The agency Ashton Wall and her co-founder, Amelia Soohoo, needed at a cosmetics brand they worked for didn’t exist. Legacy PR firms had added Influencer Marketing arms, but it was rarely the core competency. In October 2021, they founded the firm they couldn’t find.

GateMaker Community, headquartered in Miami, Florida, operates as a creator-led earned media agency for consumer brands including Groupe L’Occitane, Milk Makeup, OPI, NARS, Rag & Bone, Reebok, Estee Lauder Companies, Unilever, and L’Oreal, among others. The firm operates PR and word-of-mouth strategy, building around creators and community rather than traditional editorial placements. In June 2026, Residence, a global creative network, acquired GateMaker.

The founding premise was a direct response to what Ashton and Amelia saw in the market. “You still see this today where a lot of blue-chip PR firms that have been around since the 90s or even before, they’ve all rebranded themselves as Influencer Marketing and creator firms, but they’re not,” Ashton says. “They might have an arm, and that arm might execute incredibly well, but it’s actually not the DNA of the firm.” 

By April 2022, less than six months after launching with no prior agency experience between them, GateMaker reported reaching a $1 million annual run rate.

ColourPop Rewired a Performance Marketer’s Assumptions

Ashton entered marketing through performance. At Tradesy, the fashion resale marketplace where she spent nearly five years, she learned LTV/CAC ratios, funnel conversion, and the discipline of justifying spend to boards and finance teams. Performance marketing was the ascendant discipline, and she was good at it.

The shift came at ColourPop, part of the Seed Beauty portfolio that also housed Kylie Cosmetics and other Kardashian-linked brands. The influence those brands exercised over consumer behavior was, by Ashton’s account, something no paid media budget could replicate. “It was just undeniable how that moved markets in a way that a performance marketing budget never could,” she says.

Ashton’s title at ColourPop was Director, Performance Marketing. Amelia’s was Director of Influencer Marketing. Those two functions typically operate in competition at consumer brands. At ColourPop, the dynamic ran differently. “I often wanted to give her my budget,” Ashton recalls. “You never see that at brands.”

That shared conviction became the intellectual foundation of GateMaker. Not that performance marketing was irrelevant, but that it was downstream of something harder to buy. “The soft stuff is actually the moat,” Ashton says.

Every Business Objective Now Traces Back to the Creator

GateMaker’s operating framework positions creators as the gravitational center of a brand’s marketing ecosystem. Paid, owned, and shared channels orbit that core.

At an executive summit with a GateMaker client earlier this year, the company’s CEO and CMO outlined their goals for the next 36 months, involving category leadership, reaching customers with a specific skin type, and establishing authority with a professional audience. “Every objective that the CMO and CEO shared, the solution all came back to influencer and creator marketing,” Ashton says.

The operational conclusion she draws from that pattern is about resource allocation. “The brand marketer’s door is the most knocked on from everyone in the organization, needing them to power their lane,” she says. “You really need to staff accordingly. It should probably be your biggest line item and your most supported externally and internally.”

She argues the same logic extends to performance media specifically. Brands trying to scale Meta ads, she notes, now find that creator-generated assets produce the strongest-performing creative. “When you look at what’s working in every other channel, it likely leads back to that.”

Designing Word of Mouth: The Sphere of Influence Model

GateMaker maps what Ashton calls “spheres of influence” when building creator strategies for clients. Starting from a target community, the firm identifies the most influential voices within it, then the creators who amplify those voices, then the next tier outward. Each tier is engaged through a different mechanism.

“If you want to work with 500 creators that match that sphere of influence, you can’t work with them all the same way,” Ashton explains. “Who are you engaging in really big campaigns? Who are you engaging in an organic way? Who are you inviting to events? Who are you gifting to?”

On platform selection, the firm applies the same creator-first logic. Ashton uses Vogue as a reference point; whether a collaboration runs in the magazine, on YouTube’s “Vogue Beauty Secrets” series, or inside a sponsored spread matters less than whether Vogue’s brand credibility fits the campaign at all. GateMaker is currently paying attention to Substack, and what Ashton calls YouTube’s renaissance, categories she sees as underweighted relative to TikTok and Instagram.

She also pushes back on the brand expectation that strong view counts should immediately produce conversions. “Let it warm up for a little bit,” Ashton says. The analogy she reaches for is paid social: no brand expects every Meta ad to convert in the first hour of a campaign.

Legacy Brands Resist the Creative They Are Paying For

The brands with the strongest creative identities are often the most resistant to ceding directorial control to creators, in Ashton’s experience.

“It’s not your creative. It’s their creative,” she says. “They have a million followers, not you, and you want to work with them because they have a million followers. They know what their following likes. So trust them.”

A related tension recently surfaced around the word “influencer” itself, with some treating the term as a pejorative. Ashton draws a gender line through the discourse. “Why is MrBeast a creator but Alix Earle is an influencer?” she asks. “Are you saying you hate influencers, or do you just hate women that make a lot of money?”

She connects the double standard to how branding power has historically been allocated. Twenty years ago, she notes, a small group of people in a conference room determined which voices would represent brands. Social media distributed that decision to audiences. “Women aren’t waiting to be chosen,” Ashton says. “They’re just choosing to be a voice.”

AI Scales Taste, but Cannot Manufacture It

Ashton sees AI as a tool that improves what skilled people do, not a substitute for underlying skill. “AI is like a supercharger,” she says. “But it can’t replace taste, it can’t replace relationships, it can’t replace true creativity. What it can do is take those attributes and 10x them.”

She is skeptical of automated creator-matching platforms that promise to remove human curation from the process entirely. For smaller-scale executions, she allows they may have a role. For high-stakes work, she draws a harder line. “Huge campaigns are never going to function that way,” Ashton says. The comparison she reaches for is film, noting that no one expects Hollywood to cast based entirely on an automated brief.

The Acquisition That Completes the Solar System

GateMaker was not formally put up for sale. Inbound acquisition interest arrived around 2023, but Ashton says it wasn’t until 2025 that offers became serious enough to warrant real conversations. What distinguished Residence from other potential acquirers was its operating philosophy.

“The companies in the network remain independent in a way. They retain their brand and their team,” Ashton explains. “It’s a model of shared services to power each company, which is very different than the typical holdco model where they kind of just swallow you.” Other companies in the Residence network include BUCK, a design studio, and ACRONYM, an experiential firm.

For GateMaker’s clients, the acquisition expands the available service set. Before joining Residence, the agency could not take on experiential work, creative influencer mailers, or paid media management. Now it can. “If creators and influencers are the sun of the solar system, wouldn’t it be nice to have all the planets in the same solar system?” Ashton says. “So now they are.”

For Ashton, the broader wave of agency consolidation carries a specific signal about where value sits in a market increasingly automated at the executional layer. “I think a lot of people have viewed agencies as almost like a second-class business,” she says. “And I think now people are realizing service businesses are so very valuable and know no limit to what they can achieve.”

The Decade That Finally Rewards Brand Thinkers

For Ashton, the larger story is not which platform comes next, but that creative and brand thinking, long subordinated to performance marketing, is finally the discipline brands most depend on. 

The through-line from her career is direct: she started in performance, watched organic and creator-led work outperform it in ways no budget could match, and built an agency organized around that conclusion. The Residence network now gives GateMaker the capability set to serve brands across the full scope of what creator marketing has become.

“This is the era of creativity. This is the era of brand,” Ashton says. “Taste, creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, and just trying things that seem a little out there – if this is how you think, this is your decade.”

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