Inside Howl's $1.1 Billion Creator Economy Expansion Play

Forbes

25-06-2025

Social commerce platform, Howl, is expanding creator economy access beyond beauty and fashion.
Since 2022, founder and CEO Li Haslett Chen has been on a mission to expand access to social commerce through her creator platform Howl. Over the past three years, over 20,000 creators have generated $1.1 Billion in sales across brands like Samsung, Nintendo, LG, Sony, and Nike. When it comes to modern lifestyle essentials like gaming, consumer tech, and wellness, Howl is the clear leader.
'Social commerce has exploded into a $100 Billion dollar market, but it's been artificially constrained to beauty and fashion,' Haslett Chen shared. 'We built Howl to capture the enormous opportunity in gaming, consumer technology, and wellness.' Howl's top revenue drivers challenge conventional wisdom about what sells in the creator economy. It's things like Nintendo Switch 2, Sony Noise-Cancelling Headphones, Oura 4 Smart Ring, Nike Vaporfly running shoes, Pokémon cards, TP Link wifi routers, and thousands of other modern essentials from OLED TVs to Ninja CREAMi devices.
Howl founder and CEO, Li Haslett Chen.
Haslett Chen learned brand building from the inside out at Vogue and Chanel, then watched media's digital transformation unfold as a Warner Bros Discovery board member. That vantage point revealed what others missed. Howl allows brands to work directly with creators and product reviewers and is becoming the go-to platform for athletes, cultural commentators and industry insiders who lead the conversation and drive purchase. This unlocks countless new possibilities for people to discover, share, and earn through media. For brands and retailers, Howl offers an end-to-end solution featuring creator matching, campaign management tools, performance optimization, content rights, attribution, reporting and payments. Howl is unique because it provides real-time, product-specific sales, SKU insights that retailers need to power their media networks, as well as clear commission rates, bonuses, and flat fees with no hidden fees.
Creators of all sizes can partner will brands from home, beauty, fashion and electronics.
On a Howl dashboard, creators can see exactly what was sold, at what times, and through which videos. It's the kind of visibility that feels obvious, until you realize that other affiliate platforms creators are left in the dark about their audience purchases. It's this type of transparency that has empowered creators to earn more than $100 Million dollars on the platform since 2022. This supports the company's belief that the more creators know the more everyone wins. Creators regularly discover that their audience purchases items they hadn't originally featured, generating fresh earning opportunities they wouldn't have considered otherwise.
'With so many new creators in the space, this type of order data really differentiates Howl - this feedback loop means new ideas, better content, of course, more revenue,' shared Haslett Chen. Howl's technology works for all the stakeholders involved, which are creators, brands, and increasingly, retail media networks. Retail media networks (RMN's for short) are expected to be the fastest-growing advertising channel across media in the next few years, but until Howl, creator commerce has been difficult to scale and measure.
On a Howl dashboard, creators can see exactly what was sold, at what times, and through which ... More videos.
'RMN's best-selling onsite inventory is sponsored product listings. We're connecting these turnkey retail media ad products to creator commerce. This innovation allows RMN's to access exponentially more inventory without changing the way they buy or sell to brands,' added Haslett Chen. With social commerce projected to reach massive scale over the next decade, Haslett Chen's bet on expanding the creator economy to new categories positions Howl at the center of a fundamental shift. Not just in how products reach consumers, but in who gets to participate in the economic upside of content creation. For Haslett Chen, that expansion represents the creator economy's true potential finally being realized.