a category buyer who reviews the category on a fixed calendar, often once a year. Miss the review and you wait twelve months. Get in, and you have to hold a service rate: deliver the volumes ordered, on the day agreed, week after week. Miss too often and you are delisted, at which point the brand has no route to consumers at all.
The creator brings the name and the audience, and takes shares rather than a fee. That distinction matters: an endorsement fee is paid per campaign whatever happens next, while shares pay once, years later, and only if somebody buys the company.
The formula repeats. In June, Banger launched Ciao Energy with Squeezie, Léna Situations and Inoxtag, and Brosti, crisps made with McFly & Carlito. A second Paris studio, Le Bon Moment, imports rather than creates: it brought Snoop Dogg’s American ice cream brand Dr.Bombay to Carrefour in May.
💰 What the creator replaces is the advertising budget. Making people aware that a new food product exists normally means buying television, outdoor and in-store promotion, before any sales arrive. Large groups fund that from existing brands. A new brand cannot, which is why most vanish before anyone has heard of them. Squeezie showed Ciao inside his own videos, to an audience he had already assembled, at no cost to himself: national awareness, no media budget, paid for in shares.
3. Why is this happening now?
📈 The trade has become more attractive because renting attention has become more and more expensive. Channable measured more than 10,000 European advertisers and €1.38bn of verified Google spend: between June 2025 and June 2026, the average cost of a click rose 15%, while the average return on that spend fell 46% on Performance Max and 43% on Shopping.
Google does not set the price of a click. It runs an auction, so the price is whatever the next advertiser will pay for the same customer at that moment, which means your acquisition cost is set by other people’s budgets and you discover it after they have decided. Every rented channel behaves this way.
An audience a creator already owns does not. It was assembled once, costs nothing extra to reach again, and cannot be outbid.
⚠️ The weakness sits in the same arrangement. That audience belongs to the creator, not to the brand. If he loses interest, or his followers move on, the brand starts buying attention at market price like everybody else, having built nothing of its own in the meantime.
So a strong first year proves less than it appears to. What matters is whether people buy the product a second time, and a third.
4. The first test: is it bought twice?
🔀 The best answer available comes from one American company that ran the experiment twice, with opposite results.
Congo Brands, based in Kentucky, does what the French studios do: it builds drinks with well-known creators and handles everything industrial itself. Its success is Alani Nu, an energy drink founded in 2018 by the fitness influencer Katy Hearn. Congo took control, grew it to $595m of revenue, and in 2025 sold it to Celsius for $1.8bn.
Its failure is Prime, a hydration drink launched in 2022 with the YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI. For about 18 months it was one of the biggest consumer crazes of the decade: queues outside supermarkets, shelves emptied on delivery day, bottles reselling at several times their price. In late 2023 the company said it expected to pass $1.2bn in annual sales, a forecast rather than a result, still quoted in presentations today. Since then Prime’s British business has watched revenue fall from £112.2m to £32.8m in a single year.
Same company, same method, opposite outcomes. Logan Paul and KSI have several times Katy Hearn’s audience, so the size of the following is not what decided it. What differed is WHY people bought. Alani Nu is a drink you buy every week because you go to the gym. Prime was something you bought once, filmed, and posted. A big audience produces the first purchase. It does nothing at all for the second.
Audience size misleads for a second reason: the mismatch between who follows a creator and who wants the product. Hearn’s followers came to her for fitness content, so a functional energy drink was what they were already looking for. That alignment is rarer than it sounds. A creator may have assembled millions of followers for reasons unrelated to what is being sold, in which case a launch converts curiosity rather than demand, and curiosity is bought once.
So the number to look at in Ciao’s results is not the €23m. It is the repeat purchase rate of 45.5%. Circana and NielsenIQ track what individual households buy through loyalty cards and scanner panels, which lets them follow the same shopper over time, and the repeat rate is the share of buyers who came back. Two very different businesses produce the same sales chart: a million people trying something once, or a hundred thousand buying it ten times. The first is a fad, the second survives contact with a competitor. Among the ten best-performing grocery innovations in France in 2025 ranked by NielsenIQ, Ciao’s is the highest.
5. The second test: how big can it get?
🎯 Ciao’s second advantage was the small size of the market it entered - though not, the studio says, the market it was aiming at. Its stated positioning was never “Kombucha” but a healthier alternative to soda, and the product supports the claim: around 10% fruit juice against 2 to 3% for most kombuchas, peach and mint rather than the fermented flavours of the organic aisle. The small category was the door, not the destination.
The door was worth having because nobody defends a category worth €6m, for reasons internal to how a food group works. Its brands are run by category managers with budgets attached to specific markets, and defending a category costs money: cutting your price when a newcomer arrives, paying the retailer for shelf space, putting a competing product through development. For a market worth hundreds of millions that is an obvious use of a manager’s year. For a €6m market, nobody at Danone or Coca-Cola has a reason to open the file.
