Brandon Edelman, known by the moniker Bran Flakezz, started posting online at age 24 while working at Anthropologie’s corporate office, initially gaining a following posting about his personal life: partying and recaps of weekend hookups. By the next year, he was making enough from brand partnerships to rival his salary and decided to pursue content full time.
In the years since his “craziest summer” in 2021, he’s turned his former self doubts into his strengths as a creator. “I used to hate that I was gay. I used to hate that I was chubby, and now it's like, no, I'm just me, and I love being able to build a community of people who love me for exactly who I am,” he said during an interview at Cannes Lions.
While his original brand was built around “gay chaos,” he’s grown by focusing on building community with his audience and sharing, at times, meta content about the creator industry itself, such as the financial realities of his chosen career and behind-the-scenes accounts of his journey. As more people view being a creator as a viable career path and universities have begun offering students the chance to major in the field, Edelman’s rise is emblematic of social media users’ interest in more openness about the creator economy itself.
I recently sat down with Edelman to discuss his audience strategy, advice for companies working with creators and why he’s sick of seeing the same friend groups on brand trips. You can watch the full interview with him here.
Here are some highlights from our conversation:
Connecting IRL is key: “It's storytelling, and really making a relationship with your audience through them getting to know you on a personal level, on an emotional level, on a financial level,” said Edelman. “It's oversharing every single part of my identity and making my followers and community actively engage with me, and just having a deep relationship with them that some would say is parasocial.” As a result, he’s prioritized building real-life ties with his online audience, like hosting a “Bran trip” for fans to Philadelphia. Now, he says, a second one is in the works.
Edelman used to share how much he makes. Now, he doesn’t. Edelman is passionate about making sure that creators “aren’t being taken advantage of by these brands that have a ton of budget.” He went from making $40,000 a year to $768,000, but now does not share his specific salary out of concern it may come across as crass or set an unfair expectation. “I am a white man. … There's so many people who will do double the work that I do, and they will get paid less simply for how I look,” he said. “I just didn't want my kind of salary transparency to come across in a negative light of like, ‘yeah, Bran, it's easy for you to say that this is how much money you can make because you're privileged.’ And I am privileged. So, I think it just made sense to kind of back away from that a little more.”
“Audience is boss”: “Your audience is completely the boss of every single decision that you make,” he said. “When you're a creator, people's opinions of you are literally your business. So it's easy to say, ‘Oh, ignore the haters, ignore the comments,’ but when these are the same people fueling your engagement, fueling your brand deals, and fueling your community, fueling your wallet, you have to pay attention to people's opinions, even if those opinions are negative and you do not like what you are hearing.” That can take a toll, he said: “you're not always going to get it right, and when you get it wrong, it feels like the world around you is ending, and that is something that no one will really ever understand unless they're in a creator's shoes.”
There’s more strategy behind the content than meets the eye: Edelman posts twice a day, seven days a week, and plans his publishing schedule to rotate around his different pillars of content — such as fun entertainment videos, brand partnerships, videos about friendship or dating, and creator industry transparency. “With every creator who's extremely successful, what they're putting out there is very intentional. And if it's coming across like it's not, that just means they're doing a better job than you think,” he said.
His advice for brands: Edelman predicts that the next hot thing in the creator space is friend groups and duos, to capitalize on their respective audiences and the connections they unlock through collaboration. But he’s skeptical of how brands are leaning into the trend, saying “I’m sick of seeing the same people on the same trips. … It's not coming across as fresh to me. I'm like, yeah, I've seen these four girls already on this trip. Oh, they're on another one, and it's not even in a bitter way. It's just this isn't interesting anymore. I want to see a new community and some fresh faces.” He also encouraged brands to go deeper with creators and have a conversation about their goals, unlocking opportunities for more creative or nontraditional arrangements, for example offering a lower rate but more highly-produced content a creator could then use for an acting or hosting reel.
This story is part of Verified, a newsletter that is published by Washington Post Creator, a team outside The Washington Post’s newsroom that is focused on the creator economy and content partnerships with independent creators. Learn more about Washington Post Creator.
