Balenciaga is the first luxury house to formally sponsor Substack creators, and it comes as brands have piled into the platform in record numbers.
Balenciaga has become the first luxury fashion house to join Substack as an official brand partner, entering the platform’s native sponsorship program alongside an inaugural cohort that includes Uber, T-Mobile, and Polymarket. The house marked the deal with a literary panel at its Cannes flagship on June 24, timed to Cannes Lions, and it formalized a relationship that began in last year, when Balenciaga opened one of the first luxury profiles on the platform and became the first house to broadcast a runway show live there.
“Balenciaga has a century-long history of innovation, and I’m proud that it continues to forge ahead as a cultural catalyst, empowering creativity and new channels of independent thinking,” Gianfranco Gianangeli, Balenciaga’s chief executive, said in a statement announcing the partnership. That is a considerable amount of weight to hang on an email product, and Substack’s scale is part of what makes the claim legible. The platform now hosts more than 50 million active subscriptions, and its writers earned $450 million in gross revenue in 2025, up from $300 million in 2023, according to recent data. That figure sits inside a creator economy that Precedence Research valued at $254.4 billion in 2025, one that Goldman Sachs expects to approach $480 billion by 2027.
Brand partnerships already supply roughly 70 percent of total creator income, per Goldman Sachs, and the influencer and sponsorship market reached $32.55 billion in 2025, a 35.6 percent increase over the year before. Luxury’s move onto Substack is not a whim. It is a bet placed at the center of where marketing money is going.
Why luxury brands are betting on Substack
On Instagram, a brand’s followers see whatever the algorithm decides to show them, which means the audience a company spent years assembling can go missing overnight. Substack works the other way. Readers hand over an email address, the newsletter arrives in their inbox, and they open it at rates a marketer running conventional email can only envy: somewhere around 60 percent for the newsletters that actually move product, against the low single digits a promotional blast tends to earn. The Los Angeles dress label Ciao Lucia traces about 10 percent of its sales to the platform.
Tory Burch got there early. She started What Should I Wear? in 2023 as the “next generation iteration” of Tory Daily, the brand blog she launched back in 2009. “We were drawn to Substack for its authenticity, creativity, and sense of community,” Burch told the marketing writer Rachel Karten, and marketers have pointed to the newsletter ever since as the model of how a brand ought to behave on the platform.
Have we reached peak Substack?
Substack turned into a unicorn last summer, valued at $1.1 billion after its Series C round. In March 2025 it announced 5 million paid subscriptions, up from 4 million a few months earlier — a jump that suggested the platform was accelerating. Then the number stopped moving. By this past spring, the company was still counting its subscriptions at “five million-plus,” with no sixth million in sight. To the media analyst Simon Owens, the flat stretch is the tell, because before the 5 million mark Substack had been adding roughly a million paid subscribers a year, and it appears to have settled back into that pace.
“This isn’t to say that Substack can’t get to 50 million paid subscribers, but if it’s still only adding about a million per year, then that growth is going to be a real slog,” Owens wrote in his newsletter. That same month, The Ankler, a widely read entertainment publication, packed up and moved off Substack onto its own platform. Owens waves away the death-of-Substack think pieces that trail every such exit, and he is right to, since publishers swap vendors all the time. The development worth watching is creeping ever closer, though: Substack has said it is building an advertising business, which would introduce to the platform the one thing its entire pitch was built to keep out.
What branded Substacks actually reach
A year after the first wave of brands launched their own newsletters, the receipts have started to arrive, and some of them are real. The RealReal’s newsletter climbed from 3,470 subscribers to more than 8,000 over the past year; it also launched launched The RealGirl, a Gossip Girl-style newsletter. Its views quadrupling from 58,400 to 236,000, the company told Modern Retail. It also sold, more or less by accident, better than $334,000 of merchandise through product links it had not been tracking. “It wasn’t meant to drive sales, but it is driving sales,” Kristen Naiman, The RealReal’s chief creative officer, told Modern Retail. M.M. LaFleur moved its M Dash over from WordPress and now counts more than 81,000 subscribers opening at close to 50 percent, and Rare Beauty has lifted its newsletter’s viewership 281 percent in a year.
None of these is a mass-market audience, and the field is lopsided. American Eagle’s Off the Cuff went dark for months at a stretch, and Substack keeps reminding brands that here you grow only as often as you post. The companies that stay with it, though, are turning up readers and, increasingly, money. Substack would still rather they not get carried away. “We always advise that success comes from bringing a strong, original perspective, not just using the platform as another promotional tool,” Christina Loff, its head of lifestyle writer partnerships, told Karten. The company’s own content guidelines reserve the platform for high-quality editorial content rather than conventional email marketing, a line that gets harder to hold with every brand that arrives to test it.
The authenticity trade
Balenciaga is not buying reach — yet. It is buying a place beside writers whose pull comes from having kept brands at arm’s length in the first place. Mara Hoffman is the sharpest version. She ran her sustainable label for 24 years, closed it, and now writes a newsletter called The Crystalline Vessel, where she tells readers she is “no longer selling you material objects,” but hopes the offering can help readers “feel something special and connected to, similar to what the dresses were able to do.” Beauty label Saie’s founder, Laney Crowell, works the same seam from inside a going business, telling Modern Retail the brand keeps the hard sell out of its newsletter because the point is content a reader will enjoy whether or not she ever buys anything.
Luxury is buying proximity to that credibility just as Substack itself begins to cash it in. The money moving into Substack is the same money that hollowed out every earlier channel that once felt uncommercial, and the platform is courting brands while building the ad business that could flatten the very thing drawing them in. Substack appears to see the risk more clearly than its newest partner does. “We’re always looking for bringing the most important, influential voices to the platform,” Loff told Marketing Brew. “We don’t want Substack to be flooded with brands.” Then it built a sponsorship program.
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