Welcome back to Behind the Creator Curtain

Welcome back to Behind the Creator Curtain, a series where I break down exactly how creators grow their businesses from brand deals to empire, so that someday you can do it too. And today I wanna talk about Patrick Starr. You know him from his beauty content that dominated YouTube, from his massive collaborations with major beauty brands and from ONE/SIZE, the makeup brand he built that is now in major retailers like Sephora. And of course, I'm gonna feature him because he's also Filipino like me. Here's what I wanna talk about. It's what he understood about brand deals that a lot of creators completely miss. Okay, so Patrick started on YouTube, makeup tutorials, product reviews. He was good at it. And like most successful beauty creators, he was also doing a lot of great brand partnerships. Building a career as an influencer. Most creators look at that and think, that is the goal, right? Brand deals with big names, consistent partnerships. And honestly for a lot of creators, that is a solid business model. But here is where Patrick saw something completely different that made his career take off. He didn't look at brand deals as the destination. He looked at them as education, and more specifically as positioning. Every collaboration he did with a major beauty brand was teaching him something. How do they develop shade ranges? How do they decide what products to launch? What actually works and what is just hype? He was actually studying the industry from the inside. And while he was doing that, he was also building something else: a unique point of view in the beauty space. A specific, clear, unapologetic perspective on what the beauty industry was missing and exactly where he fit inside it. He used all of that knowledge, all of that credibility he built working with major brands to launch ONE/SIZE, a makeup brand that is unapologetically inclusive, that solves real problems that he saw in the industry, that reflects his actual point of view, not just what he thought would sell. In fact, he even went to school to become an esthetician, so he understood the market and the need from a professional level, not just as a consumer. And it worked. The brand launched at Sephora, it expanded, it became a real business that exists completely separately from any single brand deal or platform algorithm. And here's what I need you to understand about his trajectory. Patrick did not build his brand because he got tired of doing partnerships or because brand deals stopped coming. He built it because he was thinking bigger than the next brand deal. Every collaboration was gathering proof that people trusted his recommendations, proof that his point of view mattered in the beauty space. And when he had enough proof, he just built while still creating content, while still doing partnerships. And he used the brand deals as fuel and as the investment to get ONE/SIZE started. And that is the exact mindset shift that separates the creators who stay at the brand deal level from the ones who eventually build something that outlast every algorithm change and every brand budget shift. And Patrick understood this. He knew exactly what he stood for. And he was playing a completely different game while everyone else thought he was just posting makeup tutorials. That is exactly what I want you to start thinking about. What are you learning from every brand you work with? What are you building that could exist beyond any single partnership? What could you create that's fully yours? This is what intentional positioning looks like over time. And the creators who get there are not the ones who waited until they felt ready. They are the ones who started paying attention right now.