HBBIP Does Coachella: Insights, Top Brands, & More (HBBIP #81)

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If you’re on social media (which I’m not) or follow social media (which I do), then you already know that recent weeks saw arguably the most Social Media of all possible events: Coachella, an annual music festival/influencer convention/thinkpiece fodder in the Californian desert.

I have written about Coachella before, and I will surely write about Coachella again. Just as you have surely read all kinds of blogs, articles, newsletters, and reports about Coachella, and you now find yourself once again wading through the annual deluge of Content. Just as attendees have long since familiarized themselves with the rituals and idiosyncrasies of the festival, and go back each year to partake and document their partaking.

If that last paragraph sounds a little weary, well, there might be some truth to that. I’ve been in the creator game for nine years now, and for all that time Coachella has been an object of both attention and scorn. Depending on who you ask, the festival is either better than ever, played out, or overrated from the start. ‘Coachella Fatigue’ is a perennial angle on the subject, so maybe it’s most accurate to say that I’ve got Coachella Fatigue Fatigue: clearly, Coachella still matters to a lot of brands and creators. But how do we quantify just how much it matters?

Well, we can get the star-studded CreatorIQ Data Operations team to investigate this year’s top brands at Coachella, the top content surrounding these brands, and how all these tops compare to the peaks set at last year’s festival, in order to see which way things are trending. That sounds pretty interesting, no? 

Suddenly I’m no longer fatigued. Or fatigue-fatigued. I’m ready for my Coachella photo ops! Let’s get into it!

The top brand(s) of Coachella (2025):

First, a word on how this data came together. We looked at branded posts from April 10 (one day before Coachella) to April 20 (the final day of Coachella’s second weekend, and also, you know). We then compared the totals that these brands racked up to the corresponding time period from 2024 (April 11 to April 21, 2024).

We found some ups and some downs, some surprises and some mainstays. While these results complicate the notion that Coachella’s glory days lie in the past, they also fail to present unambiguous success for some of the brands most closely associated with Coachella. The main conclusion, then, might be a somewhat intuitive one: just as the nature of what’s popular in beauty, fashion, wellness, and other verticals changes from year to year, so too do the top brands at Coachella. While the festival itself remains as a powerful venue for brand activations and creator content, those phenomena often function like the musical acts—fitting the general vibe, but also changing with contemporary tastes. 

Alright, enough waxing philosophical: let’s get to the data!

Top 10 Coachella Brands by EMV: 2025

While this list might contain some surprises—yes, people wear tracksuits and/or luxury gowns to a music festival in the desert—there’s at least one result that shouldn’t shake up anyone’s preconceived notions: Coachella is Revolve’s world, and the rest of us are just living in it. You get to make that claim when you drive nearly as much EMV as the next four brands combined. We’ve written about Revolve’s Coachella dominance before, and it bears repeating just how closely the brand’s iconic Revolve Festival is tied to discourse around Coachella.

However, when we look a little closer, we see that not all brand performances were created equal. After all, we have to factor in year-over-year momentum: which brands are seeing their presence at Coachella, and on Coachella-related social media, increase?

Top 10 Coachella Brands by EMV: YoY Change

So what do we see? A slight drop for Revolve, and other drops across the board for top Coachella fashion brands. However, skincare is roaring into Indio, with RHODE Skin, Kosas, and Neutrogena all boasting YoY EMV growth. Two is a coincidence, but three is a pattern: in 2025, Coachella attendees were out to save their skin. 

We talked about RHODE last week, and we’ll talk a little more about it this week, if only to remind everybody that Hailey Bieber reposted our data when it was featured by our good friends at Business of Fashion. So here’s us reposting Hailey’s repost:

Repost by CreatorIQ's page

While RHODE Skin excelled at Coachella thanks to its prevalence at creator parties and other brands’ official events—Hailey Bieber’s visit to the festival didn’t hurt, either—there’s more to the story than just RHODE Skin, or skincare at large. In fact, when we look at the top 10 overall brands that saw the highest YoY EMV growth for Coachella-related content, we see a range of verticals represented, from beverages to gummies to fashion to…airlines?

Top 10 Coachella Brands by YoY EMV Growth 

For those who don’t know, Sprinter is Kylie Jenner’s recently launched vodka spritzer brand, while Lemme is Kourtney Kardashian’s recently launched nutritional gummy brand. Both brands threw splashy events for creators at Coachella, often in conjunction with other high-growth brands on this list like RHODE Skin; both brands represent a savvy reading of contemporary trends by America’s favorite reality TV family—further proof that the Kardashian Jenner Industrial Complex is alive and well. (A contention further bolstered by the Coachella success of the OG Kardashian-Jenner alcohol brand, 818 Tequila.)

Chloé, meanwhile, proved one of the few fashion brands to make progress at this year’s festival, perhaps because both festival headliners and attendees were caught up in the thrall of the ongoing Chloé Girl trend. Meanwhile, Ray-Ban, Alaska Airlines, and Absolut all benefited from serving as official Coachella sponsors, which makes sense: if there are three things all Coachella goers need by default, it’s plane tickets, a pair of shades, and a drink.

Rounding out the list, we have our old friends on the skincare side: RHODE Skin, Kosas, and Neutrogena. When contrasted with all the alcohol brands, skincare’s presence proves that though Coachella-goers might not have valued their largest internal organ, they took steps to protect their largest overall organ. And that’s a little anatomy humor for you on this Monday morning.

It’s pretty much those same brands for all the key YoY growth metrics:

Top 10 Coachella Brands by YoY Engagements Growth

BMW and Poosh get in on the action here, with BMW being an event sponsor and Poosh being Kourtney Kardashian’s lifestyle brand. So basically, the Kardashian-Jenners are responsible for at least a quarter of Coachella’s highest-growth brands this year. The only thing I’m surprised about is that it took until 2025 for this to happen.

Top 10 Coachella Brands by YoY Creator Count Growth

But in the end, as seen from which brands saw the greatest expansions to their creator counts, all roads lead to RHODE. But hey, at least the White Fox Boutique baddies make an appearance in this graph! Miss you ladies. Plus, there’s ONE SIZE, showing that beauty brands do in fact still have a place at Coachella. I bet brand founder Patrick Starrr was happy about that…

Patrick Starrr with CreatorIQ data

That’s right: our data was repped not only by Hailey Bieber, but Patrick Starrr. Not bad for a day’s work! Thank you to both founders: we are happy that you are happy, and congratulate you on your richly deserved success. 

Having said that, celebrations are nice and all, but I’ll also accept free merch (please).

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