By Nancy Dahlberg
Believing anyone can be a content creator, the team of Trend, a Miami Beach-based startup, is building a curated creator network and marketplace. The company today the closing of $3 million in pre-seed funding.
The round was led by Flybridge with participation from Pharrell Williams’ Black Ambition, Techstars Ventures, and the founders of Kabam, Crunchyroll, Rotten Tomatoes, Twitch, LegalZoom and others across the media world and tech industry. Miami’s Flamingo Capital is also an investor.
Co-founded by Ramon Berrios and Zach Moosbrugger, Trend connects top brands with original photos and videos made by content creators. The funding will help the team build out its creator side of the platform, expand into new industry verticals and reach more businesses. Trend relocated its HQ from Austin last fall.
“We’re trying to build the world’s largest creative studio without a studio and in that process, empowering anyone with a smartphone to make a living by doing it,” said Berrios, Trend’s CEO, in an interview with Refresh Miami.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Berrios founded Trend in 2019 in Austin after having a realization that, while influencer marketing can be great, the outcome of influencer marketing is not within a brand’s control. Trend started out by having influencers create content for brands and then selling them the content, giving the brands licensing and distribution rights, he said. “And the opportunities just kept opening up. We thought, ‘hey, we have more leverage here than any creative studio — we can do this all around the world, any location, any setting’.”
From there the vision expanded again. “Almost everyone has a smartphone, everyone knows how to use TikTok, everyone is editing videos and images. This is not just for influencers, anybody could do this,” Berrios said. That includes the Uber driver who wants to do product photography from her apartment. “Our mission is really to just help people monetize their time by doing the things that they love and shooting content in the process.”
Trend is a curated marketplace that helps brands source high-quality custom content and has worked with Chameleon Cold-Brew, Health-Ade Kombucha, FabFitFun, Saatva Mattress, Mark Cuban Companies and other brands. Trend partners with OpenStore for their DTC Pod, which has featured over 200 of the best founders in the e-commerce space and has 60,000 listeners, Berrios said.
The Trend Creator Community consists of thousands of talented, creative personalities the company hand-selects and invites to join. The creators make unboxing videos, lifestyle images, product shots, in-use demo videos, and other content to help a brand scale. Anyone eager to earn money by shooting content can apply to join the network on trend.io, Berrios said.
To date, the creator network has produced over 100,000 pieces of content for the brands. The startup plans to launch a full web app that will enable creators to completely manage their own businesses. The community is currently powered through an IOS app. “We’ve been building quietly for the past three years, but now it’s time to get on the map and really be out there,” Berrios said.
Trend is a team of 8, with 5 employees in Miami so far, and is hiring. “We just found the best engineer; he starts on Monday. We found him here. Our creator success team is all in Miami. Or customer success person is also in Miami. It’s all coming together here, including our investors.”
Williams said he was immediately drawn to Trend’s mission of empowerment and individuality.
“They are enabling a whole new set of creators to harness the power of what makes them unique and allowing brands to tap into that magic and gather content from around the world, all while working through a single community and platform,” Williams said in the Hollywood Reporter.
This story has been updated. Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg and email her at [email protected]
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