
CAA Brand Incubator Creative Beauty And Pley Beauty’s Collapse Leaves Contractors Unpaid
When CAA formed beauty brand incubator Creative Beauty in late 2019 and over two years later launched Pley Beauty, a makeup brand connected to actress Peyton List, contractors, from makeup artists to photographers, gladly signed on to work with it.
They believed the giant talent agency, valued at $7 billion last year in its sale to Artémis, French luxury fashion tycoon François Pinault’s investment vehicle, had the money, skill and team to pull off successful beauty brands. The brainchild of Michael Yanover, whose tenure as head of business development at CAA began in 2003 and engineering of Lady Gaga’s brand Haus Labs lent him beauty industry credibility, and led by CEO Alexis Maybank, former CEO and founder of Gilt Groupe, Creative Beauty planned to introduce at least three brands attached to famous names on CAA’s client roster deemed to be bankable in beauty.
But Creative Beauty dissolved in 2022 after Pley Beauty made its January debut with splashy marketing and before its second brand that sources close to the company report was tied to singer Natti Natasha ever came to fruition. Maybank exited in July 2022, and Laura Staves, a former SVP at The Route Beauty and GM for EM Cosmetics at Ipsy, was Pley Beauty’s CEO from August 2022 to May 2023. Yanover was no longer at CAA as of May this year.
In the wake of Creative Beauty’s dissolution, contractors have gone without payment from CAA, Creative Beauty or Pley Beauty to the tune of thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, an outcome surprising to them since the agency regularly orchestrates multimillion-dollar deals for celebrities and athletes.
“Literally, the pitch to us when we started working with them was, we are backed by CAA,” says a contractor owed more than $37,000 for services rendered. “If it were a brand-new company that didn’t have CAA backing, I would have had them pay a bulk of it upfront versus 50/50.”
The dissolution of Creative Beauty demonstrates that the lure of celebrity beauty brands often outshines their lucrativeness, particularly in a beauty industry crowded with them, and the challenges of steering a brand engine inside a company with its attention mainly elsewhere. Ipsy owner Beauty For All Industries and Unilever shuttered brand incubators last year to focus attention on their primary operations.
It also underscores that, in a consumer brand landscape littered with what publication Modern Retail characterized in an article last week as zombie brands, fire sales and quiet closures, there can be scores of people impacted by brand implosions that aren’t obvious on the imploding brands’ stagnant social media feeds and out-of-stock websites. While Pley Beauty products are still available at retailers and e-tailers Beauty Bay, Beautyhabit, Macy’s, Airshop and Revolve, its site is inactive, and its last Instagram and Facebook posts were Feb. 14.
A representative for List didn’t respond to Beauty Independent’s requests for comment, and CAA didn’t give comment. Several attempts to contact Yanover and Maybank were unanswered. Pley Beauty emails bounced back.

Generally, people caught up in zombie brands, fire sales and quiet closures have little to no leverage to force payments, if there’s even money for them, don’t speak openly about them as to not deter future employers and conclude they’re better off finding other gigs than fighting for the amounts they’re owed. The contractor out $37,000 says, “It would make zero financial sense for us to file a lawsuit and then we are probably never going to see any money from it anyway.”
A different contractor owed $6,000 recounts, “Everything was going smoothly, content was being delivered and then it went silent when it came to invoicing. I didn’t hear back for a while. I know a lot of people that were doing work for them. We all got in contact and realized that they owed everyone a lot of money. One day when I reached out, everyone that I knew who worked there was gone.”
Six contractors owed money by Creative Beauty and Pley Beauty communicated with Beauty Independent, five anonymously and one, Yves Huy Truong, a photographer and director who’s shot for Hourglass, ColourPop and Sephora, on the record. The contractors preferring to stay anonymous fear foreclosing on jobs with CAA and its prominent clients. Select contractors executed services for CAA prior and subsequent to their work with Creative Beauty and Pley Beauty that they were compensated for.
