The rise of ‘talent-led' brands. What do Kevin Hart, Selena Gomez, George Clooney, and David Dobrick all have in common? With Andy Hooper, Founder of R3

0:06Talent may be someone that unlocks some portion of the value chain and provides some arbitrage

0:17Welcome to Curious Customer, the consumer podcast. This show is for anyone curious about the world of consumer. From insights, trends, companies, brands and design, we'll uncover the hidden stories from the people at the forefront of consumer industries. The show has a wide range of guests, from marketing leaders to startup founders. So whether you're in the world of brand building or the startup ecosystem, or simply curious about the world around us, then this podcast is for you. My name is Matt. I hope you enjoy the show.

1:14led brands. And I just want to give folks an idea of who you work with. So you've created Hart House alongside Kevin Hart. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later on. So it's fantastic to have you on the show, Andy. Thanks for joining. Can you give us a little bit of an insight into when this trend in talent led brands started? When did you start to notice? Yeah. What's been interesting about food and beverage and just consumer more broadly is that I think over the last decade, talent, whether that is musicians or actors or comedians or YouTube creators are starting to take note of the fact that their name, image and likeness is carrying increasing value for brands who are trying to kind of cut through the clutter of everything.

1:59But they're building equity value oftentimes for other brands and not for themselves. and usually it's the folks that are the biggest like a Kevin for example who have the luxury to first cut out from the traditional path of endorsement deals and brand ambassador plays and instead think creatively about what would this look like if I did this for myself. It's interesting I feel like athletes got the joke on this a lot sooner than any other sort of talent because their careers are cut short by their age by definition, right? You've got professional footballers around the world. Unless you're Cristiano Ronaldo, you're done by the time you're 40, and you've still got 25 years to figure it out at that point.

2:44And so I think what people are doing is applying that sort of second act or third act structural question much earlier in their careers and saying, what would happen if I created these brands in the image and with the story that I want to see now versus waiting until that time when, you know, when I'm in my midlife years to do the same. So are you seeing any change in that arc, that trajectory? So people have their core part of their career, take the sports people, as you mentioned, they're working with brands alongside that. They're realizing that actually the values are going out to that brand owner.

3:20And then they decide to launch their own. Are you saying that actually the latter piece, the piece where you work. Is that coming way earlier in the early parts of the career? Yeah, it seems to be, particularly in Hollywood. One of the things that I think is interesting is the proliferation of AI has led to a bunch of anxiety around how art is made, particularly in Hollywood. And the idea that some of the work that used to be done to produce art in the form of a movie, for example, just can't get funded today in the same way. It's interesting if you find method actors, For example, I heard like Matt Damon mentioning this the other day that they couldn't make Goodwill Hunting today in 2025 because the economics don't make sense for it.

4:02You can't sell enough of it at the box office. You can't sell enough secondary and tertiary product through DVDs or Blu-ray discs because that just doesn't exist in the same way. And so I think what that has done structurally just as the way in which art is made in that space has evolved, it's pushing that creator experience closer to the beginning of their career than it once was. And I think what we see, one of our core partners at R3 is David Dobrik. He's a YouTuber. David got his start on Vine when Vine was a thing and was actually quite famous early on in moving him and his crew over to YouTube and creating content there.

4:41David's not even 30 years old and he's been at this for 10 years. So he's naturally thinking to himself, how do I turn the attention that I have into an economic engine for me and not just for a placed endorsement of another brand on one of my videos? So you're tending to see that actually it is financially motivated. So the Hollywood example, right, it's harder for actors to make the kind of wealth that they may have done 10, 15, 20 years ago, if I've understood your example correctly. Are you seeing people actually realize that this is a really important part of that early year's career and actually that their agents might be sort of moving into the space that you're active in at the moment?

5:21Or are there other motivations and what are they across your customer base? Yeah, I think there's definitely multiple motivations. I think what's different today is that structurally the economic incentives are also aligning with those. So there are core motivations grounded in purpose or the desire to tell story related to something that's important to them or an issue that's important to them. I think you can see that in some talent-backed brands that have been very successful. If you look at what Selena Gomez has done with Rare Beauty, for example, you know, the foundation that she has attached to that is very connected to her personally.

