One of our favorite health and fitness creators, James Smith just launched a beverage. So did Katy Perry, Blake Lively, Logan Paul, and dozens of other creators and celebrities. WTF is going on? Why are so many creators launching beverages? Here’s why creators are launching drink brands and why this is only the beginning:

Huge brands and corporations don’t know what we actually want to drink, but creators do. The traditional beverage industry which includes drink producers like Coke and Pepsi, the retailers that sell them (Publix, 7-Eleven, Whole Foods Market), and all of the distributors and brokers in between have built billion dollar businesses on the premise that you can sell one thing to nearly everyone, in nearly every store. But that’s not working like it used to. We’re not all the same. We have different needs, and different likes. We also don’t trust that big corporations have our best interest in mind. We would much rather buy something created specifically for us, by a creator we know and trust than buy mass-market garbage from an airplane hanger-size store full of mass-market garbage.

But that’s not the whole story. Talented and influential creators are also realizing that they can be more true to their audience and have more control over their own brand and income if they rely less on selling other people’s stuff and start selling their own products. It’s more expensive than ever to launch a national beverage brand in stores across the country (Poppi raised over $50 million to do it) but it’s cheaper than ever to launch a small, creator-led brand and make a decent income.