7 biggest celebrity brand launches of 2026, ranked

On March 31, 2026, Alix Earle’s skincare brand Reale Actives went live and crossed $1 million in sales in under five minutes. By mid-afternoon it had passed $5 million. By 4 p.m. there was nothing left to sell.

Numbers like that are why the biggest celebrity brand launches of 2026 got treated as business news rather than gossip, and why every talent agency in Los Angeles now runs a brand-incubation arm. They’re also why it’s hard to tell which of this year’s launches are real companies and which are expensive merch drops with a press release. A sellout tells you about demand on day one. It tells you nothing about month fourteen.

So this ranking ignores buzz. A celebrity brand launch is a business where a famous person holds equity and operational responsibility rather than collecting a fee to appear in the campaign, and the seven below are ordered by what they actually raised, sold, or got priced at. Some of them are built to outlive the person on the label. At least one probably isn’t.

Last updated: September 2026

Quick answers

What celebrity brands launched in 2026?

The biggest 2026 celebrity brand launches were Sydney Sweeney’s lingerie label SYRN in January, Alix Earle’s skincare line Reale Actives in March, Cardi B’s haircare brand Grow-Good Beauty in April, Kylie Jenner’s relaunched KHY in April, Carrie Underwood’s wellness brand HiNote in May, and Olivia Jade’s makeup line O.Piccola in May.

How much is Tom Holland’s Bero worth?

Bero was valued at more than $100 million in a 2026 private equity deal backed by Paine Schwartz Partners through its BetterCo Holdings portfolio company. The nonalcoholic beer brand, which Holland co-founded with CEO John Herman in late 2024, generated close to $10 million in first-year sales.

What’s the difference between a celebrity brand and an endorsement deal?

In an endorsement deal the celebrity licenses their name and collects a fee or royalty, carrying no ownership and no downside. In a celebrity brand the star holds equity, shares in losses, and usually takes operational responsibility for product and creative direction. The second structure is what 2026’s launches almost all used.

What celebrity brands launched in 2026?

Seven launches defined the year, and they’re ranked here by business substance rather than social buzz: capital raised, sales disclosed, and distribution won.

1. Bero (Tom Holland). Bero is the outlier on this list because it didn’t launch in 2026. Holland and John Herman started the nonalcoholic beer company in late 2024. What happened in 2026 is that somebody put a price on it. Paine Schwartz Partners, an agrifood-focused private equity firm, backed the brand through its BetterCo Holdings vehicle at a valuation above $100 million, and existing investor Imaginary Ventures increased its position. Bero did close to $10 million in its first year and told Inc. it intends to roughly triple that in 2026 by doubling its sales team across the US and UK. That’s a beverage company with a distribution plan, not a celebrity licensing deal.

2. SYRN (Sydney Sweeney). SYRN launched January 28 and the debut collection sold out within hours. The capital behind it is the interesting part: backing came through a Coatue fund whose committed capital includes the family offices of Jeff Bezos and Michael Dell. Sweeney holds equity and runs creative, which puts her in the founder seat rather than the ambassador seat. The product decisions read like a business rather than a photoshoot. SYRN opened with 44 sizes spanning 30B to 42DDD, priced most pieces between $39 and $89, and structured the year around four sequential capsule drops instead of one seasonal collection. We broke the structure down in detail in Sydney Sweeney’s SYRN business model explained, and traced what the brand contributes to her balance sheet in Sydney Sweeney’s net worth in 2026.

3. Reale Actives (Alix Earle). Earle’s skincare brand launched March 31 with four products priced from $28 to $39: a cleansing balm, an exfoliating gel cleanser, a mandelic acid serum, and a barrier moisturizer. It cleared $1 million in under five minutes and $5 million by mid-afternoon before selling out entirely. Imaginary Ventures, the fund founded by Natalie Massenet that also holds stakes in Skims and Glossier, is the sole institutional investor. Earle isn’t running it alone either. Andrea Blieden runs the company as CEO and dermatologist Dr. Kiran Mian consults on formulation, which is the kind of hire that signals a company rather than a campaign.

4. Grow-Good Beauty (Cardi B). Grow-Good launched April 14 after a March 24 presale and sold out in an hour. Six products, all priced between $15 and $20, built around a proprietary plant-based complex the brand calls Fiberlace. The structural detail that matters: it was developed with Revolve Group as a joint venture with equity on both sides, not a licensing arrangement. Cardi told Billboard she’d spent years repairing her own hair with kitchen masks before building the line. Our full breakdown of the deal structure is in how Cardi B’s Grow-Good Beauty actually works.

