OnlyFans has tapped the founder of a lingerie company and former nude model to launch business classes on the platform.
Rachael McCrary, a longtime lingerie designer and founder of the company Spice Rack, is launching four videos on OnlyFans Wednesday. The videos are quite different from the usual OnlyFans fare. They’ll focus on pitching investors, building a brand, and navigating being an entrepreneur as a woman, McCrary tells WIRED. More videos will follow. She’s also creating a Spice Rack x OnlyFans clothing line that will launch on the site later this year.
The move is OnlyFans’ first foray into making content focused solely on building a business. It’s part of the platform’s continued push into safe-for-work content that’s meant to complement the adult content it’s known for.
“OnlyFans is a community of over 4 million creator businesses, so it makes sense that we are the perfect platform to share tips on entrepreneurship,” Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans, tells WIRED in a statement. “As we’ve seen in other genres like comedy and sport, it takes just one creator to recognize the opportunity and others will follow suit.”
McCrary, 48, said she met Blair at the tech conference Summit Baja last November, when they came up with the idea.
As a former SuicideGirl—a community of alt pin-up girls founded in the early 2000s—she says she felt stigmatized by her past when working in corporate fashion. At one of her jobs, she says her colleagues looked at her SuicideGirls photos while she was at work.
“I just wanted to start crying,” she says.
Then she decided to launch her own businesses, but “pitching underwear to tech VCs, I already felt like I had to prove myself more,” McCrary says. According to Inc., only 1 percent of VC-funded companies were wholly led by women in 2024. Spice Rack, which McCrary says is backed by Sequoia Partners China and Mucker Capital, is among them.
“Being naked on the internet and raising venture capital from the largest funds in the world is a very rare Venn diagram,” McCrary says, adding that OnlyFans was already looking to expand into more non-adult content. “We decided to do a masterclass format of business classes.” The first two classes will be free, while the others will require a subscription to McCrary’s page.
Over the years, McCrary says, she’s been approached by many young women, including sex workers, seeking advice on how to start their own businesses or pivot away from adult content. After she revealed her past as a SuicideGirl on a panel in 2022, she says an adult content creator came up to her and said, “I didn't know that you were naked on the internet, and that makes me feel like I can have a career after this.”
McCrary says she’s heard from OnlyFans creators who want to launch clothing lines or are looking to leave their corporate jobs.
“They're already gotten into entrepreneurship, and some of them have learned how to do it really, really well. So how can we sort of expand on that past the barrier of what they're doing ... to make it an even bigger business?”
In 2021, OnlyFans announced that it was banning the sexually explicit content it's known for, only to reverse that decision a few days later. That same year, cofounder Tim Stokely stepped down from the company; in May, he launched Subs, a new subscription-based creator-driven platform. At the time, he told WIRED he’d heard from creators who were frustrated by the limitations of OnlyFans or wanted a platform that was more “brand-friendly.”
“OnlyFans is home to a wide range of content, offering creators of all genres the opportunity to reimagine how they can engage with their fans and monetize their content,” Blair says.
“That’s exactly what Rachael is doing here, using her skills and experience as a business leader to inform and engage with her followers while demonstrating the potential of the platform as a place for business content and a place to inspire others to be bold and disruptive.”
