When Kristal Heredia started managing a creator early in her career, she quickly learned how much the business of influence depended on negotiation. The creator had the audience size, engagement, and influence that companies were paying for. The rates coming in reflected that value.

Then Kristal began meeting other creators with similar platforms, comparable metrics, and in some cases with larger audiences who were receiving much less. The difference, she says she found, was race.

“I actually saw the pay gap firsthand when I was solo managing her,” she says. “I would meet someone who also had the platform and had the influence, who had more numbers or maybe aligned numbers, who wasn’t white, who was either a Latina, who was Black, Asian, who was receiving significantly less.”

That experience became the foundation for Mujeres Social Digital Agency, the boutique talent firm Kristal launched in 2021 to represent creators across beauty, fashion, lifestyle, and food. The agency was built around a question she kept returning to: why were some creators being valued differently despite bringing similar influence to brand partnerships?

Today, Kristal operates on both sides of the Creator Economy. She manages talent through Mujeres Social while maintaining her own creator career in fashion and lifestyle content. From her base in Fairfield County, Connecticut, she describes the agency as a business built around changing how creators, particularly those from underrepresented communities, approach brand negotiations.

“I’ve done work to kind of go against the grain and be a voice for the underrepresented,” she says. “I want that to be my forward message, and I hope that when anyone looks me up, they receive that.”

What She Saw That Nobody Was Naming

Before Mujeres Social had a name, Kristal was already acting as an informal manager. She had built a relationship with a creator, began solo-handling her negotiations and pitches, and started learning how the money moved. What she observed shifted everything.

“That’s what really built the advocate within me,” she says of watching the pay gap operate in real time. Her reaction was not focused on what she could personally gain from the disparity. “In the beginning, it wasn’t even about, ‘Okay, well, what can I get?’ It was about, ‘Wait a minute, why aren’t other women receiving?’”

From that question came the agency. It began as a solo operation with her niece as an assistant, one person handling all talent operations end to end. That arrangement nearly killed the idea. “I wore all the hats and it wasn’t fun doing that,” she says. “My passion quickly kind of withered away and I realized, ‘No, I love this work. I just need help.’”

She started building a team. In 2026, she brought on a new internal manager for her own creator account, which she credits with producing her highest-earning year. “Ultimately, 2026 has been my highest earning year because of that shift, because of having a fresh set of eyes on my content,” she says.

What Gets a Creator Signed

Mujeres Social now represents creators across beauty, fashion, lifestyle, and food. The roster expanded as the team identified emerging niches and as the industry’s definition of “niche” itself began to collapse. Kristal quotes a perspective she endorses entirely: “I am the niche. Like, there is no niche, it’s me, I’m the niche.”

Before signing anyone, the agency runs an intensive case study. Follower counts and engagement averages are part of the evaluation but not the deciding factors. “We’re looking through creators’ comments to see if it’s an actual community or if it’s just other creators kind of cheering them on,” she says. Brands want human engagement, real people participating without being incentivized to do so.

The second criterion is qualitative. Mujeres Social specifically seeks out creators willing to show the real and raw of their journey. “People don’t necessarily get attached to figures more so than they get attached to the story behind the figure,” she says. “What is the story? What is their struggle? People are so scared to share their struggles these days where people need to hear it the most.”

The Negotiation, From the Inside

Every deal at Mujeres Social begins with the brand’s scope of work. The agency breaks that scope into line-item rates and sends over what the creator’s work is worth. Pushback is expected and standard. “Brands are always going to negotiate,” Kristal says. “Something that I’ve learned in business is you should negotiate. The first number that you receive, there’s always room for negotiation.”

Her philosophy for creators on the other side of that table is equally clear. “Sometimes, you should deny something because you’re worth more than it,” she says. A brand with a low budget this month may have overflow the next. Standing firm on rates preserves both leverage and relationships. The creator, she emphasizes, always gets final say on every offer.

Deals fall apart, according to Kristal, in two scenarios: rates that fail to reflect a creator’s value, and brand conduct that misaligns with a creator’s public positioning. She cites a swimwear brand that recently faced public accusations of racism and never publicly addressed them. “For me, that speaks volumes.”

When brands arrive at Mujeres Social expecting the same accommodation a larger, higher-volume agency might extend, the response is consistent. “Data is king. And we have the data,” she says. “We’re able to respectfully bring it back to disrespectful offers.” The agency’s size, she argues, is a feature. “We’re small but mighty.”

What Running a Brand-Side Business Teaches You

Working daily inside brand negotiations has reshaped how Kristal manages her own platform. Not in ways that compromise her directness. In ways that reflect a longer horizon.

“If a brand is investing so much money in you, it needs to make sense quality-wise,” she says. “When they’re buying into a campaign with you, they’re buying into you as a person.” That includes everything a creator says or does outside of branded content.

Earlier in her career, Kristal says, she was more inclined to respond when confronted with something inflammatory online. “In the beginning of my career, if somebody said something crazy to me, a lot of the time, I felt emboldened to give a reaction,” she says. “I know that reaction can truly cost me my livelihood, if I’m being transparent.”

The shift does not mean she has softened her approach. “I don’t want to be super palatable,” she says. “I do think it’s nice to have a little grit and to show up and maybe say things that could go a little bit against the grain.” She tells her clients and herself the same thing: “I always urge myself and also my clients to be careful.”

The Success She Is Building Toward

The operational goal for Mujeres Social is specific: grow intentionally, remain accessible, and never scale so fast that the quality of care slips. “I’ve seen other agencies grow at such a scale that they end up losing massive amounts of clients because they’re biting more than they can chew,” she says. “I want to still be accessible to our clients, because that’s important.”

The relationship-driven model has produced what she calls first access: advance notice on upcoming campaigns, direct texts from brand reps, and budget conversations that arrive before they are publicly announced. “We will get first access to campaigns, to budgets, we’ll get the text on the side,” she says.

“Trust is such a hard thing to build, but it’s so easy to lose,” she says. That trust, built over years of holding firm on rates, declining misaligned deals, and operating with professional precision, is what produces the circle-back.

The measure Kristal keeps returning to, though, is not retention or revenue or first access. It is the number of diverse success stories the Creator Economy produces. “There’d be way more diverse millionaires in this space, quite frankly,” she says, if the system “operated the way it should.”

She built Mujeres Social as one structural answer to that deficit. She intends to keep building.

“I’m going to do this, I’m going to show you how to do it, and then I’m going to cheer you on as you’re doing it,” she says. “Because it is so deeply important to me to see more millionaires in this space who look like us.”

Photos: Courtesy of Kristal Heredia

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