5:59You can feel that. That's not an economic driver for her. That is a purpose driver for her. Now, it helps that the economic interests are fully aligned with that purpose in her case. So she can do both at the same time, lean hard into something that matters, and then at the same time achieve some economic independence as a result of it. But what we're seeing is the fact that structure has shifted. And so what we tend to do is play in the same space that perhaps agents may have played in historically. Matt, like each talent agency that we work with, they all are building things inside of the agency in recognition of this shift towards talent led and talent backed brands where they're starting to try to incubate and shape the idea in partnership with their client much earlier because they're watching that value sort of leave the agency and go out into the world to partners like us who are helping them build their own brand.

6:56Yeah, got it. I'm going to pull us out of the rabbit hole of agencies because there's a risk there. You talk on your website about building brands that are one of one. What do you mean by that? What we mean is that we take each individual partnership that we have and treat it with the intention that this thing needs to be fully composed on its own. It's not, you know, take something that's a rubric that works today and slap a talent name on it or face on it. It's build it from first principles. And so for us, we believe that then the brand can in fact truly be one of one, that there is nothing else like it, and that it then deserves to exist in the world.

7:38You know, I think right now it's the barrier to creating something is getting lower and lower and lower. Content creation, especially digital content creation, barriers are getting low. I'm almost to the point where I can create and edit videos by myself, which tells you how low the barrier has gotten. And so for us, one of one really means how do you ensure that there's real integrity and curiosity behind that consumer brand on its own and that it doesn't just feel like it was churned out by some algorithmic machine? Just want to double click on that. So going back to your comment around first principles.

8:13So a celebrity walks into your office and says, this is my intention. This is the category or this is the brand idea that I have. What are those first questions that you ask them? What are you looking to uncover in that first meeting? I mean, why is the number one reason why this and not something else? Why now and not earlier or later? There's a lot of double click, triple click questions that we go through to figure out whether this is something that has intrinsic motivation to accompany the obvious extrinsic financial motivation. If it is make a quick buck on a trend that we come to, we say no.

8:52Like we want to build enduring brands for and with folks. If people are looking for economic certainty and quick wins, food and beverage is a terrible space to do that. It's just hard to have a get-rich-quick scheme in food and beverage. It's alluring for people. They like it because consumer is so much easier to explain to people than tech or insurance or other things that maybe aren't as sexy. But the reality is there needs to be some sort of intrinsic motivation. So we ask them if they are going to put their own capital into this as well. and if they are willing to be a material shareholder in the business and therefore participate pro rata on capital needs into the future or not as well.

9:38And so that becomes a bit of a litmus test of whether this person is sort of looking at this as a way to siphon off some royalty or ambassador fees or whether they're really truly looking to build something that is legacy. To making sure they've got skin in the game. I just want to go a bit deeper on what makes celebrity brands so successful. And clearly the business rationale is around distribution. And from a customer perspective, they get the opportunity to buy a product from a celebrity they've been following or they find really intriguing. But can you go a level deeper? Why are celebrity-led brands having a moment?

10:16And they have done for the last five, six, seven years from Casamigos through to road more recently. What is really driving all of this? You know, what's interesting with the Casamigos story for example, is that that was really born out of them solving a problem that they themselves had. I mean, it's been well written about in terms of why Casamigos works and why every other celebrity with a tequila brand is like an also ran. And mind you, there are some that are doing well economically, but I don't, I think everybody uses the Casamigos example in their pitch deck, hoping that an investor will see them as the next billion dollar tequila exit.

10:55The reason why it works well is that it is a very low customer acquisition cost. And the benefit of that is that you can drive a ton of trial. And so if you have broad distribution for your product, getting it in people's mouths is easy, easier on a relative basis. The challenge, though, and what we've seen to kind of use a flip side example of when it didn't work well, is if the product and the operational execution aren't strong, then it is a race to the bottom. And so like with Mr. Beast, for example, doing his video where they took over the restaurant in North Carolina and built Beast Burger and did a video in complete congruency with the way that he created content.

