There's a quiet assumption that runs through a lot of creator decision-making: the bigger the brand, the better the collab. A name people recognise. A logo that looks good in a portfolio. A tag your audience clocks instantly.
We get it. But we want to gently push back on it.
Because some of the most interesting content on our platform right now is coming from creators who said yes to the new wave of hot, upcoming brands. Brands like Maihomu.
Meet Maihomu
Maihomu is a homewares brand built around a single, quiet idea: a considered home, shared. Their pieces are calm, their design language is unhurried, and their entire ethos pushes back on the more-more-more churn of fast interiors. "We don't believe in having more," their site reads, "just choosing better."
They're new on the scene. They put up one gift on #gifted.
What happened next is the part we want to talk about.
Three creators. Three formats. One brand worth backing.
Three creators applied for the Maihomu collab. Three said yes. And three made something completely different with the same brief.
Charli Cutajar turned it into a Sunday morning reel — a slow, lived-in piece of content that matched Maihomu's pace exactly. Pieces in context. A home being a home.
Eliana Parissi went two ways with it. A reel for the algorithm, and a static carousel about a "kitchen shuffle" — weaving the products into a real moment from her week (cleaning two kitchens, including her daughters' playroom one). It didn't feel like a placement. It felt like a story.
Megan Green shot UGC photography — content she handed straight to the brand to use across their own channels, no public post required.
One reel. One carousel. One set of UGC stills. Same brand, three completely different outputs, three completely different audiences served.
This is what creator diversity looks like in practice, and it's something we love seeing. Not every great collab ends in a viral reel. Some end in a quiet carousel. Some end in a folder of beautiful images on a brand's hard drive that go on to fuel their website, their EDMs, their own socials for months.
All three are valuable. All three are real work. All three are portfolio.
The case for working with new and upcoming brands
Here's the bit we really want you to sit with.
When you say yes to a brand on the rise, a few things happen that don't tend to happen with the big guys.
You get creative room to move. New and upcoming brands aren't going to send back three rounds of feedback because the lighting in your B-roll is half a stop off. They want to see what you make of it, and that trust shows up in the final content.
Your content does heavier lifting. When a brand has thousands of pieces of UGC already, yours is one of many. When they have a handful, yours becomes part of how they show up in the world. Your work might end up on their homepage. In their next EDM. Pinned to the top of their feed. That's portfolio gold.
You're growing alongside them. The creators who got in early with brands that later became huge didn't get in because they were famous. They got in because they were paying attention. Saying yes to Maihomu now is the kind of move that, two years from now, looks really clever.
Your tastemaker credibility goes up, not down. There's a particular kind of cool that comes from showing your audience something they haven't seen everywhere else. "I found this gorgeous brand" hits different to "here's another box from [insert mega-retailer]."
The portfolio mindset
We talk about this a lot, but it bears repeating: every collab you take is a deposit into your portfolio.
A big-brand collab is a deposit. A new-brand collab is a deposit. UGC that never gets publicly posted is a deposit. The question isn't "is this brand famous enough?" The question is "does this make my body of work stronger?"
Maihomu is a brand whose aesthetic is genuinely beautiful, whose values are clear, and whose product photographs like a dream. For Charli, Eliana and Megan, that's the only test that mattered. The follower count of the IG handle they tagged was beside the point.
What this looks like for you
If you've been scrolling past gift listings from brands you don't recognise, this is your nudge to slow down on a few of them. Click through. Look at the product. Look at the world they're building. Ask yourself whether their aesthetic fits yours, whether their values track, whether the pieces would actually live in your home or your content.
If the answer is yes, that's a collab worth saying yes to. Whether they have ten thousand followers or ten.
The creators we see thriving on #gifted aren't the ones holding out for big names. They're the ones treating every gifting decision like a strategist would: with an eye on portfolio, taste, longevity, and fit.
That's the shift. From poster to strategist. From chasing logos to building a body of work.
Maihomu's first three collabs are a quiet little proof point. We hope they're the first of many.
Want to be the next creator to spot a brand early? Browse current collabs on #gifted and back the ones that fit your world.
