Top takeaways from the strategists behind Teremana and Alo Yoga

TL;DR

• A famous founder is a powerful cheat code for attention, but sustaining a brand requires building something deeper. The brands that last are the ones whose founders bring an authentic point of view that translates into a genuine community ethos.

• Community is a culture, not a follower count. Building it requires investing in relationships and experiences without expecting an immediate return, and giving your most passionate advocates the tools to carry the brand forward on your behalf.

• Influencer programs work best when they operate across multiple tiers, with standard creators, affiliates, and UGC creators each playing a distinct role. Creator content consistently outperforms brand-produced content, making it one of the highest-leverage investments a marketing team can make.

• The brands winning on community are the ones designing activations around a feeling rather than a metric, finding creators whose values genuinely align with the brand, and loosening the creative reins enough to let something unexpected happen.

Celebrity visibility can launch a brand overnight. Sustaining it is a different challenge entirely, and it requires a completely different playbook.

That's the premise behind the second episode of Made You Look, our monthly live conversation series for marketers who want more than surface-level trend reports. Later's Social and Community Manager Kayla Monis sat down with two strategists who have spent their careers building brands that outlast the initial hype: Robyn Nissim, founder and CEO of Social Proof Agency and the mind behind influencer programs at Anastasia Beverly Hills, Ulta Beauty, and Alo Yoga, and Matt Anger, Digital Director at Teremana Tequila, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's brand.

The conversation covered how to turn a founder's fanbase into a community the brand doesn't have to control, why the validation gap between what a celebrity brand says about itself and what consumers actually believe is a real strategic problem, and how to build the kind of creator program that closes it.

Watch the full expert session on demand.

1. Be honest about what your founder can and can't bring to the table

Not every founder belongs on camera, and knowing the difference is one of the most important judgment calls in founder-led marketing. Robyn has worked with founders across the spectrum. At Anastasia Beverly Hills, the founder is the brand, with her name literally on the product, so putting her front and center was always the right move. At Alo Yoga, the founder Danny Harris had a deep vision for the brand but preferred to stay behind the scenes. "Despite the fact that he was very behind the scenes, every single decision that I made had his voice in my head," Robyn said. "We are a luxury brand. We always present this way. We're not a store, it's a sanctuary."

The practical questions to ask: is your founder willing and able to be on camera? Do they have a warmth or an ethos that can genuinely lead a community? Critically, is there something authentic about them that can become a brand platform rather than just a press asset?

2. Build the brand around what your founder authentically embodies

The most durable founder-led brands are built on a concept the founder actually lives, rather than on the celebrity surrounding them. For Teremana, that concept is “Mana,” a Polynesian idea rooted in bringing great energy to the world, and an ethos that founder Dwayne Johnson embodies. "Our founder is known for doing things the right way and not taking shortcuts," Matt said. "And that's everything our brand was built around."

Robyn's framing applies broadly: "Really tap into what their expertise is. What is the thing that they authentically are, and how can we translate that?" Just as The Rock personifies the spirit of Mana, Anastasia Beverly Hills owns the authority on eyebrow products, and Alo Yoga's founder had a sanctuary vision for the brand. In each case, the founder's authentic POV became the through line that made every creative decision easier.

3. Reframe what "community" actually means

Community has become one of the most overused words in marketing, and most brands are using it to describe something that isn't community at all. "A lot of companies think their following is their community," Robyn said. "But if you're throwing an event and you have a million followers and no one shows up, you don't have a community."

Her definition is more exacting: community is a group of people who share a feeling, a culture, and a sense of belonging to something. Building it requires investment without expectation of immediate return. "Think about an amount of money that you are willing to invest in developing your brand, in relationship building, and not to get anything out of. That's how you build a community." Beach cleanups, free events, workshops, product gifting to advocates who are already doing the work: these are the mechanics that create the feeling, and the feeling is what builds the relationship.

4. Give your advocates the tools to carry the brand forward

One of the most efficient community-building moves Robyn made at Alo Yoga was recognizing that the advocates were already there. Yogis in the community were already running classes and workshops. Alo's job was simply to support them. "We would send them product and it would be sponsored by Alo, but our advocates would take care of it for us," she said. "Thinking about things that ladder up to the larger ethos of your brand."

The principle scales: find the people who already love what you stand for, give them the resources to do more of what they're already doing, and take a genuine backseat. As Robyn put it: "Tap those people who already love your brand and find ways to help them do their thing with their own audiences, and really take a backseat. Allow them to succeed and your brand is just there."

5. Design activations that create the feeling your brand promises

Teremana's "Guac on the Rock" program is one of the cleaner examples of a brand activation that earns its place in people's lives. The concept is simple: when you order a margarita at a participating bar or restaurant during April and May, your guacamole is on The Rock. It started after COVID as a way to get people back out to bars and restaurants, and it worked because it benefited everyone involved: the brand, the consumer, and the account. "Teremana was the brand that brought people together," Matt said.

What makes it work is that the mechanic directly embodies the brand's reason for existing: bringing people to the table, sparking connection, and generating what Matt calls "Mana-ful moments," those feel-good, deeply human experiences that people want to share. The activation is now annual, and the organic content it generates continues to surface weeks after the campaign window closes.

6. Think in terms of organic cultural moments when designing for shareability

The idea of “Mana-ful moments”, shared experiences that build genuine community and connection, shows how thoroughly Mana, Teremana's founding Polynesian concept of bringing great energy to the world, permeates the way the brand thinks about everything, including what makes content worth creating. The goal is content that travels because it touches something real, rather than content that performs because it was engineered to. When Teremana launched its Venice Beach pop-up, where a street-level billboard dropped down to reveal a bartender serving cocktails to strangers on Abbot Kinney, the goal was to create exactly this kind of moment.