The most comfortable position is the middle one: a big category where the incumbents are weak. The YouTuber Mister V found it in 2022 when he put Pizza Delamama into frozen pizza, a large but fragmented market where shoppers are loyal to no particular brand. It had sold more than two million pizzas by mid-2025 and is still on sale four years later, which makes it the only French creator brand old enough to prove anything.
📋 But an empty category is a cheap win with a low ceiling. A €6m market cannot produce a €100m brand, so growing eventually means going where the incumbents fight back. That is not bad news in itself: Alani Nu reached $595m inside an American energy drinks market worth more than $20bn a year and defended by Red Bull, Monster and Celsius, winning on the first test rather than the second.
So the two tests do different jobs. Whether a product is bought twice decides whether there is a business at all. Whether the category is defended decides how large it can become. Read against the ambition to compete with soda, Ciao Energy looks less like opportunism than like the plan arriving on schedule - and it is the first real test of whether a studio of this kind can operate against companies that fight back. Brosti, entering crisps against Lay’s and Vico, is the same bet. Dr.Bombay is different: ice cream is an occasional purchase, so its problem is the first test, not the second.
There is also a competitor the incumbents do not create. Hydration and energy drinks have become the default category for creator launches, so each arrival fights the others for the same shelf: Prime in 2022, Lionel Messi’s Más+ and Alex Cooper’s Unwell Hydration since. Either the market divides into segments small enough for everyone, or none of them becomes the next Red Bull.
6. The customer nobody writes about
🛒 A studio sells nothing to consumers. Its customer is the category buyer, and that person has a problem these brands can solve: retailers need younger shoppers back in their stores, and Carrefour’s 2030 plan names this type of brand as a source of growth. That appetite arrived after the numbers did, not before, and it now shapes how the next launches are received.
There is also a version that removes the studio altogether. The YouTuber Joyca has put a range of ice creams into Picard, the French frozen food chain, working directly with the retailer: no listing to negotiate, no shelf to win from an incumbent, and no brand to sell later either.
⚔️ The biggest threat to these brands is that same retailer, and the mechanism is one grocery has used for decades. Supermarket own-brand products are not made by supermarkets. They are made by contract manufacturers to the retailer’s specification, frequently in the same factories that produce the branded equivalent sitting next to them. The retailer carries no advertising cost and no brand development cost, which is how own-brand undercuts the product it copies and still makes a better margin on it.
A creator brand does the expensive work first: making people want a product they were not looking for, paid for with the creator’s audience. Once that demand exists, it appears in the checkout data, which the retailer reads before anybody else, including the brand. The retailer can then commission its own version and place it alongside, cheaper, needing no creator because the creator has already done the hard part.
The shelf then structures itself: a premium option, a reference brand people ask for by name, a cheaper challenger, an own-brand underneath. Every creator brand starts as the only brand in its category, which looks like the reference position without being it. A shopper buying Ciao today has no alternative. One buying it when four other kombuchas sit beside it, one 30% cheaper, is telling you something.
7. Where it probably ends
💡 A large food group entering a new category can spend several years building a position or buy one that already exists. Buying is faster, and it transfers something that cannot be acquired separately: the listings. A brand already on the shelf at Carrefour, Leclerc and Intermarché comes with distribution the acquirer would otherwise spend years assembling, plus sales data proving shoppers pick it up.
That purchase is most attractive while the outcome is still unknown, before the category structures itself and before own-brand arrives. It is the window in which Celsius bought Alani Nu, PepsiCo bought the soda brand Poppi, and e.l.f. bought Hailey Bieber’s skincare brand Rhode, all three still growing and none settled.
The buyer’s central question cuts against selling early: does the brand still work once the creator steps back? An acquirer is buying a business it will run for a decade and cannot depend on somebody else’s enthusiasm, or their reputation. When Diageo bought Casamigos in 2017, it had to believe the tequila would keep selling after George Clooney stopped selling it, and it structured the deal accordingly: $700m at closing, $300m tied to performance over ten years. An earn-out is a polite way of declining to pay in full for a brand whose independence is unproven.
So the studio is selling potential to a buyer who discounts for exactly what the potential has not demonstrated. Weaning a brand off its creator - an identity of its own, other faces, a reason to buy that does not depend on a video - is the difference between the headline price and the money received.
On that reading, a studio’s business is less about building brands that last than about producing sellable positions in categories that did not exist eighteen months earlier, then selling while the buyer still pays for what the brand might become. It would explain the launch rate. A brand is sellable only briefly: late enough to have real sales and secure shelf space, early enough that the category is not yet crowded. One launch every two years gives a single attempt at that window; three or four a year means one is always arriving at it.
The measure that settles it is the boring one: holding shelf space with real rotation through 2026, 2027 and 2028. Ciao Energy is now up against Red Bull and Monster, where shoppers have alternatives and incumbents fight back. If it holds a repeat rate anywhere near 45.5% there, the loyalty attaches to the brand and somebody has built something durable. If it does not, these studios will have been very good at opening categories for somebody else.
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