What We Evaluate
The first thing we assess is authentic category authority. This is different from interest in a category, different from an existing endorsement deal in a category, and different from a manager's belief that a celebrity's audience would buy beauty products. Authentic category authority means you have a genuine, personal, documented relationship with the product category you want to build in. You use these products. You talk about them unprompted. You have opinions about formulation that go beyond what a brand brief would tell you. Your audience has watched you interact with this category over time — it is not a new interest manufactured to support a business opportunity.
We ask about this directly, and the answers are always immediately clear. A celebrity who has authentic category authority can talk for twenty minutes about their skincare routine, the products they've tried and discarded, what they've learned about their skin type over the years, and what they wish existed that doesn't. A celebrity who does not have it gives us answers that sound like brand positioning documents. Both conversations are useful — one tells us there is a brand to build, the other tells us there isn't, and knowing that early saves everyone time and capital.
The second evaluation is audience data. Follower count is not the number we care most about. Engagement rate matters more. Demographic breakdown — age, geography, gender, income signals — matters more. Purchase intent signals, if you have access to them through previous commerce integrations, matter more. What we want to understand is whether your audience is primed to buy a product you genuinely recommend, or whether they follow you for content that is structurally disconnected from purchasing behavior. Both kinds of audiences exist. Only one of them supports a brand launch.
Third: market timing. Is the category you want to build in growing? Is the LatAm market underpenetrated in your specific category? Is there consumer demand that is currently being underserved by existing brands? We do this research ourselves during the two weeks following an initial meeting — but you should arrive with a preliminary point of view on it, because your answer reveals whether you have been thinking about this as a business or as a brand extension.
Fourth: equity appetite. This is the most important question, and we ask it bluntly. Are you here because you want to build an asset that compounds over time and potentially provides generational financial security? Or are you here because you want a branded product that generates a flat fee and some social content? Those are different businesses and we are structured for the first one, not the second. If your priority is immediate income with no long-term ownership stake, we are not the right partner — and we will tell you that in the first meeting rather than six months into a process that ends in misalignment.
What to Bring
Your analytics data. Pull your Instagram Insights and TikTok analytics exports before the meeting. Specifically: engagement rate by content type, follower demographic breakdown by age and geography, and if you have any commerce-enabled content, conversion data from it. You don't need to have analyzed this data before you arrive — we will interpret it together. But having it available makes the first meeting significantly more productive than a conversation about estimates.
A clear category thesis. This is the single most important thing you can bring, and it is the thing most people arrive without. A category thesis is not "I want to do beauty." A category thesis is: "I want to build a skincare line specifically for Latina women in their twenties and thirties who want glass skin results without the ten-step Korean routine — accessible premium, maximum three core products, rooted in Korean formulation but marketed without the cultural translation barrier that makes K-beauty intimidating to a consumer who didn't grow up with it." That is a thesis. It answers who the consumer is, what problem you are solving, what the price position is, and what the brand differentiation is. You can arrive with a rough thesis and we will sharpen it. You cannot arrive with no thesis and expect us to manufacture your founder story for you — that is not what founder stories are.
Examples of brands you admire and why. Not brands you want to copy. Brands whose positioning, aesthetic, community, or quality you find genuinely compelling — and a clear sense of why. The brands you admire reveal your implicit aesthetic and positioning preferences faster than any brief, and they tell us whether your taste is calibrated to the market you want to build in.
Your timeline. Are you available to be a working founder over the next six to twelve months? Can you allocate meaningful time to product development conversations, content creation for the launch, and community activation? Or are you mid-tour, mid-production, or in a period where your attention is structurally committed elsewhere? The six-month launch timeline requires real involvement. A celebrity who is genuinely unavailable during the launch window produces a launch that looks like an endorsement rather than a founding — and consumers notice the difference immediately.
What Not to Bring
A fully developed product concept with formulas, packaging, and a manufacturer already in mind. We know this sounds counterintuitive — you've done your homework, why wouldn't we want to see it? The reason is that our manufacturing partners — Korea's top-tier OEM/ODM houses — the same labs that power the world's most recognized K-beauty brands — are better at product development than any outside consultant you have access to. They have formulated thousands of products, they have proprietary ingredient databases, they know what works and what doesn't at the production volume that makes your margin model viable. Arriving with a locked product concept means we spend the first weeks undoing decisions that were made without the manufacturing intelligence those partners carry. Arrive with a category direction, not a product specification.
A specific manufacturer you want to use. If you have had conversations with a contract manufacturer outside our partner network, that is useful context for us to understand — but we partner exclusively with Korea's top-tier OEM/ODM houses — the same labs that power the world's most recognized K-beauty brands because their quality and reliability at celebrity brand volumes is the foundation of the product quality that protects the celebrity's credibility. Switching to an unfamiliar manufacturer to preserve a prior relationship introduces quality risk that the brand and the celebrity both absorb. We do not do that.
An expectation of a quick licensing deal. If what you want is to license your name and likeness to a product for a flat fee with no ongoing involvement and no equity upside, that arrangement exists and there are intermediaries who structure it. We are not one of them. Every brand we build is structured for celebrity equity ownership, real product involvement, and long-term compounding value. If the licensing model is what you want, we will tell you that directly and you can pursue it without spending time in our process.
The Process After the First Meeting
If the initial meeting confirms authentic category authority, an engaged audience that aligns with the product category, and genuine equity appetite, we move into a two-week research phase. We map the competitive landscape in your specific category, identify the underpenetrated consumer segments, pressure-test the pricing model, and produce a category brief that gives you a clear picture of what the brand opportunity actually looks like — what the realistic revenue trajectory is, what the comparable exits are, what the margin profile looks like at different volume tiers.
Week three or four: introduction to the appropriate Korean manufacturing partner for your category. This conversation is substantive — formulation direction, ingredient philosophy, packaging concepts, production minimums, timeline. The manufacturing partner meeting is where the product begins to become real rather than conceptual.
Following the manufacturing partner introduction, we move to term sheet. The equity structure, the capital requirements, the launch timeline, the revenue sharing mechanism if applicable, and the governance structure for brand decisions. We structure for founder control — you are the CEO of this brand, not a spokesperson for it. The term sheet reflects that.
Launch preparation runs approximately six months from term sheet signing. The brand is live, distributed, and generating revenue within that window under normal circumstances.
What Makes a Yes — and What Makes a No
A yes happens when three things are simultaneously true: you have a genuine personal connection to the product category that your audience already associates with you, your audience is engaged and demographically aligned with the product you want to build, and you are prepared to hold equity and wait for it to compound rather than take immediate cash. When all three conditions are present, the brand has a real foundation and we can build on it.
A no happens when any of the three is absent. If your category authority is constructed rather than genuine — if you want to build a skincare brand but your audience knows you as an actor who has never publicly engaged with skincare — we will tell you that the brand launch will read as opportunistic rather than authentic, and that consumer reaction to opportunistic celebrity brands is now swift and brutal. If your audience doesn't align — you have 30 million followers but they are predominantly a demographic that does not purchase the product category you want to build in — the distribution advantage that makes the model work disappears. If you want a flat fee rather than equity, we are structurally the wrong partner.
The goal of the first meeting is to determine which situation we are in, directly and without wasting anyone's time. We approach it with that directness and we expect the same in return.
The best celebrity brands in history did not start with a product. They started with a founder who had genuine authority in a category — someone whose audience already trusted their judgment in that specific domain, and who built a product worthy of that trust. Come with that, and we can build the rest together.