Same celebrity-brand playbook, opposite outcomes: Casamigos, Proper No. Twelve, and DeLeón shrinking or unwound while Kevin Hart's Gran Coramino and Dwayne Johnson's Teremana expand into new markets. The difference wasn't the fame.
Casamigos sales dropped 18 percent in 2025, and George Clooney moved on to a non-alcoholic beer. Conor McGregor was dropped entirely as the face of Proper No. Twelve. Back in January 2024, Diageo paid Sean Combs $200 million just to unwind their DeLeón joint venture and close out the legal fallout that came with it.
In the same category, over the same stretch: Kevin Hart's Gran Coramino reportedly did $85 million in sales. Teremana is rolling into 20 new international markets in 2026 through its distribution partner Mast-Jägermeister, on top of six new markets in 2025.
None of this is happening in a quiet category. The Tequila Report puts the number of registered tequila trademarks at over 2,500 as of early 2026, with 20 to 30 new entrants launching every month, though it estimates only around 900 of those brands are actually moving meaningful volume in the US. A famous name used to be the fastest way to stand out in that crowd. That is no longer a safe assumption.
Every one of the brands above launched on the same premise: a famous name buys instant shelf space and distributor attention. That premise is why brand operators are still pitching celebrity partnerships to investors and distributors the same way today.
Here's what the pattern actually shows. Clooney, McGregor, and Combs are, by any distributor's reckoning, bigger names than Kevin Hart or the team behind Teremana. If fame alone drove distribution outcomes, their brands should be the ones expanding into new markets right now. Instead they're the ones shrinking, dropped, or unwound. The difference isn't the wattage of the name.
Look at what Hart actually did differently. He has put the distinction in his own words: he didn't want to be a name on a label or a face on a box. He was hands-on in developing the bottle, the taste, and the SKU lineup from the start, and he is on record doing the unglamorous part himself, shaking hands with distributors and bar owners in person instead of delegating it to a licensing fee. That is not a marketing story. It is an operating story that happens to have a famous face attached to it.
Teremana's version of the same lesson took even longer to build. Dwayne Johnson signed Mast-Jägermeister as Teremana's global distribution partner in January 2020, with distribution launching that March. Two years later, in February 2022, that same distribution partner became a strategic investor in Teremana as well, adding sales, marketing, and logistics expertise and organizational structure to support the brand's growth. The 20-market expansion happening now is years of that structure compounding, not a launch-week headline.
The capital behind these deals is repricing the same way. Diageo's own venture arm, Distill Ventures, has put more than $300 million into over 35 brands and has now stopped bringing in new ones entirely. When the biggest single funder of exactly this kind of brand bet pulls back, that is not one flop. That is the supply of easy money for the old playbook drying up at the source.
That should matter to you either way. If you're pitching a celebrity partnership to a distributor or an investor, fame alone isn't the argument it used to be. Distributors have now watched several of these deals unwind in public, and they price that risk into the pitch. If you're an indie brand without a famous name, that skepticism is quietly working in your favor, because the pitch you're competing against now carries more baggage than it used to, and the money that used to chase it is getting harder to find.
Here's the uncomfortable question: if you stripped the famous name off your brand tomorrow, would the distribution plan still hold up on its own?
What to do about it:
Model the distribution and sell-through plan with an anonymous founder first, then size the celebrity name as a multiplier on top of that plan, not the whole strategy.
Lead every distributor pitch with category positioning and sell-through data. The name buys less of the room than it used to, and a crowded category means the room is smaller to begin with.
If a name is genuinely doing the work, an owner in the weeds and not an endorser cashing a check, say so explicitly in the pitch. That distinction is now worth more than the name itself.
Spend the way Teremana did, on a named distribution partner and phased multi-year market expansion, not on the celebrity fee itself. Budget in years, not launch quarters.
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