OnlyFans goes to business school

OnlyFans has been exploited Founder of a lingerie company and former nude model to launch business classes on the platform.

Rachel McCrary, the longtime lingerie designer and founder of Spice Rack, is releasing four videos on OnlyFans Wednesday. The videos are quite different from the usual OnlyFans fare. They will focus on pitching to investors, building a brand, and tackling being an entrepreneur as a woman, McCrary told WIRED. More videos will follow. She is also creating a Spice Rack x OnlyFans clothing line that will launch on the site later this year.

The move is OnlyFans’ first attempt at making content solely focused on building a business. It’s part of the platform’s ongoing push toward safe-for-work content that aims to complement the adult content it’s known for.

“OnlyFans is a community of over 4 million creators, so it makes sense that we’re the perfect platform to share entrepreneurship tips,” OnlyFans CEO Kelly Blair tells WIRED in a statement. “As we’ve seen in other genres like comedy and sports, it only takes one creator to recognize an opportunity and others will follow suit.”

McCrary, 48, said she met Blair at a technology conference in Baja last November when they came up with the idea.

As a former member of SuicideGirl — a community of alternative girls founded in the early 2000s — she says she felt stigmatized by her past when she worked 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.

She then decided to launch her own business, but “when I pitched lingerie to tech venture capital firms, I really felt like I had to prove myself more,” McCrary says. According to Inc., only 1% of venture capital-funded companies were entirely run by women in 2024. Among these companies is Spice Rack, which McCrary says is backed by Sequoia Partners China and Mucker Capital.

“Being naked online and raising venture capital from the biggest 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 create a major format for business administration classes.” The first two chapters will be free, while the others require a subscription on the McCrary page.

Over the years, McCrary says, many young women, including sex workers, have reached out to her for advice on how to start their own businesses or stay away from adult content. After revealing her past as a suicidal girl at a panel in 2022, she said an adult content creator came up to her and said: “I didn’t know you were naked online, and it makes me feel like I can have a career after this.”