11:43It was exceptional. And then they said, wow, the demand for this is so great. Let's go out there and launch it. They picked a partner who could give them broad distribution in their case, which was a partner that does restaurant licensing deals without a whole lot of diligence and with no real operational oversight. And they launched Beast Burger to a thousand locations on a single day. It's a great headline. Feels like it works on YouTube. The challenge with that, of course, is that the operational execution was all over the place, good in some spots, terrible in others, and all of the brand trust was gone overnight to the point where, as it's well documented, they've been suing each other and fighting with each other since, and it's a mess.

12:26And it's a mess because Jimmy basically diluted his own brand equity in that deal. The partners spent a lot of time and money on that deal, and individual operators all went through the effort of launching this menu item only to have the wheels fall off based upon some folks poor execution. That is how not to do it. And so to the original question of like, why does it work? Well, it works because it lowers the barrier to trial. But what you must have underneath it is a strong operating platform that deserves to exist on its own two feet independently of that partner. So you have the operations which enable something to be durable.

13:07But I also want to talk about the distribution side. As you put it, the distribution side enables it to get people to try stuff much quicker, brings down the acquisition cost. But how do you drive that repeatability? How do you make sure that this celebrity with millions of followers on Instagram doesn't just post one tile, it begins to look inauthentic and slightly random? How do you actually make sure that it is an always on part of their day to day? How do you drive that lasting distribution? We'll use David Dobrik and the pizza brand that we operate together and the snack business that we've launched as I think a good example of this.

13:43So when we became partners with David, he was operating this pizza shop and we came in as the operating partners to help turn around the operational execution of the unit, but to also take a pole position on brand strategy with him for what to do with the intellectual property that he had created. If he gets on, does a YouTube video, somebody in Ghana is not going to get on a plane and fly to Los Angeles to have a slice of pizza. His followership in that case is not necessarily a good indication of brand help. We did do, though, is say within David's life and the way that he lives on screen today, what are the logical touch points whereby the intellectual property of that pizza can then be extrapolated omni-channel to as many distribution points as possible without us building 2 ,000 pizza shops to do so.

14:32And so, you know, what we've done in that is we look for restaurant to retail as a pipeline to get as much distribution for the IP as possible. And so we partnered with a team on a snack product that's pizza inspired, but shelf stable has a high repeatability to it. It's on the savory sort of chip or crisp aisle, and it's fashioned after some other very successful snacks in the space from a textural perspective, we worked with the partners and creators of Veggie Straws to do that. And so it's light, it is craveable, it's crunchy, it's pizza inspired, it's tied back to the intellectual property that we've created on site, but it allows for people to get it at thousands of locations.

15:18And what we did first was we picked some distribution partners there that were big into delivery. So like GoPuff was one of our first partners. And the reason for that is that they do delivery like last mile delivery. And so it gave the opportunity for people to experience and taste the brand at their home in the most convenient way possible before even having to go to the grocery or a big box retailer and check it out. And that sort of that's our mantra in general. We build fully composed in real life experiences like the pizza shop where you can see the brand in its fullness and experience the set of expectations and memories and stories and relationships that are part of that brand.

15:58But then you can go over here and get a piece of that in all of these different areas of your life, ultra convenient, also craveable, also tied back to that IP. And that fits perfectly in the way that David makes content. He's on the road. He's in a different country. He's snacking. People are seeing him. He's credible is this sort of like snack creator because it's already very much part of who he is and what he's doing naturally in his content. And so what that does and what's interesting for us is he doesn't have to be snacking with waivers in the video in order to reinforce the fact that he is a snacking expert and here is his brand and he's doing this other thing.