5. KHY (Kylie Jenner). This one is a relaunch, and that’s why it’s instructive. KHY existed as a platform for guest designers to drop collections modeled by Jenner. In April 2026 she rebuilt it as her own Los Angeles-rooted label, opening with the Born in LA capsule. The $490 studded carpenter jeans sold out in a day, made from Cone Mills American cotton denim. Jenner is already a proven operator, so the pivot is the signal here. Her name on the label had stopped being sufficient, and she changed the product instead of the marketing.

6. HiNote (Carrie Underwood). Underwood announced HiNote on May 6, 2026, opening with a daily nutrition drink mix carrying 20 grams of protein, 15 from clear whey and 5 from collagen, plus 5 grams of fiber and no added sugar or caffeine. The more interesting move is the software. Her existing fitness app fit52 is being folded into HiNote Life, which converts a standalone supplement into a subscription surface with a retention loop attached. Underwood has done this before. She built CALIA, launched fit52 in 2020, and held an equity position in BODYARMOR.

7. O.Piccola (Olivia Jade). O.Piccola launched May 12 with one product, a dual-sided Bronze & Glow Balm in three shades at $44. It’s self-funded. Giannulli spent roughly five years getting there, scrapping a finished palette after a California manufacturer couldn’t customize formulas and eventually moving production to South Korea. The brand ranks last on capital and last on day-one revenue. It may be the most honest business on the list, because nothing about it is subsidized by someone else’s conviction.

The 2026 launches side by side

The spread between these seven is wider than the coverage suggests. One is a priced company with institutional owners. One is a single $44 product funded out of pocket.

Which celebrities are venture-backed founders?

Four of 2026’s seven biggest launches took institutional money: Sweeney’s SYRN through a Coatue fund, Earle’s Reale Actives through Imaginary Ventures, Holland’s Bero through Paine Schwartz Partners, and Cardi B’s Grow-Good through a joint venture with Revolve Group. Jenner, Underwood and Giannulli funded theirs without an outside institutional round.

The distinction is not cosmetic. Taking venture or private equity money means accepting a board, a valuation, and a clock. It also means somebody with no emotional stake in the celebrity has run the numbers and decided the business works. When Paine Schwartz priced Bero above $100 million, that wasn’t a fan valuing Spider-Man. That was an agrifood investor valuing a nonalcoholic beverage in a category that’s growing while traditional beer declines.

Institutional capital is also the sharpest filter available to a reader trying to tell a real company from a merch drop. Fans will buy anything once. A fund underwriting a nine-figure valuation is making a claim about year three. The same logic now drives where famous people put their own money, which we mapped in which celebrities are investing in AI in 2026.

How much is Tom Holland’s Bero worth?

Bero’s 2026 private equity round valued the New York-based company at more than $100 million. Paine Schwartz Partners led through BetterCo Holdings, and Imaginary Ventures, already on the cap table, put in more.

The operating numbers underneath that price are modest by design. Bero booked close to $10 million in sales in its first year after launching in late 2024, and the company has said it plans to approach $30 million in 2026 while expanding distribution and roughly doubling its sales headcount across two countries. A valuation near ten times trailing revenue is aggressive for beverage, and it’s a bet on the nonalcoholic category rather than on Holland’s fame.

Holland’s own story is doing real work here. He stopped drinking in 2022 and built a product for the position he was actually in, which is a materially different pitch than an actor being handed a beverage to front. That distinction shows up in retail conversations, and it’s the same pattern we traced in celebrity tequila brands are mostly endorsement deals, where the brands with genuine founder involvement outperformed the licensed ones.

The one investor behind two of the year’s biggest launches

Imaginary Ventures is the sole institutional investor in Alix Earle’s Reale Actives and an existing backer that increased its position in Tom Holland’s Bero during the 2026 round. Two of the year’s most commercially significant celebrity launches, in unrelated categories, share one fund.

Most coverage of this year’s wave treats each launch as a standalone celebrity story. It isn’t. Imaginary, founded by Natalie Massenet, holds positions in Skims and Glossier, which means the firm has spent a decade learning how personality-led consumer brands convert attention into repeat purchase. That’s a specific, transferable competence, and it’s now being applied across a portfolio.