"It went so far beyond just us paying for an appetizer," Matt said. "These very Mana-ful moments do come out of a brand like ours with our purpose of bringing people together at the table." Robyn echoed the framing directly: "It's not just another moment. It's not just a drink of tequila." When you're designing activations, the question to ask is whether the experience itself creates a feeling worth sharing, something people want to document and pass along, rather than a staged photo opportunity.

7. Run a two-pronged influencer strategy for local activations with national reach

When Teremana activated in Venice Beach, the challenge was telling a story with local physical roots to a national audience. Matt's solution was a two-pronged approach: local creators who could actually show up to the event and capture it firsthand, and national accounts whose audiences would see the story through earned pitching, almost like a media relations strategy.

"The second that this went live to the public, we were out with all of those national accounts," Matt explained. Accounts in the "good energy" space were a natural fit for Teremana's brand ethos. Michelle from the Good News Movement, whose whole platform is built around feel-good stories, was one example. A small paid budget fueled the fire for a few key local creators, and the ripple effect of organic content followed. "It was kind of this ripple effect of great energy that we kept seeing on the internet," Matt said, "and we still see some beats even a month later."

8. Build out multiple tiers of creator involvement across your program

Robyn built Ulta Beauty's first influencer marketing program from scratch a decade ago, and the creator economy has evolved significantly since then. Her current thinking on creator programs goes well beyond the standard paid partnership model. "You can literally create multiple revenue streams from your business," she said. The tiers she outlined: standard influencers who can build brand community, affiliates who have trained their audiences to buy and can compress the purchase funnel to a single video, and UGC creators who may not have large followings but produce content that outperforms brand-produced assets when put behind paid.

On that last point, her data point is concrete: "We know that creator content outperforms brand content by 13X every single time." Bringing creators into brand shoots so their content can live on product pages and in email campaigns is one way to extend the ROI of creator relationships well beyond a single post.

9. Use creators to close the validation gap celebrity can't reach on its own

In the celebrity founder era, there's an inherent credibility challenge: what a brand says about itself and what consumers actually believe are often miles apart. Creators, particularly those with deep community trust, are positioned to close that gap in a way that no amount of paid media can replicate. "I think creators are put into a really great position to close that gap," Kayla noted during the session. "That's how you can reach your consumer at a quicker rate."

Robyn's B2B example makes this concrete. For a med spa services client, she didn't run a standard influencer activation. She identified the top 11 injectors in the industry, built a society around them, and created a community that others could join. Within three months, the client saw more than double their return on investment. Within five months, they hit their highest-grossing revenue month. "We didn't ask people to buy anything," Robyn said. "By creating value with a society, we said, 'Come join the community and get access to all of this stuff.' And in being unselfish and giving back through community, it resulted in business."

10. Apply a brand values filter to every creator you consider

Both Matt and Robyn emphasized that the creator selection process at its best goes beyond demographic data and engagement rates. Robyn uses what she calls the "four pillars of influencers" as her filter: is this creator driving brand heat, building community, driving revenue, and getting your message out in an interesting way? "If they can bring community, if they can help you get your message out in a really interesting way, if they can build trust, and of course if they can drive revenue — one of those four things — you want to keep them in your program," she said. "If it's falling flat, then you cut them."

For Teremana, the filter is an internal framework for assessing whether a creator genuinely embodies the brand's ethos. For brand ambassadors in particular, the standard is higher: "I want to meet those individuals. We bring them to our distillery. They're in our office, they're learning with us, they're building with us," Matt said. At a minimum, he makes sure every creator has a direct line to him at the brand. "They can hear it from us and feel a part of what we're building here."

11. Loosen the reins on TikTok and prepare to be surprised

Matt's team was among the first brands to launch a verified TikTok channel, and the experience taught him something that applies to any brand approaching a new platform: letting go of control is a prerequisite for discovering what actually works. "My big push to the team was we need to be comfortable with loosening the reins a little bit," he said. "This is not Instagram or YouTube. This is its own world."

Their first creator-in-residence posted a video that the team looked at and thought hadn't done anything for them. They woke up the next morning to 9 million views. That video evolved into an ongoing content series: creator-led, platform-native, and entirely unprompted by a brief. "It all goes back to loosening the reins a little bit and being a bit uncomfortable," Matt said. "What might be quite exciting or TikTok-y to one might not be quite exciting or TikTok-y to another — but you find something." The lesson extends well beyond TikTok. It's about trusting creators to know their platforms better than you do.

12. If you don't have a famous founder, start with your best customers

For brands without a celebrity at the helm, the path to community starts closer to home. Matt's advice: lead with a clear point of view tied to emotion, something that goes beyond the product itself. "Brands that have a clear point of view help break through, especially if that thing is tied to something that leans into emotion and goes beyond just the product," he said. "What problem is that brand trying to solve, and what does the brand stand for? Momentum comes from that."

Robyn's answer is even more direct: start with the customers who are already there. "If you don't have a founder, tap your customers," she said. "Who is your top customer? Where are you getting the most brand love? How can you bring them into your business to make them feel special?" Host an event. Create an experience. Turn your best customers into advocates, activate your employees (who are increasingly their own micro-influencers), and only then start adding paid spend to amplify what's already working organically. "It comes down to relationship building and experiences to ultimately create brand love," she said.

Where attention becomes loyalty

Attention without loyalty is just a moment, and loyalty is built through the slower, less glamorous work: investing in relationships before you need them, designing experiences that create real feelings rather than just content, and finding creators who genuinely believe in what the brand is building. Want to see how Robyn and Matt brought these ideas to life? Watch the full session on demand.

If you're thinking about how to build a creator program that goes beyond the founder and into something that actually lasts, schedule a strategy session with our team.