16:37But even if he eats another product while traveling, it becomes part of the R &D of that product going out into the world. And people see that now as like, okay, that is talent who's really building their own brand. They're curious enough to go out there and do market research as part of their normal routine. And so that really helps as well. Help me understand the brand strategy piece a bit more then. Talent comes in, they already have their own brand, or at least their follower base has a perception of their brand. And yet they're trying to create a food or beverage product as well that may or may not emulate parts of their own existing human brand.

17:16How do you manage that? How do you make sure that it fits with what the customer wants, plus also the type of distribution that that celebrity might be looking to push forward? Can you talk through that part of your process? Sure. Yeah. So inside of the venture studio, my partner Luke and I are constantly looking at trends, white space, holes in the market, opportunities, et cetera. And so we've got like the running board of here are all the things that we feel like there is a space for and deserve to exist in the world regardless of who's backing it or not so like an example of a brand that we're working on right now is a caribbean jerk chicken brand like on the bone fashioned from a service model standpoint very similarly to the way that nando's is in the uk and south africa and around the world basically everywhere except for the us nando's is that way and so we see that as a tremendous pull in the market in the States.

18:13And it's supported by real research. You know, the number of people who buy a rotisserie chicken at a Whole Foods for a weeknight dinner and the prevalence of chicken as an occasion and the proliferation of chicken fast food chains, all of that supports the fact that this is a big market. What we've done is try to find a partner or for that idea that makes sense and who shares a passion for those flavors and that product, but in a way that's authentic where they can plug in. So one direction we could go would be culinary in that brand building. Another direction we could go is culture and design work.

18:52And that's the road we did. So we're partnering with Ferg and with Loleen Rothenberg on this. And what we're doing there is building this Caribbean jerk chicken brand in the sort of Nando style, but coming from a place where it's grounded in the fact that this will and should work independently of who's on top of it. And then that allows us to find the right partner to put on top of that brand. And again, the sort of table stakes for us is that that person has to be in it economically and in it in a real way. And so anybody who follows Ferg knows that he is starting to become this sort of like culture carrier outside of his rap career.

19:32he's a really burgeoning interior designer and clothing designer and cultural mover and shaker in New York. And so it makes for a great partnership for bringing that authentically to market in the first unit. And are you going any deeper in the sense that you're trying to understand that Ferg, the way that he speaks and actually his own personal tone of voice, that might match the brand, like whether he's a joker or whether he's quite serious and the tone of voice that you want the ultimate brand to have. Are you going to that level of granularity? Yes. In fact, like going back to Dobrik, for example, the brand strategy that we have is that it should emulate the tonality and the approach that David has, but it should not put him into the seat as like Ronald McDowell.

20:20Example that we used to use with Kevin, for example, on Heart House all the time was that Kevin needs to be the founder, not the mascot. And I think that's where there's a level of difference. We want to emulate the tone and the approach and things that make it familiar. So we used humor and we used health and wellness and we used business mogul type terms, all things that Kevin uses in his own personal brand, which spans comedy and television and video production and venture investing and philanthropy and emulate that within the brand. And so that's a very much a part of what we do, but not every brand will be fashioned in the tone of voice of the talent behind it.

21:06In the case of the jerk chicken brand, Ferg's voice is more visual than it is copywriting. And so he's helping more with what does the space look like? What does it feel like? What is the music like? What does it smell like? How does it show up in the world? Would it be a place he would want to find himself at one o 'clock in the morning on a Friday? And then our tone of voice is meeting that moment that he has created, but it may not be his voice specifically. It's one that he would hang out with, which is a little bit of a different look at that facet. Okay. Let's go to Kevin Hart and Hart House, which is a restaurant chain.

21:44And I'd love to hear your perspectives on that and where it's going. But let's rewind first to the story. How did you meet Kevin? I got a chance to fly to L.A. and my first meeting face to face with Kevin was backstage at the Staples Center before he went on stage for the first show of his reality check tour. And so, yeah, it was interesting to have my first sort of one on one for an hour and a half before he went on stage in front of 20 ,000 people. Whatever you said, you said the right things. Yeah, apparently. I mean, what was interesting about it at the time for me, which is something that we look for in R3 with each partnership, is here he was.

