Most of what passes for “content” these days is disposable. Made fast, optimized for whatever invisible math decides what people see today, and forgotten about five minutes later.
That never interested me much.
I’m Kennyatta, a photographer, writer, and strategist. What I care about are the stories that stick. The ones rooted in culture, in places, in the messy, contradictory reality of how people actually live, work, and make things.
So this is where I put those stories.
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Photos: Courtesy of Cinis website and Ariana Medizade’s Instagram.
Ariana Medizade’s launch of Cinis shows how audience trust is becoming one of the creator economy’s most valuable forms of startup capital.
Ariana Medizade has spent years telling followers that “your kitchen is your pharmacy.” So when the pharmacist-turned-creator finally launched a product, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it wasn’t apparel-related.
Known online as “Wellness Pharm,” Ariana’s new brand, Cinis, sells a 28-bag “cyclical tea system” built around the four phases of a woman’s menstrual cycle. Medizade, a PharmD who trained at Chapman University and has built a following of over 600K across platforms around supplements, hormones, and functional health, formulated the blends herself. The offer to the customer is a natural progression of her community experiences. Her content taught women to think about health through their daily rituals, and now her product delivers that philosophy to their counters in a pretty box, after they press check out.
The Product Was Already Hiding in the Content
I feel like tea is a smart vehicle to rest her wellness ideology and methodologies in the lives of her audience. Medizade has said she chose it because brewing creates a ritual in a way that taking pills can’t replicate. Commercially, it also gives Cinis a recurring use occasion, which is the dream for any business. The timing is also brilliant. Cinis is nestled precisely between two categories seeing amazing momentum right now: functional nutrition and women’s health. Functional nutrition is one of the wellness category’s major growth pockets over the last year, with about half of consumers in the U.S. and about two-thirds of Gen-Z and Millennials saying they bought functional-nutrition products within the last 365 days. Women’s health has also moved deeper into consumer wellness, where shoppers have increasingly looked for products organized around their hormonal changes, for example.
Ownership Changes the Creator Economy Math
For years, creators monetized the relationship with their audience through the products or services of already established companies. I currently sit on the other side of those deals and can tell you that trend has not changed for the majority. With that said, the exposure to new industries, startups, seed funding, multi-million dollar buyouts, even billion dollar buyouts, is showing creators that ownership changes the math. Hailey Bieber’s Rhode generated $212 million in net sales last year before being bout by e.l.f. Beauty in a billion-dollar deal. Mr. Beast’s Feastables did about a quarter of a billion dollars in sales in 2024. Emma Chamberlain’s Coffee did around $20 million in revenue three years ago. Sure, these are extreme cases, but extreme cases are only extreme cases for so long, especially when the formula has been democratized for everyone to implement if they choose.
Now Cinis is still in its infancy, so we can’t guarantee it’s the next Poppi, but strategically, it shows the same mechanisms at play that lead to the same success that other creators have seen, at an even earlier and arguably more instructive stage. Medizade did not build an audience around random fandom and then search for something to sell to people to capitalize on the awareness. She built around a specific editorial territory, women’s wellness, supplements, hormones, and then launched a product directly inside it.
In Wellness, Trust Comes With a Higher Bar
Healthcare is about as tough an industry to crack when it comes to consumer goods. There are rules and regulations around what you can and can’t claim for your product. For Medizade, the PharmD after her name is therefore both an advantage and a higher bar to clear when it comes to messaging, marketing, and branding her product. But after working with her on a few different events, I can tell that she’s up to the challenge.
Cinis is worth watching and paying attention to over the next year, to me, biases aside. The old creator business model sold attention, but this new model is all about building equity through relationships established over the years. So now when the product feels like the logical next step in years of content, the creator can’t be seen as just a cog in the machine of the media plan anymore.
She’s now the founder the media plan was built for, the fuel that keeps it running, and the pharmacist who happens to be qualified enough to recommend the product in the first place.
For more from Ariana Medizade, follow her on Instagram. To explore Cinis, visit the brand’s website. And for more writing on taste, access, ownership, and the economy of culture, find me at The Corner on Substack.