Building a brand on the back of an audience is the easy part, but most fail when the operational reality hits: a product that disappoints the audience, a supply chain that breaks, and margins that never materialise. Jens and Emma Grede have spent the past decade quietly building one of the most successful operational platforms in consumer brands to solve exactly that problem, and their recent addition of Elsa Hosk's Helsa to their portfolio is an interesting push into a new premium consumer segment.

Jens and Emma Grede both built a strong track record before launching their holding company Popular Culture. Jens co-founded Frame in 2012, a premium denim and ready-to-wear label that reached $170M in revenue (2022). Emma launched Good American with Khloé Kardashian in 2016, one of the earlier examples of a talent relationship built around equity rather than endorsement. Together, they co-founded Skims with Kim Kardashian in 2019 and structured Popular Culture as a formal vehicle.

The thread connecting the brands in the portfolio is a specific customer who sits at the affordable premium price point (enough for real margins to exist, never so much that it loses mass appeal), and discovers almost everything through her feed. Every brand that Popular Culture operates builds knowledge about it, and that knowledge accumulates. The compounding customer intelligence built across years and multiple brands is the most valuable asset Popular Culture holds, and it is the one that no individual brand could build alone.

The fashion brands are built directly around their central customer. The adjacent ones, like Safely, extend the same relationship into new categories she already shops. The model works because every brand, regardless of vertical, feeds the same intelligence loop.

The Elder Statesman and Helsa are a different kind of bet. Over the past two years, the Gredes have begun moving upmarket, targeting a higher-spending buyer with a longer purchase cycle and a more considered relationship with product.

Helsa already works. Hosk launched it through Revolve in 2022, retaining 100% ownership and building the brand to around $35M in annual sales through that partnership alone. The Gredes know it can sell, they have the data on who bought, at what price, and how often. That is not the question.

The question is what happens when you add the Popular Culture operating model behind it. The infrastructure that took Skims from launch to $1B in net sales: the pricing discipline, the supply chain, the margin architecture, and a decade of knowledge about how to convert a social-media-native woman into a repeat customer. Can that machinery serve a different woman and take Helsa from $35M to a nine-figure brand?

Hosk's two-decade modelling career gives her credibility with that buyer that the Kardashian orbit does not naturally reach. The only unknown is whether the Gredes' most valuable asset, their compounding customer intelligence, is as powerful when the customer is different.

For any creator with an audience and a brand concept, the underlying logic is the same: the audience is the starting point, but what sits between an audience and a scaled brand is pricing architecture, supply chain, margin management, and a product development process that can absorb the pace of social media without breaking. The brands that have scaled share a common factor: an operator behind them with the industry knowledge to build what the creator cannot.

That is why we launched Vivaio. Europe has no shortage of creators with real audiences and real commercial potential. What it lacks is the operator layer, and that is the gap we are building into across a market that counts more consumers and is more fragmented.

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