22:25He could have been rehearsing. He could have been hanging out drinking with his buddies. He could have been doing anything before going on stage. And this was the first show that he was doing live on the other side of the pandemic. And so, like, it was a big deal, even for a guy like him who has a ton of experience in that. We spent 90 minutes talking about his vision for what Hard House could be before going on stage. And to me, that was like a real indication. In addition to him having capital in the business, that he was engaged in it in a way that wasn't just as an ambassador or as a paid spokesperson.

22:55It was something he wanted to see happen in the world. Yeah, yeah. I'm aware that you're global. So we've spoken a lot about US-based brands, but you also look at Europe. And I'm interested in what differences you're seeing between those two geographies and particularly the differences in the type of engagement and following that people give to celebrities. And very simplistically, where I'm sat in London, I think people in the U.S. follow celebrities more. In the U.K., we have a little bit of a culture of giving people their moments in the limelight and then rapidly trying to tear them back down to Earth.

23:29What are you seeing? What are you observing in terms of the type of work that we've been discussing and its relevance to non-U.S. geographies? Well, what's interesting is we use the name talent on purpose at R3 and not celebrity or not famous people. And part of it is the fact that globally celebrity carries a lot of potential baggage with it, specifically in the UK, as you mentioned. And, you know, my my co-founder and I, he's from the UK originally, and I think is great at representing that truth that you just mentioned, Matt, about the way that culture is in the UK when it comes to celebrity.

24:06And so what that also does, though, is it allows us to be a bit more flexible about what the definition of talent is. Talent may be someone that unlocks some portion of the value chain and provide some arbitrage. other than top of funnel trial as well. Like it could be in the case of a brand that we've just started speaking to that I think is really interesting, a like scientific talent behind it that it and has created something patented that's exceptionally unique in the food and beverage space that that by itself might make it, along with their willingness to build brand in public, might make them the talent for that brand.

24:48And maybe we don't even need to have somebody else on top of that brand, maybe they themselves are sufficient as talent. I think that globally, that's a little bit about how we look at it differently. Like we don't just look at it raw terms of followership because, you know, like very few people have more followers than somebody like Mr. Beast, for example, but somebody's core consumers might be exceptionally engaged with their product. And that could be a better indication of early trial and success than broad distribution is by itself. I want to hear an example of a talent-led brand that you're not working with, that is emerging and that you're excited by.

25:27Ooh, it's far beyond emerging, but I referenced it earlier. And I think one of the reasons it's interesting and I follow it is that I'm so fascinated by how many boxes it's been able to check. And that's Selena Gomez's Rare Beauty. To me, it's just this, it's this phenomenal like brand where she has created something that is accessible and available to millions and millions of people. And it's not niche. It's very, very hard to create something that is mass and high quality at the same time while being somebody with such mass distribution that she has and doing it at a stage in her life where she's not even 40 years old yet.

26:13But she's not 22 either. She kind of has this interesting wisdom to her at this life stage. Not only has she created that product for herself and therefore for the masses, much in the same way that Clooney and Randy Gerber did with Casamigos, they were solving their own challenge. But she's done it with a foundation and control creatively of that business, but at the same time, trust in the operating partners that she has. So to me, that's a really impressive one. Does talent of her size have to almost go towards mass market because they have such broad reach? And I'll give you another example is Ben Stiller's recently launched Stiller's, the Soda, which is quite clearly mass market positioned.

26:58I mean, are there commonalities there? And actually, what's your perspective on Stiller's? I haven't tried the product yet, so I don't know what I think about it, to be fair. I mean, I think it's a crowded category and what's unclear to me about that brand out of the gate is why it should exist. Like why that and not something else in the space? And why will Coke and Pepsi care? You know, or why won't they just defend their turf as they do thoughtfully and successfully over and over and over again when somebody comes to try to play in the space? Aside from like sumptogenic or protein or other sort of benefit for the space, I don't think the world needs more sodas, to be honest.