Hawkers grew up on social media. When the Elche sunglasses brand raised its first outside money in 2016, about 90% of its sales went straight to consumers, and its general manager, Paco Pérez, called social platforms “the right and only place for us to be.”

Alejandro Betancourt López, who chairs Saldum Ventures, the group that owns Hawkers, has since overseen campaigns built on paid creators and on household-name stars. He describes the choice between the two as one that keeps moving with the public’s mood, and 2026 survey data on marketing budgets shows brands splitting their money across both.

Why Does the Mix Between Stars and Creators Keep Changing?

“There’s been times where the influencer is everything, or is very effective, for a brand. And other times it changes radically and the celebrity brings more, depending on the market conditions,” Alejandro Betancourt said in a 2023 conversation about Hawkers’ marketing. At some points, he explained, consumers related more closely to influencers and found celebrities too aspirational, and then the preference swung back.

Among respondents to Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2026 benchmark report, 52.83% planned to expand their work with micro-creators and 51.43% with nano-creators, against 33.33% for celebrities. None planned to cut celebrity work. Macro creators sat almost exactly in balance, with 20.59% planning to expand and 20.58% planning to pull back.

Nano and micro creators took 29.54% and 22.36% of cost selections in the survey, compared with 13.92% for celebrities and 4.35% for macro creators. The report drew on more than 600 respondents.

What Does Alejandro Betancourt López Expect a Campaign to Deliver?

Sales, plus brand awareness that outlasts the posts, is how he describes the goal. He has described a Hawkers collaboration with a Latin music star that ran as a continuing working relationship, with content built over weeks, in place of a single sponsored post. “A branding campaign brought a lot of conversion into sales,” he said of that effort. The teaser phase, he recalled, had people guessing what was going on before they discovered the brand behind it, which built an audience that later bought.

Alejandro Betancourt López singles out timing as the skill that decides the result. Identifying whether the market is following creators or stars at a given moment, and pairing the brand with the right name at the right point, is what he calls the key to success.

“We are not the owners of the brand. We just manage the brand,” co-founder David Moreno told TechCrunch in 2016, adding, “We don’t take ourselves too seriously, and we think that is a good thing.” The label had sold 3.5 million pairs in 50 countries by then, almost all of them through social channels, under the Saldum group that Alejandro Betancourt López now chairs.