Most coverage of the The Sunday Times 100 will tell you who made the list however the more interesting question is how they got there. When you look at the top 100 through a marketing lens, one pattern dominates: these businesses don’t behave like advertisers. They behave like media owners.
1. The fastest growing company in Britain is a media company
The number one spot belongs to Goalhanger — Gary Lineker’s podcast studio behind The Rest Is History and The Rest Is Football. The same logic runs through the list. Viewture (no. 4) finances YouTube creators. Simmer Eats (no. 5) grew out of Simmy Dhillon cooking on social media.
The line between company and content operation has collapsed. The real question isn’t whether you need a content strategy. It’s whether you have a reason for people to pay attention before they become customers.
2. The founder is the channel and the brand
Every brand in the top 10 has a visible, story rich founder at its centre. These aren’t origin stories for press releases — they are the business’s first and most distinct brand asset. Dr. Robert Cialdini‘s principle of liking holds that we connect with and buy from people we find relatable. The founder is the human through whom customers first understand what the brand stands for; everything built afterwards either compounds that connection or dilutes it.
3. Invite participation, don’t just leverage paid promotion
The dominant channel for DTC brands on this list isn’t influencer marketing in the conventional paid sense. It is invited participation — giving creators and customers something genuinely worth sharing and letting them decide whether to engage. Purdy & Figg scaled from £452k to £50m+ by sending product to creators with zero requirement to post; organic content then fed their paid social as creative; CAC dropped 61% in year one. The distinction matters. When people chooses to share something, they are not fulfilling a brief — they are making a personal recommendation that feed a community. This doesn’t just create ads; it creates social signals from people and a community they already trust.
4. Sequencing matters as much as channel selection
Adanola built organic UGC first, scaled paid social second, then landed the Kendall Jenner partnership — generating $1.3m in Media Impact Value in a week. The mistake most growth stage brands make is inverting this order — buying reach before the brand foundation exists. Performance spend on an unbuilt brand captures demand that doesn’t exist yet, at a cost that compounds. The sequence is the strategy.
5. Celebrity as credibility, not reach
Celebrity shows up across this list, but rarely as a paid endorsement. Snoop Dogg’s VCfirm backs MAMEDICA® — a funding round that doubles as earned media for a category that can barely advertise. Alessia Russo is a genuine Simmer Eats customer. Lineker co founded Goalhanger. Fame functions as a trust transfer mechanism, not a reach play — and it only works when the association is authentic. The question isn’t “how many followers?” but “what do people believe about this person, and does that belief serve our brand?”
6. Broadcast as a trust signal, not only a reach play
TRIP ’s first multi million pound TV campaign in 2024 was explicitly positioned as trust building tied to retail expansion — the real audience was trade buyers at Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, not only consumers on TikTok. Goalhanger’s Netflix World Cup deal works identically: 63 million monthly downloads already; the deal signals institutional quality to commercial partners. Broadcast reaches audiences and builds legitimacy simultaneously. Plan it for the moment you need to shift the perception of a buyer, a retailer, or a category sceptic — the credibility effect is as valuable as the incremental reach.
7. Partnerships work best when fit complements scale
The smartest partnerships on this list aren’t chosen for scale alone. Pott’d borrowing Barbie and Hello Kitty IP wins shelf space in 20+ markets because the cultural fit is immediate and obvious. Wellness brands funding podcast shows acquire hours of committed attention because the audience alignment is precise. In each case, reach matters — but it is the fit that determines whether the reach converts into something durable.
8. Niche depth beats mass reach
Free Soul , Pott’d , Simmer , Viewture — none of them tried to talk to everyone. They went deep with a defined community, built genuine relevance there, and let the category expand around them. Les Binet and Peter Field’s work on brand strength shows that meaningful, salient difference — not just awareness — drives long-term commercial advantage. A brand deeply relevant to a specific community generates stronger mental availability within that group than a broader brand generating lower intensity awareness across a wider one. Specificity with the biggest audience possible, scales. Breadth doesn’t compound in the same way.
9. Ride the wave, don’t make it
The Genius Group (TGG) built a £210m redress machine by pointing performance marketing at a live consumer finance news cycle. MAMEDICA® is scaling with a regulatory tailwind. Timing is a media strategy. When culture or headlines are already generating demand, the job is establish the brand as top of mind, ensuring its’ the most visible, attractive and easiest route to act on it.
The MFN POV
The brands scaling fastest aren’t just trying to outspend anyone. They’re out engineering the attention mechanism itself — through a ruthless focus on market orientation, proximity to founders, and a strong brand identify that gives people a reason to care. Purdy & Figg reached £50m on product gifting. Hawkstone reached £45m with almost no conventional paid media. P Louise built £111m through live entertainment on TikTok. Goalhanger reached 63 million monthly listeners by being a media company, not by advertising on one. The question for founders and marketers isn’t which channels to use — it’s whether the business has an attention mechanism that’s ready to be amplified by paid media.
The MFN POV
The brands scaling fastest aren’t just trying to outspend anyone. They’re out engineering the attention mechanism itself — through a ruthless focus on market orientation, proximity to founders, and a strong brand identify that gives people a reason to care. Purdy & Figg reached £50m on product gifting. Hawkstone reached £45m with almost no conventional paid media. P Louise built £111m through live entertainment on TikTok. Goalhanger reached 63 million monthly listeners by being a media company, not by advertising on one. The question for founders and marketers isn’t which channels to use — it’s whether the business has an attention mechanism that’s ready to be amplified by paid media.
Four actions to unlock fast growth:
— Build the attention mechanism before the media plan. Ask what you have that generates unpaid attention — a founder story, a community, a content format, a product people talk about and brand people care about. If the answer is nothing, fix that first. Paid media on a brand with no organic signal is renting reach you haven’t earned.
— Invite participation before you pay for promotion. Leverage the foot soldiers on the ground already advocating for brands and products they value. Ensure genuine brand fit to maximise results and start generating organic noise and a community that can later be used to fuel paid amplification and build credibility.
— Sequence correctly. Organic first, paid second, broadcast third. Use broadcast as a credibility intervention, as well as a reach play.
— Make the founder the brand’s first asset. Invest in founder content consistently, not episodically. People connect with, trust, and buy from people they relate to — the founder is a powerful brand device through whom customers can understand what the brand stands for. The moment it feels managed, the mechanism breaks.
Cameron Davies is Comms Planning Director at Miroma Founders Network, a specialist marketing and media agency built by serial founders. Connect with Cameron on LinkedIn.
