Prime, Feastables and Rhode: What Creator-Founded Brands Actually Prove
By Nadia Vos
An audience buys you distribution on day one. It does not buy you a second purchase. That single sentence explains almost everything about which creator-founded brands are still growing and which ones are being cleared off shelves, and the numbers behind three of the most famous examples make the point better than any theory.
Prime: the fastest launch, and the fastest correction
KSI and Logan Paul launched Prime in January 2022. Fortune reports first-year sales of around 250 million dollars and projected 2023 sales of roughly 1.2 billion. In 2023 it overtook Gatorade to become Walmart most-sold hydration drink. In the UK, single cans were reselling for as much as 1,200 pounds and retailers put security stickers on bottles.
Then the curve turned. UK sales in the first quarter of 2024 fell by roughly half year on year, from about 26.8 million pounds to 12.8 million, and some retailers were clearing bottles at 31 pence. A class action over caffeine content followed in April 2024. Industry analyst Andrea Hernandez summarised it in Fortune with a line worth writing on a wall: a brand cannot live on hype alone.
What is easy to miss is that Prime was not a failure. Getting to nine figures in twelve months from a standing start is something almost no conventional beverage launch achieves. The lesson is narrower than the headlines suggest: the audience delivered trial at a scale money cannot buy, and the product did not convert enough of that trial into habit before the novelty expired.
Feastables: the same curve, better handled
MrBeast launched Feastables in 2022. Dealroom figures put 2024 net revenue at about 215 million dollars, more than double the prior year. The company forecast 74 percent growth for 2025. Actual sales volume growth came in at 13 percent, down from 33 percent the year before, and unit sales moved from 7.6 million in 2024 to 8.6 million in 2025.
The interesting part is the response. Rather than pushing harder on reach, Feastables brought in Michelle St. Jacques, a Molson Coors veteran, as president. That is a company deciding it has a distribution problem and an operating problem rather than an attention problem, which is the correct diagnosis and an unusual one for a creator brand to make in public.
Rhode: the one that got sold
Hailey Bieber launched rhode in 2022, the same year as Prime and Feastables. In May 2025, e.l.f. Beauty agreed to acquire it in a deal worth up to one billion dollars: 800 million upfront, split 600 million in cash and 200 million in stock, plus a 200 million earnout over three years. e.l.f. put rhode net sales at 212 million dollars for the twelve months to 31 March 2025, which values the business at roughly 3.8 times trailing sales.
Two details matter more than the headline number. First, rhode was direct-to-consumer only, with Sephora distribution still ahead of it at the point of sale. It built that revenue without the retail shelf that Prime and Feastables leaned on. Second, e.l.f. cited rhode as the number one skin care brand by Earned Media Value in 2024, growing 367 percent year on year, which is a measurable way of saying the brand generated attention it did not pay for.
Rhode also launched with a deliberately small range. Where a hype brand maximises the number of things a fan can buy at the peak, rhode limited the catalogue and made the products the reason to come back. That is the difference between a merchandise strategy and a product strategy.
What the three cases have in common
All three launched in 2022. All three reached nine-figure revenue faster than a conventional brand could. All three then met the same wall, which is that attention converts to trial extremely efficiently and to repeat purchase not at all. The difference between them is entirely in what was waiting on the other side of the first purchase.
The four questions worth asking before launching a creator brand
Would somebody buy this a second time if they had never heard of you? If not, you have a merchandise line with a shelf life, which is a legitimate business but should be planned as one.
Who runs it when the novelty passes? Every one of these brands eventually needed operators rather than promoters. Hiring them early is cheaper than hiring them in a downturn.
Are you renting distribution or building it? Retail shelf space granted on the strength of a spike gets taken back when the spike ends. Direct-to-consumer is slower and harder to lose.
What happens to the brand if the creator steps back? If the answer is nothing survives, the asset is the person, not the brand, and it should be valued accordingly.
Sources
Figures in this piece are drawn from Fortune reporting on Prime, Dealroom data on Feastables, and the e.l.f. Beauty investor announcement of the rhode acquisition dated 28 May 2025.
Pixily builds and runs social media channels and brands across platforms. The channels we manage have passed 30 million subscribers, 18 billion views and 2 billion hours watched. To talk about yours, email sales@pixilylimited.com.