Beauty products refurbishment company Refurbco Inc. filed a legal complaint in January last year against Creative Beauty and Pley Beauty for a nonpayment of $43,451.95. In addition, to substantiate nonpayment, Beauty Independent obtained emails sent by Pley Beauty to around 20 contractors with explanations of the reasons for it.
An August 2022 email states ownership of Pley Beauty was transferred from Creative Beauty to a company called Pley by Pey LLC and its affiliation with Creative Beauty was severed. As early as 2021, nearly a year in advance of Pley Beauty’s debut, Pley by Pey LLC filed for Pley Beauty-related trademark protection, and Maybank was identified as the contact for the company.
“The pitch to us when we started working with them was, we are backed by CAA.”
A later email reads, “We are deeply sorry for the situation. We know you were put in a stressful spot, and it really pains us to know our partners are hurting as we really enjoyed working with each of you. As some of you know, back in late-May 2022, we were put into sudden distress by our parent company, Creative Beauty. This was beyond disappointing to all, as we had built an incredible foundation and were set to sail!…We’re stuck in this weird limbo period where we are not able to pay out the debts we want to pay.”
The email goes on to mention that Pley Beauty would pay its contractors $100 monthly “until we get to our company restructure goal” and offered a $500 gift certificate for Pley Beauty’s site. In April last year, the contractors were sent another email informing them that the $100 “monthly good-faith payments” were ceasing.
A contractor who received $100 monthly payments and a gift certificate says, “I’m like, is this a joke? I think they owed me five grand. I was doing the math, and it was going to take years. I only got a couple of payments, and then it just stopped.” The contractor surmises, “If you think about the power of social media, they were kind of strategic with this drip of $100 to keep us at bay from trying to smear the brand.”
Truong, a recipient of $100 monthly payments as well, estimates he’s owed a minimum of $5,300 for photography and videography commissioned for a shoot on May 23, 2022. “It was just an all around strange experience, except for the shoot itself in which the creative team was wonderful,” says Truong in an email. “We had a great time and it seemed like at the end of that day I would be getting more work from them.”
Pley Beauty hit the market with 60-plus stockkeeping units priced from roughly $12 to $42 such as $36 Pleyer Palettes, $16 Let It Linger Eyeliners, $20 Lip Habit, $18 Pley Date multipurpose sticks and $20 One-Stop-POP blushes. Aimed at gen Z consumers, it had clean and sustainable beauty messaging—its packaging contained recycled materials, and it was certified plastic neutral by plastic action platform rePurpose Global—and traded on the renown List gained from roles in the Disney shows “Jessie” and “Bunk’d” that were etched into many gen Zers’ childhoods.

Recently, List has played a leading role in the Netflix series “Cobra Kai.” Pley Beauty released a limited-edition “Cobra Kai”-themed capsule collection in 2022. Pley Beauty has 41,800 followers on Instagram, and List has 20.3 million followers on the platform.
Melissa Hernandez, a celebrity makeup artist who’s handled red carpet looks for Olivia Rodrigo, Sydney Sweeney and Lana Condor, served as Pley Beauty’s director of artistry. To celebrate its inauguration, the brand hosted a pop-up at Los Angeles event space Frankie featuring what public relations firm LaForce described as “larger–than–life–
Out of the gate, List and Pley Beauty faced skepticism about a new celebrity beauty brand entering a market with a surfeit of celebrity beauty brands. In an interview with the media outlet Glossy in 2022, List said, “It’s a question that I’ve definitely sat with. But my heart is really in it. I’ve been involved in every step of development along the way.”
According to the LinkedIn account of Jenna Phalouka, an ex-senior brand marketing manager at Pley Beauty, the brand generated $200,000 in direct-to-consumer revenue within the first three months of its online launch. However, a source employed at Pley Beauty at the outset says the brand was spending liberally. “We used the best of everything,” says the source. “We went to the top PR agencies, the top designers, built the top websites.”