For anyone building in consumer, this is the practical read: the smart money isn’t betting on famous people. It’s betting on a repeatable operating model for turning audience into distribution, and it’s sourcing famous people who fit the model. Earle and Holland have almost nothing in common as public figures. They have the same thing in common as assets.

Why equity replaced the endorsement fee

The endorsement fee lost to equity because the celebrity now supplies the thing that used to be most expensive: distribution. A brand that once paid for both media and a famous face can now get reach directly from the founder’s audience, and the founder can credibly ask for ownership in exchange.

Run the math from the celebrity’s side. An endorsement contract might pay seven figures over two years with no residual claim. An equity position in a brand that exits at $100 million is worth considerably more, and the downside is a business that fails rather than a check that stops. For anyone with a durable audience, the expected value moved years ago.

Run it from the operator’s side and it’s just as clean. Paying a fee buys awareness you rent. Granting equity buys a partner who shows up for the product reviews, defends the brand in interviews, and can’t walk when a competitor offers more. Cardi B’s arrangement with Revolve, structured as a joint venture with equity on both sides, exists because both parties wanted the other one locked in.

This is the same logic reshaping sports and music. We covered the parallel version in how Ciara sold out 5,000 cases of Frosh in 24 hours, where the celebrity co-founders function as distribution channels with equity at risk, and in Jay-Z’s net worth and business playbook, which is essentially thirty years of choosing ownership over fees.

What separates the launches that last

The test that predicts survival is whether the brand can operate without the star behind it, and most celebrity launches fail it. Nylon made the case in May 2026 that consumers have grown tired of the pattern, pointing to Addison Rae’s shuttered Item Beauty as the cautionary version and Hailey Bieber’s Rhode as the counterexample: a brand that reformulated a product after customers complained about a grainy lip tint, and casts campaigns with faces who aren’t the founder.

That’s the whole distinction. Rhode acts like a company that happens to have a famous founder. The failures act like a famous person who happens to have a company.

Apply the test to 2026’s cohort and it sorts quickly. Bero has a CEO, a distribution plan, and a category tailwind that exists whether or not Holland promotes it. Reale Actives has an outside CEO in Andrea Blieden and a consulting dermatologist, which means product decisions don’t route through a celebrity’s Instagram instincts. HiNote has a software retention loop. Those are businesses.

The harder cases are the ones where the product is generic and the founder is the only differentiator. A bronzer balm at $44 competes with several hundred other bronzer balms, and O.Piccola’s five-year formulation process is the argument that it earned its spot. Whether customers agree is a 2027 question.

Sellout headlines are the least reliable signal in the entire category. A brand that sells out in an hour may have manufactured 4,000 units. Scarcity is a marketing decision as often as it’s a demand measurement, which is why the second restock tells you more than the first sellout ever will.

What founders can steal from the 2026 wave

The transferable lesson has nothing to do with fame. It’s that distribution advantage is now a fundable asset, and the 2026 cohort shows four specific ways to convert it.

Price for repeat, not for prestige. Cardi B priced Grow-Good’s six products between $15 and $20. Earle priced Reale Actives from $28 to $39. Both cleared out on day one. A launch price low enough to be an impulse purchase buys you a customer list, and the list is the asset. Kylie Jenner’s $490 jeans work because KHY is a fashion label with a different economic model, not because high prices signal quality.

Ship one product, not a range. O.Piccola launched with a single item. Reale Actives launched with four. Neither tried to fill a shelf. Narrow launches let you learn what customers actually reorder before you commit capital to inventory you’ll discount later.

Hire the operator early. Reale Actives has a CEO who isn’t Alix Earle. Bero has a CEO who isn’t Tom Holland. In both cases the founder kept creative and audience, and handed operations to somebody who’d done it before. The brands on this list without that separation carry visibly more risk.

Attach a retention mechanism at launch. Underwood folded fit52 into HiNote Life so the supplement sells into an app with workouts, recipes and tracking. Sweeney structured SYRN as four sequential drops rather than one collection, which builds a return visit into the calendar. Both solve the same problem, which is that a one-time sellout generates a spike and a subscription generates a business.

The wave isn’t slowing. The filter is just getting sharper, and equity has replaced the appearance fee as the default structure. For founders without famous faces, the useful takeaway is that every one of these brands is competing on the same things you are: price architecture, repeat rate, and whether the product survives contact with a customer who doesn’t care who made it. The celebrity buys attention for a week. After that it’s just a consumer company, and the biggest celebrity brand launches of 2026 will be judged on whether they still exist in 2029.