Gretta van Riel was 22, working with no investors and no outside funding, when she started SkinnyMe Tea using little more than an Instagram account and a product she believed people would actually want to talk about. The company scaled to roughly $600,000 in monthly revenue, built almost entirely on an approach that, at the time, most consumer brands weren’t using in any structured way: paying real people with real audiences to talk about the product, instead of buying traditional advertising.
The bet that didn’t have a name yet
Influencer marketing as a defined discipline barely existed when van Riel was building SkinnyMe Tea — there was no established playbook, no agency category, no proven formula to copy. What she was actually doing was a genuinely early, unproven bet: that a smaller number of people with real, engaged audiences could sell a product more effectively than a much larger, more expensive traditional ad campaign aimed at strangers. The bet paid off well enough to take the brand from zero to six figures in monthly revenue without the capital a traditional consumer-goods launch would normally require.
Why one brand became several
Most founders who scale one brand successfully stay inside that brand. Van Riel instead treated the underlying skill — building product-market fit and a marketing approach around genuine audience trust rather than paid reach — as the reusable asset, and went on to found and build multiple additional consumer brands using variations of the same influencer-led approach that worked the first time. That pattern, repeating a specific skill across several ventures rather than treating one lucky brand as a one-off, is a considerably more reliable signal of genuine entrepreneurial skill than any single company’s revenue number on its own.
The product wasn’t really tea. The product was proof that a 22-year-old with no outside funding could out-market companies with real advertising budgets, simply by understanding audience trust earlier than they did.
The case study underneath the success story
The popular version of van Riel’s story is ‘young founder builds huge brand.’ The more useful version, for anyone actually trying to learn from it, is narrower and more specific: a founder who correctly identified an emerging marketing channel before it had a name, moved early enough to build real expertise in it while the field was still uncrowded, and then treated that expertise — not any single product — as the actual long-term asset worth building on. That’s a meaningfully more repeatable lesson than ‘sell tea on Instagram,’ and it’s the part of her story that holds up best once the specific product and specific era are stripped away.
