How Creator Hauls Become Your Best Gen Z Marketing Channel

Gen Z isn't ignoring your ads by accident. They're actively avoiding them. This generation gets informed, inspired, and ready to buy through creators, not through the channels brands still pour budgets into.

The shift in attention is already visible at a national level: in the UK, YouTube has overtaken ITV across all age groups, from children and teenagers to adults. The opportunity for brands now sits neatly in creator-led content, not traditional broadcast or display advertising.

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Social Is Where Emerging Brands Get Discovered

Our latest research reveals how US college students found the last new or emerging fashion brand they bought into:

• 67% said organic social: the Instagram Explore page, the TikTok For You feed, a Pinterest board
• 43% named an influencer or content creator directly, including YouTube try-on hauls and TikTok style creators

Compare that to the channels brands often over-invest in:

• Word of mouth (22%)
• Search engines (18%)

Social isn't one channel among many for discovery. It's the front door. And the demand is there waiting: 96% of students are engaged with emerging brands, with 52% actively seeking them out.

Hauls sit exactly where that discovery happens. They're not an add-on to your social strategy, they now are the discovery engine.

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Why Gen Z Trusts Hauls over Ads

Gen Z wants to be on-trend, but their budgets dictate what actually ends up in the basket. Hauls bridge that gap.

A creator showing what they bought, what they returned, and what was actually worth the money reads as an authentic recommendation. Nielsen research shows people trust user-generated content 2.4 times more than brand-produced content. When the choice is between a polished ad and a real person's honest haul, the haul wins the trust battle before the product is even out of the bag.

And students pass it on. Our research found 37% have shared an emerging fashion brand on their own social, and 47% have repurchased one more than once.

One haul becomes ten.

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The Emerging Brands Winning the Hauls

Comfrt: Community Before Commerce

Comfrt built its entire rise on TikTok creators rather than paid media. Its comfort-first hoodies, framed around mental health and anxiety relief, gave creators a genuine story to tell. The result is a wall of unscripted "worth the hype" hauls that do the converting. It's a textbook case of letting real people, not commercials, carry the message.

Cou Cou Intimates: Loungewear as Haul Content

Cou Cou Intimates turned soft cotton loungewear into some of TikTok's most-shared "first haul" moments. Creators film themselves unboxing, trying on, and rating each piece — the exact honest-recommendation format Gen Z trusts. No billboard required. Just taste, personality, and a genuinely lovable product doing the selling.

Labubu: Collectibility via Creator Hype

Labubu shows what happens when scarcity meets creator culture. Over 1.4 million #Labubu TikToks — blind-box unboxings, hunts, and hauls — have been driven overwhelmingly by creators, not brand marketing. The combination of status and scarcity generates organic haul content on its own. The creators become the demand engine.

The through-line? None of these brands out-spent the market. They let individual taste and personality do the selling.

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How to Activate Hauls Instead of Ads

1. Find the right creators: Prioritize brand values, engagement quality, and relevance to your audience over raw follower count.
2. Let go of polish: Gen Z is looking for people, not commercials. The rougher, more honest the content feels, the more it converts.
3. Measure accurately: Track engagement rates, view rates, and audience demographics rather than relying on vanity metrics alone.

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Own the Haul… Own the Funnel

Hauls do something paid ads can't. They compress awareness, consideration, and conversion into a single, trusted moment. When a creator shows a product working in real life, they've done the job of three funnel stages at once — and with 67% of students discovering emerging brands on social, that's where the funnel now begins.

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