In February 2022, Pley Beauty branched into e-tail with Revolve. Phalouka’s LinkedIn account says she helmed its Revolve partnership, including a presence at the physical outpost Social Club and Coachella event Revolve Fest 2022, and delivered a $1 million marketing package “with the largest on-site activation.” Pley Beauty products are now discounted on Revolve’s site.
“We used the best of everything.”
In August 2023, Pley Beauty landed on Urban Outfitters’ site with digital content, product giveaways, model imagery and social media posts. The brand didn’t meet its sales targets at the retailer, and its products were marked down in five months. Today, Urban Outfitters doesn’t sell Pley Beauty products.
Beautyhabit picked up Pley Beauty on Faire, the wholesale marketplace where it maintains a listing. The e-tailer is currently phasing out the brand for underperformance. Beautyhabit founder Teresa Mitchell says, “I brought it in originally because it provided a ‘fun’ experience, not a serious makeup brand such as Chantecaille…The price point is good.”
Pley Beauty appears to have remaining inventory to unload. The contractor owed $6,000 says, “They had tons of inventory, way more than any beauty brand should have at that point in their business…and not enough people buying it.”
Creative Beauty is a blemish on what otherwise seems to be a strong record of accomplishments for Yanover. A central spoke drawing together Silicon Valley and Hollywood, he guided CAA in the establishment of a wide network of venture investments and consumer brands to diversify its business outside of entertainment. On his LinkedIn page, Yanover discloses that network yielded a “8.3x return on realized/unrealized investments and 6.5x return on fully realized investments.”
Among the entities in it are Caravan, a venture studio with Yummers, a pet food brand linked to “Queer Eye” stars Jonathan Van Ness and Antoni Porowski, fit52, a fitness app associated with singer Carrie Underwood, and shower products brand Hai in its portfolio; Connect Ventures, an investment partnership between CAA and venture capital firm NEA with Harper Wilde, Ghia, Camp, Soft Services and Julie in its portfolio; De Soi, a non-alcoholic drink brand developed with pop star Katy Perry and beverage brand incubator and holding company Amass; and OAM Skin, a clinical skincare brand aligned with singer Ciara and financial partners New Mountain Capital and Topix.

Charlotte Tilbury initially piqued Yanover’s interest in beauty. CAA was an investor in the makeup brand well ahead of its sale to Puig in 2020 for 1.2 billion pounds. As chronicled by Techcrunch, he got serious about the beauty business in the 2010s. He raised capital in 2018 from Goop investor Lightspeed Venture Partners for Haus Laboratories, which launched in 2019 and rebranded as Haus Labs in 2022.
“It occurred to me that the margins were fantastic and the beauty space was fantastic,” he told the publication. Yanover continued, “I wanted to understand and take advantage of the influencer side of beauty… but I wanted to do something that had a silicon valley structure. Fenty and Kylie helped build the case we were making to VCs, This is an area that has the potential to generate high amounts of revenue in a short amount of time.”
Times change, though. The bursting of the DTC bubble has undercut beauty brands’ capacity to quickly drive substantial sales volumes and caused VC firms to pivot away from consumer brands, undoubtedly making it harder for CAA to attract VC funding for its consumer brand aspirations. Yanover erected the agency’s network of venture investments and consumer brands during a period of ownership by private equity firm TPG. Artémis’s takeover of a majority stake in CAA may be bringing a reshuffling of priorities.
In 2016, Yanover wrote a piece for the magazine Fast Company entitled, “How I’ve Built Successful Startups At Big Companies.” In it, he argues, “Creating a startup isn’t as difficult as some executives might imagine,” and sketches out a playbook for big companies experimenting with startups. The plays in it are to set up “the business as a new company,” “put old and new management on equal footing,” and obtain “third-party validation” from partners.
For the most part, Yanover carried out those plays at Creative Beauty, but the contemporary beauty business requires the previous startup playbook or, ahem, Pley Beauty book to be thrown out.
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