How This Fashion Blogger Built a $2 Billion Business Connecting Thousands of Bloggers and Brands
Enjoying the work you do can lead to bigger things than you can ever imagine! Such was the case of Amber Venz Box who ended up being the pioneer of the creator economy with a business that is now valued at $2 billion, per CNBC Make It. Box started as an unpaid fashion blogger to promote her services as a personal shopper. Until then, she had already worked at low-level positions in the industry that she loved so much. She had tried her hands at modeling and had also served as an assistant buyer in a boutique.
Soon after she launched her blog, she realized that all her readers were simply buying the clothes that she was suggesting in the blog and nobody was coming to her for the services. This was at a time when affiliate marketing was not yet a thing. According to her, this was the moment she realized that she had to modernize her business so that she could "charge for the sales" that she was responsible for.
"That was the impetus for us starting [in 2011] what was RewardStyle, and is now LTK," she tells Make It. Today, she is the co-founder and president of LTK, a Dallas-based company that connects more than 250,000 influencers and bloggers with over 7,000 retail brands. Amber Box and her husband, Baxter Box, adapted the existing affiliate linking tech and once they started earning money, they pivoted to selling this technology to other bloggers who could benefit in the same way.
"There was also almost no [financial] downside. I was in my early 20s, living at home, still eating my dad’s cereal. Worst case, this stays the same. Best case, you have a business where you get to do the things you want within this lifestyle that you wanted to create," she says. The main challenge she faced was raising money as she was just a "young girl with her first business." "It was very challenging to get investors excited about it and raise money around it," she says. She managed to raise $300 million from Softbank in 2021, which according to her, is one of the largest if not the largest investments in the creator space.
She says that she has helped online creators earn more than $2.7 billion in payouts from retailers, which has turned 240 women influencers into millionaires. Her advice for people looking to start a venture of their own is to realize that if you see a problem, solve it now because it's just a matter of time before somebody else does. "It’s who gets there fastest, spreads the word and builds that community around it best. And that’s with almost every decision as a founder — you move with urgency to win," she concludes.
Recognizing opportunities even in the least expected spaces is a quality that can take an entrepreneur a long way. College friends Matt Scanlan and Diederik Rijsemus are great examples of turning adversity into opportunity. Read about how they got stuck among Mongolian goat herders in the Gobi Desert for three weeks and ended up becoming successful business leaders, thanks to that experience.