The New Creative Economy: Top 10 Culturepreneurs Shaping Global Culture in 2025
- Lisa Reynolds
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
The New Creative Economy: Cultured Focus Magazine's Top 10 Culturepreneurs Shaping Global Culture in 2025
In an era of seismic social shifts and digital disruption, Cultured Focus Magazine’s Top 10 Culturepreneurs of 2025 celebrates visionaries fueling the global creative economy. These innovators prove that culture is not just artistic expression—it’s sustainable business, inclusive infrastructure, and social transformation. Their ventures across music, film, fashion, design, and technology reimagine creativity as an engine for equitable growth, cultural preservation, and community empowerment.
Below, we spotlight the changemakers redefining value in the world’s fastest-moving economy: creativity itself.
Music & Advocacy: The Business of Belonging
Lachi – Accessibility in Pop Culture Recording artist, producer, and disability advocate Lachi expands the music sector by merging artistry with social design. Through her Mad Different multimedia concert series, she creates an accessible performance economy that integrates inclusion as its foundation. Her model demonstrates how creative enterprise can generate both art and access, proving inclusion is not a cost, but a catalyst for industry innovation.
Brandon Deroche – Cause-Driven Fan Engagement As founder and CEO of Propeller, Deroche transforms fan enthusiasm into measurable social impact. By linking artists, causes, and consumers through digital campaigns, he’s built a new marketplace for purpose-driven fandom. His hybrid model—part entertainment, part activism—turns culture into conscious consumer behavior that drives both revenue and real-world change.
Ritviz – Bridging Heritage and Pop Innovation Indian producer Ritviz fuses Hindustani classical music with global electronic sounds, creating a commercial signature that anchors India’s youth culture in global pop. His brand collaborations and digital storytelling amplify local sound traditions on global platforms, proving that economic success and cultural heritage can thrive together in the modern music economy.
Rich Brian – Expanding Global Hip-Hop Markets A pioneer of Asian representation in global hip-hop, Jakarta-born Rich Brian capitalizes on digital-first media through his association with 88rising. His multilingual releases and cross-regional collaborations expand the geography of hip-hop, modeling how cultural entrepreneurship can unlock entire hemispheres of creative trade.
Fashion & Design: Artisanship Meets Entrepreneurship
Katerine Gutierrez Villaverde – Roots-Based Fashion Futures Through her brand Traces of the World, Villaverde uplifts artisans in the global south by connecting them with conscious consumers. Her work contributes to the creative economy by designing supply chains that are both sustainable and culturally rich, showing how ethical fashion can become a profitable pillar of economic development.
Thebe Magugu – Fashion as Cultural Archive South African designer Thebe Magugu blends haute couture with historical research, curating garments that double as cultural documentation. His approach transforms fashion into an art economy steeped in heritage, advancing global recognition of African narratives through commerce, design, and education.
Ella Peinovich, Hedvig Alexander & Alison Phillips – Scaling the Handmade Economy The co-founders of Powered by People have built a digital wholesale marketplace that connects global buyers with small-batch makers. Their platform scales the handmade sector without stripping its authenticity—democratizing access to international trade and allowing craft-based enterprises to compete in the global design economy.
Storytelling & Media: Shaping the Digital Civic Economy
Kyla Searle – Storytelling for Civic Imagination Producer and strategist Kyla Searle reinvents media as a tool for civic participation. Her project This Is How We Win uses cinematic storytelling to reshape collective consciousness about community and justice. By placing narrative equity at the core of digital content, she’s cultivating new forms of creative capital rooted in empathy and collective vision.
Joey Clift – Contemporary Native Narratives Through animation and comedy, Joey Clift redefines what mainstream representation can look like. His humor-driven storytelling elevates Indigenous voices in contemporary media, creating new commercial and cultural avenues for Native creators in the entertainment economy.
Design & Social Innovation: Infrastructure as Creative Capital
Kaveto Tjatjara – Design, Dignity, and Infrastructure Namibian social entrepreneur Kaveto Tjatjara, founder of Flushh, proves that infrastructure can be part of the creative economy. By applying human-centered design to solve sanitation challenges, he turns everyday products into platforms for education, employment, and community creativity—linking design innovation directly to dignity and economic opportunity.
This year’s honorees embody how creativity fuels markets, meaning, and movement. They merge artistry with economy, transforming storytelling, sound, and style into levers of shared prosperity. Together, these ten leaders are building an inclusive creative economy where culture generates both capital and collective progress.
Read more at Medium.com and see past honorees in the prestigious Entrepreneur.com and Elucid.com.