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Today, I’m here to talk to you about the importance of recycling. Not ecologically—I’m sure that’s important too, so don’t stop doing it, but that’s not really my point. See, I’m talking about an even more powerful form of recycling: old content!
Okay, maybe it’s not recycling so much as revisiting. Repurposing. Reexamining. Regardless, a ‘re’ is definitely warranted, because as you’ll soon see, we’ve been here before.
By this point you’re hopefully familiar with the glory of our Brands of the Year Report. You can find a comprehensive blog post summarizing some key takeaways from that report here, as written by its author, Zach Donnenfield. Even better, you can find the full report itself right here. Oh, and we also did a webinar about it (by ‘we,’ I mean myself and CreatorIQ CMO Brit Starr), so check that out for good measure too, especially if you’re curious to hear what I sound like. (Some might say that I have both the voice and face for radio.)
Between all that material, you might think that we’re pretty tapped out on the whole BOTY front. Well, guess again! Because there’s one standout brand amid this group that I feel like still hasn’t gotten its full due. Today, I want to correct this grave injustice. So come away with me as we embark upon a deep dive into how one of the hottest brands in recent memory achieved supernova status:
The Top Brand of All Time (of the Week): YoungLA
You know the drill, folks: I’m going to show you some graphs. If you’re a brand, then you want your graphs to look something like this. If you’re a faithful HBBIP reader, then you might think that these graphs look the same as always, and that they make the same general point (hey look, a brand that grew!).
But this time there’s a subtle difference that makes YoungLA’s momentum truly notable—and rare. Let’s see whether you can spot it. (Don’t worry: if you can’t, then I will point it out for you. After all, that’s what I do.)
After launching in 2014, it took YoungLA a few years to catch on as a new player in the crowded streetwear and fitness apparel space. As was the case for many apparel brands, 2020 helped launch YoungLA into a new stratosphere. Because while a global pandemic might have upended life as we knew it, leading to rents in the fabric of society that still haven’t healed, it was a very good time to be selling comfy clothes via social media.
YoungLA engagements: 2018 - 2024
To go by this graph of the brand’s engagements, YoungLA might not have sprung onto the scene until 2021—a conclusion borne out by other metrics, including EMV…
YoungLA EMV: 2018 - 2024
And impressions (note how YoungLA actually dropped in this metric between 2019 and 2020—proof that growth across all these metrics isn’t always linear, and that even for global phenomena, it’s not all smooth sailing):
YoungLA impressions: 2018 - 2024
When we get to post count, we find something similar—though in this metric, compared to others, YoungLA did have a bit more of a presence in 2020:
YoungLA post count: 2018 - 2024
Those are four fairly straightforward graphs—the twist must come in the last category, creator count. Right?
YoungLA creator count: 2018 - 2024
Hmm: this also appears fairly normal, though shoutout to 2019 for making an appearance. Still, you can see how YoungLA’s other metrics are on a different scale than what we’re looking at with creator count.
In 2020, for example, YoungLA garnered shoutouts from just 54 creators on CreatorIQ’s U.S. creator panel. While the number has increased since then (YoungLA was sitting at 2.3k creators in 2024), this total still lags behind what we’d expect for a brand driving YoungLA’s engagements and impressions.
That’s where our old friend BOTY comes into play. As noted in the report, YoungLA ranked at No. 50 on our list of Total Engagements in 2024, pitting brands from all categories against each other. Of all the 100 brands on that list, YoungLA claimed, by far, the smallest creator count. So despite having a creator count that ranked well below average, YoungLA overindexed in total engagement—a testament to the passion of its fans and the viral hype of YoungLA’s new apparel drops.
What are the characteristics of this small-but-mighty cohort of creators? How are they so successfully punching above their weight?
- Affiliate codes are a hallmark of YoungLA’s top-performing content. Most of YoungLA’s top EMV-drivers are fitness creators who share personalized discount codes or affiliate links for YoungLA in their training content. This is hardly a new strategy, but what YoungLA does so well is mitigating the sponsored feel of this affiliate content by working with creators who express a genuine affinity for the brand. In 2024, posts mentioning an affiliate code powered $245.7M EMV—more than half of YoungLA’s $431.7M EMV total.
- Consistency is not only the key to any effective fitness program—it’s also the hallmark of a winning creator marketing program. (Or pretty much anything else, but that’s a subject for another blog post.) In 2024, 669 creators powered $284.8M EMV for YoungLA—up from the same cohort’s $230.1M EMV in 2023. It’s this core group of locked-in fans that sits at the heart of YoungLA’s success. Consider these figures against YoungLA’s dropped and new numbers, and you’ll see just how key this consistent community has proven to those stellar engagement figures—and how few creators stop posting about YoungLA:
Creator segments in 2024 and 2023
- Finally, YoungLA has recognized a critical fact: women exercise too. Shocking, right? I for one had no idea. When CreatorIQ last profiled YoungLA’s core creator community in 2022, we mentioned six top creators by name, all of whom were male. By the time 2024 rolled around, YoungLA’s top two EMV-drivers—Vanessa Legrow (@flexwness) and Patricia (@leanbeefpatty)—were female. Vanessa and Patricia combined for $41.7M EMV across over 1k posts: in other words, these two single-handedly (dual-handedly?) made up for the EMV of all the creators who posted about YoungLA in 2023, but not 2024. In all, mentions of “YoungLAForHer,” the tag associated with the brand’s women’s line, netted $152.4M EMV.
So there you have it, folks: by establishing a clear vision as a fashion-conscious, affiliate-driven, DTC fitness apparel brand, and by adapting its creator community as the fitness space changes over time, YoungLA has gone from staying ahead of the game to dictating the terms of the game. It’s a valuable reminder that in a content-first world, you don’t need a ton of people talking about you to succeed on social media. All it takes is the right people, saying the right things.
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