The Business of Fashion and LTK hosted a dinner in Mayfair for leaders from Harvey Nichols, Glossier, e.l.f., Rixo and others, to talk about how people discover and come to trust brands now. Two things stood out to me: what was said, and the format in which it was said.
Creators as arbiters of trust
LTK’s co-founder Amber Venz Box described creators as arbiters of trust. People are unsure what is real online, discovery is scattered across feeds, communities and AI tools, and in that confusion a real person with a track record carries weight. According to LTK, the platform now connects 500,000 creators with 44 million monthly shoppers and drives more than $6 billion in yearly sales for its brand partners.
The follower is fading
One line from the evening matches what I see in every campaign report: most people who see a creator’s content today do not follow that creator. Algorithms show content to whoever is likely to care. The follower count says less than ever.
What replaces it is fit and trust. One founder at the table called following a vanity metric and said her brand looks for cultural relevance and shared values instead. Another said audiences can tell immediately when a partnership is transactional.
Measurement grows up
Creator programmes are moving in-house, budgets are larger, and with them the demand for proof. Brands use separate tools for discovery, seeding, payments and reporting, which makes the whole thing slow. The direction is clear: fewer tools, clearer data, decisions based on what a creator actually moves.
In my reports I separate three things: what was seen (reach, views), what was felt (engagement, comments, saves) and what it was worth (earned media value, sales where tracked). One number never tells the story.
Why AI may make people more valuable
The most interesting part of the conversation was about AI. Search and comparison are moving to AI tools, and some brands already see referral traffic from them. Yet, citing research with Northwestern University, Venz Box said trust in creators had risen 21 percent year on year. Several guests argued that AI makes human recommendations more valuable, not less, because people still remember a person and how they made them feel.
And why the dinner format works
The evening itself proves a point. A small table, the right people, one topic and good food produce conversations that a conference panel never does. I plan brand dinners for the same reason: a launch dinner with the right creators and editors is the fastest way to turn people into advocates. More on brand events.
Source: “Inside BoF and LTK’s Intimate London Dinner on the New Fundamentals of Creator Commerce”, The Business of Fashion, 2026.
