From side hustle to spotlight: What Hollywood’s self-made stars reveal about starting a business

Hollywood is known for glamorous “overnight success” stories. The reality is that most of them didn’t actually happen overnight.

Take Rihanna, for example: when Fenty Beauty launched in 2017, the headlines focused on the celebrity behind the brand. But the real reason the company took off was simpler: it addressed a problem the cosmetics industry had been slow to fix. The initial launch included 40 foundation shades, far more inclusive than what many major brands were offering at the time.

Jessica Alba’s Honest Company followed a similar path. Alba has spoken about how the idea came from her search for safer household and baby products, something she struggled to find when she became a parent. What started as a personal frustration eventually turned into a publicly traded business.

That pattern pops up again and again in celebrity entrepreneurship. The ventures that stick around rarely begin as vanity projects. More often they start with a gap someone noticed – and decided to do something about.

Even celebrity ventures rely on solid business basics

Of course, once the spotlight fades, the work starts to look a lot like any other regular business, registering the company properly, keeping finances separate, figuring out payroll, taxes, and the hundred other details that never make the red carpet photos.

For first-time founders, those early steps can feel confusing, which is why practical guides like the Remitly Small Business FAQ have become useful reading for people navigating the basics for the first time. It may not be the most glamorous part of starting a business, but it’s a necessary step.

It takes a village

Another thing celebrity success stories tend to hide is just how many people are involved behind the scenes. The public may see a famous founder, but there is usually a full team supporting the operation, like advisors, accountants, operations managers and lawyers.

That kind of support system is hardly unique to Hollywood. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, small businesses account for 99.9% of companies in the United States, employing tens of millions of people across industries. Most of them succeed for the same reason celebrity brands do: someone builds the right structure around the initial idea.

Success doesn’t happen overnight

Despite the way the headlines sometimes frame it, success in business rarely arrives overnight.

Ryan Reynolds’s Aviation Gin became a global story when it sold in a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars. What didn’t make the same splash was the slow build beforehand: years spent shaping the brand’s voice and marketing identity.

That slower pace is closer to reality. Research from the Pew Research Center shows just how dominant small businesses are in the economy, which is another reminder that growth tends to happen gradually rather than in viral bursts.

Hollywood might prefer the fairy-tale version, but behind many of those celebrity empires is something far less dramatic: a good idea, solid business fundamentals, and the patience to stick with it long enough for the spotlight to catch up.