Jamie Laing thinks tomorrow’s Fortune 500 will be built by creators. He might be right

Creator-led brands have been easy to dismiss as novelties built on borrowed fame. But their cultural fluency, agility and proximity to consumers make them better equipped to build lasting businesses, argues Candy Kittens co-founder and reality star Jamie Laing.

“The next big business owners are going to be content creators,” Jamie Laing, the reality star-turned-sweet entrepreneur, tells Fortune. “I don’t think Coca-Cola can really come up any more without a content creator helping build the brand.” 

Those may sound like fighting words from—surprise, surprise—a content creator. But there are signs the future may one day belong to brands with faces, not logos and legacy.  

Laing founded Candy Kittens, the premium vegan sweets brand, with his business partner Ed Williams 15 years ago. Today, it reportedly generates £15m in annual revenue. The colorful, aesthetically packaged, cat-shaped gummies sit on the shelves of Tesco and Sainsbury’s alongside products from confectionery giants that have dominated the aisles for generations. 

For decades, companies such as Mars—which generates $50bn in annual sales—and Nestlé, with CHF 90bn ($113.1bn), built their empires through mass advertising and distribution. Candy Kittens is not about to topple either of them, but it’s doing a good job of winning shelf space, consumer attention, and market share without the mega marketing machine that made those giants.  

Once a novelty side project for a reality TV personality, Candy Kittens has grown into a credible challenger brand.  

The sweet spot  

Late 2025 saw what is perhaps Candy Kittens’ boldest move to date: snapping up snack brand Graze from Unilever for £36m. It’s a deal that says as much about the opportunity Laing saw as it does about the limitations of big corporate ownership. 

For Laing, the acquisition is a case study in exactly what gives smaller, creator-led brands their edge in the current market. “Big corporations aren’t agile at all,” Laing says. “They’re so stuck in their ways.” At Candy Kittens, an idea can go from concept to shelf in a matter of months, he adds.  For a business the size of Unilever, Graze was a mere footnote. “It had kind of lost its sparkle,” Laing says. “The brand deserves more. It needs love, nurturing and energy.” For any executive watching from a large FMCG group, it raises an uncomfortable question: how many footnotes do you have? 

Nestlé owns more than 2,000 brands globally and is cutting the number that receive media support from more than 400 to just 150 in 2026, according to its latest investor report. Whether a conglomerate is shedding brands it can no longer nurture or piling on acquisitions in pursuit of critical mass, the result is the same. That somewhere in the portfolio, something with potential is not getting the love it needs. It’s a gap businesses like Candy Kittens are only too happy to exploit. 

The creator advantage 

Laing argues that creator-led companies are nimbler, more culturally attuned, and closer to their communities. “I think consumers now trust content-led brands more than the big corporations because we have personality and authenticity,” he says.  

Consumers are not abandoning traditional brands en masse, but younger shoppers are proving particularly receptive to creator-led businesses. Research from LTK found 73% of Gen-Z consumers rely on creators when making purchasing decisions, while an Adobe survey found that two-thirds of Gen-Z shoppers have bought from a creator-founded brand. 

For Laing, these statistics reflect a broader change in how people want to engage with companies. “People don’t really like being sold to,” he says. “Actually, we’re sort of allergic to it.” 

This dynamic has changed how brands have to behave, he continues. For decades, consumer goods companies spent fortunes acquiring customers through advertising, whereas creator-led brands are built on years of giving, sharing, entertaining, and letting an audience in, before ever asking for anything in return. “It’s that jab, jab, jab, hook technique,” Laing explains. “You’ve given and given and given…and now, when you ask your audience to come with you and build something, they do. Because they already believe in you.” 

In a media landscape where attention is the scarcest commodity and skepticism of nameless corporations runs high, that kind of earned loyalty may come more easily to creators with an established cohort of eager followers. 

Meanwhile, new U.K. advertising restrictions on high-fat, sugar, and salt products may favor the nimble over the mighty. Legacy portfolios built on precisely the categories now facing restriction are far harder to pivot than a fifteen-year-old challenger brand with a fraction of the fixed costs. 

Taking the biscuit  

Still, there is reason to be skeptical. Creator-led brands have proven they can shift products and punch above their weight. But can they survive when the founder steps back, or the cultural moment moves on? And how do you value a business built around a personality? It’s a question that hangs over many founder-led companies and one investors continue to grapple with.  

“People questioned the longevity,” Laing says of Candy Kittens. “They said it was a fad. That it didn’t really have legs.” 

The European investment community, historically more cautious about personality-driven businesses than its American counterpart, has been particularly reluctant to buy into the model. 

Laing’s ultimate ambition is to one day acquire McVitie’s, the biscuit brand originally built by his own great-great-grandfather before it was absorbed into a conglomerate. It is easy to dismiss such lofty ambitions. The posh-boy profile alone is enough to invite eye rolls. But Laing’s business strategy speaks to a broader shift.  

Brand ownership has spent the better part of a century flowing in one direction, away from founders, toward the corporations with the capital to grow them. What Candy Kittens represents, and what the Graze acquisition hints at, is the possibility that the tide is beginning to turn.  

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com