How Bravo became the new QVC

The network famous for ‘Real Housewives’ quietly reinvented itself as a startup incubator, spawning personality-driven brands in businesses from canned cocktails to loungewear.

On a hot April night, Bodyarmor, the sports drink company that Coca-Cola acquired in 2021 in a $5.6 billion deal, was throwing a huge party in downtown Manhattan to celebrate its relaunch. Plenty of MBA types in brown lace-ups and untucked shirts clutched vodka sodas in Hall des Lumières, the cavernous bank-turned-event-space across from City Hall. They were eyeing the young women in short skirts and high heels who—along with star-studded guest lists and goodie bags so heavy they threaten to break—are the lifeblood of these corporate soirees. By the dance floor, where an energetic DJ pumped his fist in the air playing remixes of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and Doechii’s viral TikTok hit “Anxiety,” two trios of women collided and traded air kisses.

“Have you seen any famous people?” a blonde in one group asked a blonde in the other group.

“Only Kyle,” she said, motioning to the DJ, a fortysomething so blond, angular, and handsome he could be the villain in an 1980s teen movie.

But Kyle is not the new Diplo, Tiësto, or Skrillex. In fact, he’s not even a full-time DJ. Kyle Cooke is one of the stars of Bravo’s long-running reality TV show Summer House, which follows a group of young New Yorkers sharing a Hamptons mansion, drinking and dating their way through the East End social scene. NBC Universal released data last June that the ninth season of the show was on track to be its most-watched yet, averaging 2.2 million viewers across all platforms, with ratings up 31% on Peacock, the network’s official streaming platform.  

But Summer House isn’t Cooke’s full-time job either. Both the show and the DJ set support his core enterprise: He is the founder and CEO of Loverboy, a canned-cocktail company he started before season three began filming. 

Loverboy launched in 2018, bootstrapped by Cooke as a line of sparkling hard teas, and has since branched out into an array of spritzes and cocktails, with as many as 30 full-time employees and an office in Manhattan. In 2019, the company raised roughly $1.25 million in a pre-seed friends-and-family round, $25,000 of which came from Spencer Slaine of Slaine Holdings, which has current investments in Goodles and Olipop and a past investment in Poppi, which sold to PepsiCo for $1.95 billion in 2025. 

Slaine met Cooke when he owned Harding’s, a restaurant in the Flatiron district that Cooke lived next to and frequented. They became friends, and he was on the email when Cooke began looking for investors. Slaine was (and is) a Bravo fan, and he was familiar with Skinnygirl. “The Bravo aspect to me was the X-Factor along with Kyle himself,” says Slaine, whose aunt, Elyse Slaine, was on Season 12 of The Real Housewives of New York City. “It was the category, the timing, and that Kyle has an entrepreneurial background that made it worth the gamble.”

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