Regan Cleminson founded Coastline Creatives in 2018 around a practice she finds few other agencies follow: every creator on her roster can see every pitch email, every brand contact, and every unpaid invoice on their account in real time.

Eight years in, Regan says the transparency that now defines Coastline began as a time-management fix. “I get so many text messages every day from creators wanting a status update,” she explains. “How can I just provide them with a dashboard?”

Regan is the London-based, American CEO of Coastline Creatives, a talent representation agency focused on creators in athletic, culinary, and health and wellness categories. The roster includes creators featured in GQ, Rolling Stone, and Food & Wine, and the agency has delivered brand partnerships with adidas, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Moët Hennessy, and Crate and Barrel. Regan’s own background spans brand PR, digital marketing, and early careers as a collegiate track and field athlete and hospitality worker, experience she says gives the agency a substantive foothold in the verticals it covers. 

“I’ve dabbled in all of these industries that we represent in one way, shape, or form,” she says. “I think that gives us a little bit of an edge.”

Visibility as an Efficiency Fix, and Then Something More

The transparency model has a mundane origin. In the traditional talent manager relationship, Regan felt an obligation to respond immediately to any creator inquiry, whether it concerned a pending pitch or a contract update. “There is that expectation of responding immediately,” she explains. “If I don’t, I’m not holding up my end of the bargain.” Giving creators continuous access to account data eliminated the bulk of those incoming messages and freed the team to focus on work that actually moved accounts forward.

Through Trello, a web-based project management tool, creators can see which brands have been pitched on their behalf, the angle behind each outreach, and the full email thread where available. They can also see who at a brand is being contacted, a detail that functions as an implicit signal about effort. “If they see that we’re reaching out to the CEO of a company on their behalf, they know that we’re probably going the extra mile,” Regan says.

When creators who had previously worked at other agencies joined Coastline’s roster, the reaction was consistent. “That’s where we get the jaw on the floor,” she says. “They say, ‘I can’t believe I’ve never seen anything like this.'” 

One early creator told Regan that the pitch list was the agency’s competitive advantage and asked why she was sharing it. Regan’s response became, in effect, the agency’s operating thesis. “I’d rather just show them our cards and demonstrate our value,” she says. “Then I don’t have to constantly try to validate or explain the value we’re providing to the relationship.”

Signing for What a Creator Can Do, Not Just Where They Post

Coastline’s roster criteria follow a principle Regan describes as “ace in its place.” Follower count is not the threshold. She looks for creators who bring an independent, tangible skill to their content, separate from the act of creating content itself.

“We want there to be something else that feels tangible from a brand perspective that adds value to the storytelling than just them being a billboard,” she says. That means published cookbook authors, award-winning bartenders, current or former athletes, healthcare professionals, and people with broadcast backgrounds. It also means a disposition Regan associates with the hospitality and athletic categories specifically: the ability to read a room. She looks for creators “not operating within a vacuum and only making decisions as they relate to you, but having consideration for your audience or everybody in the room, so to speak.”

Discipline functions as a parallel criterion. “We uphold a pretty high standard for meeting deadlines and upholding their end of the bargain,” Regan says. The agency does release creators who cannot consistently meet partnership expectations.

An Onboarding Built Around a Documented Pitch Plan

Coastline’s onboarding takes 90 days, and pitching runs in parallel throughout. What the ramp is building toward is a creator-approved outreach strategy that both sides agree on before it goes into full execution.

Creators are introduced to each person on the team by role: the dedicated talent manager, the legal team, the account coordination team. Regan holds a one-on-one strategy meeting with every creator the agency signs. “We deliver a strategy for the next year: this is our financial goal for you, this is how we see you getting to that goal,” she says.

The more distinctive step is a brand preference exercise. For Melissa Riley, who runs the account @thebalanceroutine, Coastline assembled four brand categories with 15 to 25 brands each, then asked Melissa to record voice notes reacting to every brand on the list. Those reactions, ranging from ingredient objections to business practice concerns to enthusiasm for brands she had not previously encountered, produced a documented preference map that fed directly into Melissa’s Trello board.

The operational rationale is straightforward. Across a roster of 50 to 60 creators, many share overlapping brand wish lists. Without a preference hierarchy, outreach decisions become arbitrary. “We generate a hierarchy of who gets the outreach dedicated to them versus who doesn’t,” Regan says.

Talent Management Is Now a Marketing Discipline

Regan draws a direct line between effective talent management and marketing competency. Agencies that treat partnerships transactionally, moving contracts back and forth without understanding the brand’s underlying objectives, are not doing the full job in her view.

“Our job is not just selling placements like on a billboard. We are essentially acting as an extension of the marketing teams for those brands and those agencies,” she says. In practice, that means asking where in a brand’s sales funnel a creator activation should live before negotiations begin. It also means working ahead of the market: with adidas, for example, Regan describes approaching their team years before an Olympics campaign would be activated, bringing emerging themes back to creators who might fit, and opening a dialogue before the scramble starts.

It means pushing back on overly prescriptive creative briefs when the agency believes a different approach will perform better. “There are a lot of talent agents out there who literally don’t have the time to have that dialogue with a brand,” Regan says. “And so they don’t.” She attributes part of the ongoing creator movement away from major talent agencies toward smaller specialized shops to that gap. Creators leaving larger firms, she argues, are often looking for more than deal flow. “They feel like they are considered in these partnerships, not just their platforms,” Regan says.

Coastline maintains a creator-to-agent ratio that has never exceeded 20:1, a constraint she views as structural.

What a Boutique Cannot Deliver

Regan is direct about the leverage gap. Working with a boutique means conceding a degree of legal and financial weight that the large agencies carry by volume.

“There has been a growing trend at the moment with big brands and agencies not accepting any red lines that we present for contracts,” she says. “Just a take-it-or-leave-it.” At a large agency with broader client volume and more talent that brands want access to, framework agreements become available, which streamline legal review and payment cycles across future campaigns. For a smaller agency, those terms are harder to establish.

Payment recovery is the sharper edge. “Our ability to follow up and demand on late payments is a little bit diminished because we’re not in a position of leverage as a smaller agency,” Regan says. She frames it as a reality of the service industry rather than a fixable gap, and her expectations for near-term change are bounded. With some mid-tier agencies, she sees it shifting. With the largest buyers of influencer budget, she does not.

The Period Regan Is Betting On

The most exciting recent creator for Regan is a woman named Laini, who built a viral series around stealing Strava segment crowns from male athletes. The campaign spread, compelling hundreds of other creators to replicate the format. “That’s probably the most magical thing,” Regan says. “I just want to help that creator harness what that is.”

That kind of community-initiated momentum, generated by a creator who compels others to act, represents the highest return Coastline can help build toward, in Regan’s view. Very close behind it, she says, are the professional goals that creators never thought they would reach: “Their first seven-figure year, publishing their first book, being able to start a family and sustain that as a creator.” Those are the things that get her out of bed.

Beyond individual signings, she sees a shift approaching for boutique and mid-sized agencies as a category. Larger creators seeking alternatives to the major agency model are increasingly turning to specialized shops, and Regan believes the sector is positioned to absorb that shift. “I’m really excited to shepherd in this new era of talent management,” she says. “I think some of these boutique and mid-sized agencies are about to have a really lovely renaissance.” 

For Coastline, the case for that moment rests on the same argument Regan has been making through a shared dashboard for eight years: when creators can see the work, the work has to hold up.

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