community-commerce
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Brian Marks Turned a Box of Unsold T-Shirts Into Bonfire
A failed campaign left Brian Marks with a box of shirts nobody wanted. He kept the lesson, removed the inventory risk and built Bonfire around a simple promise: let the cause matter more than the logistics.
Bellesa’s First Model Failed in Public - Its Second Built a Pleasure Brand Where Ads Couldn’t Go
A consent crisis forced the Montreal startup to tear out its original engine. What followed was a sharper business built on owned products, creator distribution and the radical idea that the checkout page is part of sexual wellness.
Arthur Alvarenga Built a Business Out of the Boring Parts of the Creator Economy
After five years building a neighborhood network that went nowhere, Arthur Alvarenga found a better business hiding in six hours of manual WhatsApp admin. Hubla grew from that narrow fix into the operating layer for Brazil's digital-product sellers.
Glossier Built the Comment Section Into a Beauty Counter. Then the Counter Moved.
Born from a beauty blog and built for Instagram, Glossier made customers part of the product team. Its second act is a harder experiment: keeping that intimacy while selling wherever beauty shoppers already are.
Ty Haney
Ty Haney is a consumer-brand founder who built Outdoor Voices into a category-defining activewear label starting in 2013, was pushed out in 2020, and rebuilt from scratch. She now runs Try Your Best (TYB), a community and loyalty platform used by more than 200 consumer brands, and in 2025 returned as CEO of Outdoor Voices after its acquisition by Consortium Brand Partners. She also co-founded the plant-based energy brand Joggy.
Try Your Best (TYB)
Try Your Best (TYB) is a community rewards platform that lets consumer brands turn their most obsessed fans into a measurable, on-chain loyalty layer. Founded by Outdoor Voices creator Ty Haney in 2021, TYB rewards shoppers for participation - reviews, referrals, user-generated content, challenges and purchases - with collectibles, brand coins and access to exclusive drops. Around 200 brands including Glossier, Rare Beauty, Poppi, Urban Outfitters and Saie use TYB to reach roughly two million users, mostly Gen Z women, with the company reporting higher purchase frequency and lifetime value for participating customers.