When founders go rogue, their brands suffer. Here’s what two PR experts suggest

Social media can be a difficult beast to handle, especially for brand founders presenting as the face of their business. 

Many direct-to-consumer brands have successfully built consumer awareness by cultivating the founder’s own social media presence. Examples include travel brand Beis founded by actress and entrepreneur Shay Mitchell and Em Cosmetics founded by YouTuber Michelle Phan, just to name a few. 

However, as much as social media is helpful and at times necessary in building up a brand, it can also be a tricky tightrope to balance when a brand founder wants to express their views as an individual rather than the face of their business.

As Bethany Paris Ramsay, the founder of beauty marketing and communications firm Honey B, pointed out, “If you’re a founder of a brand big or small, you have to have the awareness to know that what you do is also a reflection of your brand, for better or for worse.”

When having a social media presence can go left 

Recently, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Scentbird Mariya Nurislamova has come under scrutiny for videos she has been posting on her personal social media accounts over the past few years. 

In addition to content related to her professional life, ranging from interview clips to marketing strategies, Nurislamova also has a large amount of content, primarily on her YouTube channel, This is Mariya, that centers on meditation and topics focused on “spiritual guidance”.

Since first creating her YouTube channel in 2018, Nurislamova has posted over 600 videos, one of the most controversial and viral of which has centered on “the Matrix”. 

While discussing the idea of humans living inside of a “virtual reality type system”, Nurislamova and her husband, Scentbird’s co-founder and chief product officer Sergei Gusev, described Hitler as “the greatest – one of the greater – sources of knowledge of 3D planet earth warfare.”

In the same video, the brand founder commented, “Do you know how many millions of souls benefited from learning from the experience he has created? So is he evil? Not really. I don’t think so.”

Speaking to The Business of Beauty about the contentious statements, Nurislamova commented, “Videos are really taken out of context, so they take a very small portion of what actually was said, and when you remove the context, the message really changes.” 

The brand founder elaborated, “Because I perceive everything as oneness, of course, murder is not okay. Absolutely freaking not. I would never endorse that. Never, ever in a billion years.”

However, the business is already feeling the sting from the public’s response to these statements. For example, YouTuber Noor Jasmine, who has previously posted several videos sponsored by Scentbird has actively said she wishes to dissolve any association with the brand. 

Considering how closely an influencer’s reputation is linked with the brands they associate with, Jasmine may not be the last influencer to distance themselves from the brand. 

The upsides of having a forward-facing social media presence

Before brand founders rush to erase their social media accounts, it’s important to remember that with social media, there is rarely a black-and-white or one-size-fits-all approach. 

As Ramsay pointed out, presenting as the face of your brand can be “both a savvy business move and detrimental to your brand”.

A case of where a brand founder’s forward-facing presence on social media proved to be a boon to the business is men’s skincare and cosmetics brand Stryx. 

The brand was co-founded by Devir Kahan and Jon Shanahan in 2017 and acquired by Foundry Brands in 2023. Prior to the acquisition, Shanahan was highly active on the brand’s social media page. 

The co-founder often posted product demonstrations and explanations in  “get ready with me” (GRWM)-style videos. He noted that, aside from user-generated content, the best-performing content was often the videos where Shanahan used Stryx’s products on himself.

“[Stryx] has a product that lends itself to [impactful] visuals. And the fact that I get on there regularly and that I’m the target audience and can speak to [Stryx product] from all angles, has [worked to] build a relationship with our audience,” Shanahan said. 

In these cases, where the founder represents the brand’s customers, or in cases where the business has a limited budget for paid marketing, having a brand founder with a significant social media presence can be a positive thing. 

However, as Ramsay warned, “We’ve seen plenty of founders go rogue over the years and the aftermath is not always easy to clean up for the supporting team.”

One high-profile example of this is the cosmetics brand Lime Crime founded by Doe Deere (born Xenia Vorotova). 

After several years of posting conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic commentary, Deere stepped back as the public face of the brand in 2016. Beauty industry veteran and then-global general manager Kim Wall was tasked with cleaning up Lime Crime’s reputation as well as a slew of other issues such as misleading product labeling.

In 2024, the brand is finding its way again after several rocky years, with the company recently expanding to Walmart and Target. But it was not without a copious amount of time and money invested in damage control, hiring new team members, and rebranding. 

Lime Crime is not the only brand – or the last – to have experienced negative PR on account of its founder’s actions and social media presence. 

In the last two years alone, founders like Glossier’s Emily Weiss and Youthforia’s Fiona Chan have come under fire for less-than-sensitive comments around work culture or skin tone inclusivity. 

Both companies have experienced some employee turnover and have publicly declared initiatives prioritising diversity and inclusion. 

How do brand founders navigate the line between their professional and public personas?

As Megan Paquin, a crisis management expert, told Inside Retail, “Ultimately, we individually need to decide how we want to present in various settings. In some cases, those choices could have positive or negative impacts on both our personal and professional lives.

“My advice is to establish appropriate boundaries between your personal and professional lives, depending on your goals and the expectations of those stakeholders who could affect your ability to achieve those goals. Ideally, choosing to be your authentic self in any setting will be welcomed and valued.”

Ramsay seconded Paquin’s point but expressed the necessity of a founder’s mindfulness of their public persona.

“Today’s consumers want to purchase from brands that align with them aesthetically, ethically, sustainable, and maybe even politically. How much you give them to align with, disagree with, support, or hate on is up to you as a founder. Self-awareness is key, as is remaining in touch with consumer perception at all times,” she said. 

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