British creator Isobel Lorna launched her own brand, Agende, on 2 September, selling luxury leather planners. At launch, complete sets with refillable inserts cost from £279 with a discount. According to Lorna, the brand took £250,000 in the first hour of pre-orders. The first £100,000 came in within ten minutes. According to analytics firm CORQ, the sets sold out within the same hour. Behind the sales was an audience Lorna had spent years building on TikTok and Instagram.
Lorna's full name is Isobel Lorna MacDonald. She started her TikTok account at nineteen, while working night shifts in an Amazon warehouse. She later documented on it how she trained at a law firm. By the age of 25 she had bought a Porsche, a Birkin bag and a house. According to CORQ, at the beginning of September she had 1.4 million followers on TikTok and more than 786,000 on Instagram. In a post accompanying an episode of the Hot Smart Rich podcast, she mentioned a motto she says she often repeats. “Save the pennies and the Porsche will buy itself.”
A queue for an unseen product
Roughly 100,000 people who had not yet seen the product signed up to the waiting list. The day before launch, according to the magazine High Flying Design, Lorna reported 98,396 of them, while CORQ puts it at more than 108,000. When the list stood at 90,000, Lorna sent them an essay on how the brand had developed, from a handbag idea in 2020 to today's hybrid of planner and handbag. In it she described her community with the words “I built this whole community around my ambition and my lifestyle, and I saw one thing you all had in common: you wanted more from life, and you loved beautiful things. You came for the goal-setting, the manifesting and the ambition. You stayed for a shared love of luxury and fine accessories.”
Lorna admitted that she had only 500 units in stock and would pack the first 500 orders herself. Referring to her beginnings, she added “let's just say my Amazon packing days are finally paying off”. She covered the rest of the demand with pre-orders. According to the same magazine, the planners themselves were due to ship by 22 September, and complete sets by 15 October. As of 23 September, the brand's website listed shipping by 5 October for planners, sets and accessories in pre-order.
The product is a four-ring A5 planner in calf leather with refillable paper inserts for daily and weekly planning, manifesting and personal finance. The brand presents itself with the slogan “Making ambition sexy again”. Lorna is also selling something her followers know from her videos. According to CORQ, in a large share of them she sits in her car with a notebook that helps her organise her work better. According to the same source, the Agende launch also served as an advert for her own creative agency, Voir Social.
In December 2024, Lorna ran an event built around a luxury advent calendar and a giveaway. According to her LinkedIn post, the event brought her 28 million views and 64,000 new followers. According to CORQ, she has a long-term partnership with L'Oréal Paris. In May this year, the brand named her its “chief confidence officer” as part of a campaign.
Her own audience and her own money
Lorna found her first customers among her followers. According to her, she put a six-figure sum of her own money into the first production run. Emilie McMeekan, director of analytics at CORQ, which supplies data for influencer campaigns to brands, called the launch “a masterclass in converting personal brand into product demand”.
According to Maggie Sellers Reum, host of the Hot Smart Rich podcast, Lorna proudly calls herself an influencer. She treats spending as an investment in her brand. In the post accompanying their joint episode, she summed it up with the words “I've never believed in shrinking my life just to save more. I'd rather invest in the things that elevate my brand, my confidence, and my ability to earn MORE.”
Chamberlain Coffee's loss and REFY's viral mascara
The model in which a creator founds their own company carries risk too. American creator Emma Chamberlain built the coffee brand Chamberlain Coffee around her name. According to investor materials obtained by The Ankler, in 2024 the brand ended up making a loss even though it took almost $22 million, 14% more than the year before. The company blamed the loss on problems with a contract manufacturer, which left it short of stock, and on changes in management. According to Sprudge, it raised roughly $20 million from investors in total. Management decided to prioritise profitability and planned revenue of $33 million for 2025. In March 2025 more than 10,000 shops sold its coffee, but the company was also planning to scale back its retail presence.
The British brand REFY shows where the same model can lead. Creator Jess Hunt launched it with co-founder Jenna Meek in November 2020 and built it on community. According to Hunt, a creator called Bronwyn, who had just two hundred followers on TikTok, filmed a video with the REFY mascara. The video gathered more than 80 million views, and within 72 hours the mascara sold out in Sephora stores in the US and Canada. Like Lorna, Hunt drew on an audience she had been building for many years. At the CreatorIQ Connect conference she described it with the words “Over a long time, very fortunately, I was able to grow a following and build a trust and nourish that relationship with my following over many, many years.”
Both REFY and Agende are British brands. The model in which the audience comes before the product also applies in Europe. Whether Agende eventually heads into retail chains or sticks to selling directly to its own community, it starts out the same way as Chamberlain Coffee and REFY. The audience was there before the first unit of stock.
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