Funding, Founders & the Power of Community: Suzie Baleson on Building Brands That Last

What does it really take to build a brand today?

According to Suzie Baleson, it’s not one viral video, a celebrity endorsement, or even a massive marketing budget. It’s community, connection, getting products into people’s hands, and having the confidence to start before everything feels perfectly figured out.

On a recent episode of the Like. Love. Share. podcast, BabbleBoxx founder Sherri Langburt sat down with Suzie, founder of Wellth Collective and founding partner of Wellth Ventures, to talk about female founders, venture funding, creator marketing, and what emerging brands should actually be doing with their marketing dollars.

And the conversation started with a pretty staggering reality: despite progress across entrepreneurship, women-only founding teams still receive an incredibly small share of venture capital. In 2024, that figure was just 1% of total U.S. VC capital, according to PitchBook.

For Suzie, that gap is about more than funding. It reflects outdated assumptions about who gets to build, lead, and scale the next generation of brands.

The Female Founder Myth That Needs to Go

Suzie knows both sides of the table.

Before launching Wellth Collective, she spent the first decade of her career in finance and international tax restructuring. Today, she combines that financial background with more than a decade of experience helping better-for-you consumer brands grow—and investing in many of them along the way.

As a founder, investor, marketer, and mom of two young children, she also has firsthand experience with one of the assumptions often made about female entrepreneurs: that family responsibilities somehow make women less capable of building ambitious businesses.

Suzie sees it very differently.

Having children may have changed the number of hours she has available, but it has also made those hours more focused.

“My kids have just made me focus more on the hours that I have to work. And I am way more productive.”

The bigger takeaway? The traditional picture of what a successful founder “looks like” is outdated, and investors who continue to rely on it risk overlooking incredibly capable entrepreneurs.

If You Have Marketing Dollars, Invest in Community

When Sherri asked Suzie where she would put marketing dollars behind an emerging brand, her answer was immediate: community and creators.

But building a community isn’t as simple as telling consumers to follow your Instagram account.

For emerging CPG brands, Suzie sees DTC as an important place to build a core group of consumers before, or alongside, retail expansion. Those early customers can ultimately become the people looking for the product on shelves, recommending it to friends, sharing it online, and helping a brand gain traction in new markets.

At the same time, digital community can’t do all the work.

Suzie is a major believer in IRL experiences because they give consumers a chance to taste, touch, explore, and actually connect with a product.

The smartest strategy brings the two together: digital discovery + real-world experience + continued engagement.

Creators Work, But Bigger Isn’t Always Better

Sherri and Suzie also tackled one of the biggest questions in creator marketing: Does flooding social media with creator content actually work?

Suzie believes it can, especially for newer brands that desperately need awareness.

What has changed is who brands need to create that content.

Smaller creators, UGC creators, and everyday consumers can often tell a product story in a way that feels naturally connected to their lives. And activating many of those voices gives brands the opportunity to reach different audiences, test different messages, and generate a much larger library of usable content.

The old idea that one celebrity or mega-influencer can single-handedly “make” a brand? Suzie isn’t buying it.

Sherri sees the same challenge from the agency side. Putting an entire creator budget behind one person means tapping into one audience and walking away with one perspective. The same investment spread across a strategic mix of micro-creators can deliver different regions, niches, use cases, audiences, and creative approaches.

The takeaway isn’t that big creators have no value.

It’s that influence at scale comes from the right mix of voices, not simply the biggest following.

Don’t Forget the Product

There was one point Suzie kept coming back to throughout the conversation: people actually need to try the product.

For consumer brands, especially food, beverage, beauty, and wellness, getting products into the right hands can be just as important as the content surrounding them.

That can happen through events, creator seeding, sampling programs, curated boxes, coupons, or ambassador communities.

Sherri shared how BabbleBoxx approaches this through creator sampling and co-promotional programs that give emerging brands a more accessible way to put products in creators’ hands while simultaneously generating social awareness.

It also creates an opportunity to take creator marketing one step further. Instead of a consumer simply watching someone try a product, brands can invite them to request a sample, redeem a coupon, visit a retailer, or otherwise move from passive viewer to active participant.

That’s where creator marketing starts becoming much bigger than content.

Build With Your Community, Not Just for Them

Getting someone to try your product once is great. Getting them invested in what happens next is even better.

Suzie pointed to ambassador programs, private social channels, and ongoing consumer communities as ways brands can maintain those relationships.

Ask consumers what flavor should launch next. Let them see behind the scenes. Invite them into the development process. Give them wins, failures, tests, and decisions to react to.

Especially for a young brand, that level of openness can turn an audience into participants in the brand’s growth.

And that may be one of the biggest lessons from the entire conversation: community isn’t something a brand collects. It’s something a brand continually engages.

The Best Advice for Founders? Just Go.

Suzie ended the conversation with advice for entrepreneurs, and particularly women and creators thinking about turning an idea or audience into a business.

“Just go.”

Not because entrepreneurship is easy or because every idea will succeed. Quite the opposite.

Suzie’s point is that waiting until the fear disappears, the timing is perfect, or someone else decides you’re ready can keep talented people from ever starting.

Failure may happen. Plans will change. One idea may lead to an entirely different opportunity.

But if there is something you genuinely feel compelled to build, Suzie’s advice is to stop letting fear be the thing that makes the decision for you.

For brands and founders, that same willingness to start, test, listen, adapt, and keep building may be the most valuable growth strategy of all.

for more on female entrepreneurship, venture funding, creator marketing, community building, and the future of emerging consumer brands.