Amber Grant a Blogger at the Fashion Plug
Amber Venz Box was just 23 years quondam when she pioneered influencer commerce with rewardStyle. X years, billions in sales, and four children subsequently, she's now upending the service industry with a new venture—while also launching a second side business organisation and setting upwards her original company for listen-boggling growth.
One past one, Amber Venz Box listened to the social entrepreneurs tell their stories. It was April 2017, and she was serving as a approximate of The Pitch, United Way's first Shark Tank-style competition. It was about six years into the launch of her company, rewardStyle, and her hard piece of work was paying off. Social media stars and global brands were flocking to her influencer commerce platform, and she was a darling of the tech press.
On stage at The Bomb Factory, social innovators, battling for a $75,000 grant, shared how they were helping women in poverty, offering second chances to juvenile offenders, bringing fresh produce to families in need, or giving promise to unemployed individuals through free IT training. It was a wake-up call for the twenty-something entrepreneur. "It made me realize that I had been so heads-down, working on our business, and had not been doing anything philanthropically in Dallas or fifty-fifty understood what the needs were," Venz Box says. "I left a changed person."
She was especially shaken by what she had learned about childhood poverty in Texas. She asked United Way main Jennifer Sampson to guide her through Dallas' foundation and social impact ecosystem. Those conversations ultimately fed into the launch of Cherry, an on-demand platform for nail technicians who do manicures in clients' homes, offices, or hotels. (Think of it as the Uber of nailcare.) Attracting investors like young man SMU grad Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder and CEO of Bumble, and BeautyBio's Jamie O'Banion, Ruby was founded on two beliefs: offset, people volition go along to crave convenience; second, the value will continue to be more directly transferred betwixt the value giver and value receiver. It also helps eliminate inefficiency and waste. Traditionally, nail techs are required to exist in the salon for ready piece of work hours. But they're but paid for the services they provide—often half or less of what the customer is charged, Venz Box says.
She points out that Dallas has 1 of the nation'south worst rates for childhood poverty and that many of those children are beingness cared for by unmarried mothers. "Our desire was to lean into that issue and provide higher-paying opportunities for these unmarried mothers and give them a flexible schedule," Venz Box says. "We figured out a way to pass forth the majority of the transaction to them and build in tipping and brand everything cashless. Nosotros're building their business, they're building their business organisation, and it'southward all on a platform that we provide to them for free." The app has a five-star rating with 1,700 reviews, and customers are tipping at an average of 23 percent.
So far, almost 125 nail techs are providing services through Cherry. They're earning about two times the national average, Venz Box says. She and her squad recently hosted a briefing at Reunion Belfry to spread the word and provide education on entrepreneurship. They too launched Cherry business pages for the techs, and then they can build their own companies on the platform. Starting in Dallas, then expanding to Austin and Houston, Cherry recently secured approval to operate in all of Texas, with plans to aggrandize into other states. The prospects for disrupting the manufacture are huge. "It'southward rethinking the whole salon model and how that should work," Venz Box says.
Through funding from Ashlee and Chris Kleinert, United Mode is i of Cherry'southward biggest backers. Information technology'due south the system's get-go social affect investment in a for-profit venture. Cherry checked all of the boxes, Sampson says. "Beginning, information technology's an investment that volition do good women and put them on a path to economic mobility and fiscal independence," she says. "And second, we thought it would become profitable and that whatsoever the return on the investment would be, it could recycle back into the fund and allow us to do more of these kinds of investments in the future."
Like rewardStyle and its LIKEtoKNOW.it app, Cherry empowers women to build their ain enterprises and have more than control over their working lives. It's also helping Venz Box with i of her biggest goals: moving from success to significance.
None of this, of course, was on her mind as a pre-teen fashionista copying the looks of her idols, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. A serenity introvert, she liked the attention she'd get from teachers and others for the outfits she put together. Earlier long, fashion became a way for her to earn money, too. She'd knit scarves in class and sell them to friends. Being an entrepreneur was something her male parent always encouraged. He'd betoken out that he never missed her brother's baseball games and was always home in fourth dimension for dinner. "If you want to be involved in your family'southward lives," he'd say, "the way you do that is by owning your own business."
By the fourth dimension she was in high school, Venz Box had moved on from the Olsen twins to Jessica Simpson. She became peculiarly obsessed with a pair of earrings the performer wore—gold hoops with a little crystal in the eye. Studio Sebastian in Snider Plaza sold them, just at $125, they were manner outside her means. So, Venz Box studied the earrings and figured out a way to make them on her ain. Soon, she began selling jewelry knockoffs to friends and creating her ain designs.
After high school, she enrolled at SMU and landed a dream job at Sebastian's. A co-worker in that location often tried to prepare Venz Box up with her nephew. But the college freshman was decorated with school and her jewelry business organisation and wasn't interested. So, ane New year's Eve, her co-worker talked her into going to a party hosted by i of her nephew's friends. Venz Box went to the nephew's firm to pick up a ticket for the event. Information technology turned out that Baxter Box lived merely ane street away, in a home with the same floor program and on the aforementioned spot of the street as hers. They were four years autonomously, and so their paths had never crossed at Highland Park High School.
Information technology wasn't until she and Box reconnected at a graduation political party a few months after that they began dating. Venz Box was an undergrad, nevertheless at Sebastian's, and still making jewelry. Baxter, who earned a degree in applied science from the University of San Diego, was in grad school at SMU and investing in the startup space. 1 afternoon, he looked over her shoulder at a spreadsheet she was working on and saw how much money her jewelry business was raking in. He encouraged her to make her side gig a full-fledged business organisation and offered to help gear up it upward.
The jewelry venture flourished, but Venz Box began to miss the connection with fashion that came from putting together looks for customers at Sebastian'southward. She started doing personal shopping, earning commissions from stores for pieces her clients purchased. Her following grew through VenzEdits, a blog she created, and her fans began emailing her to thank her for her tips and share pics of purchases they'd made based on her recommendations.
Venz Box realized she was cutting herself out of the transactions. "My concern had moved online, but my business model had not," she says. And with that, the thought for rewardStyle was born.
The concept was simple simply revolutionary: utilise engineering to assist fashion bloggers monetize their content. Through rewardStyle, co-founded with Baxter, Venz Box created a way for influencers to link their posts to various retailers, who would pay commissions (to both bloggers and rewardStyle) for sales generated past their posts. Afterwards lining up a handful of influencers, it was fourth dimension to become retailers on lath. One of Venz Box's commencement calls was to Shopbop. It was an early adopter of online retail and had fairly robust offerings even back in 2011 when the manufacture was still in its infancy. The 23-year-old was persuasive, and Shopbop agreed to test the platform. That one "yep" sustained rewardStyle through the "million no's" that followed, Venz Box says.
Luxury retailers didn't understand the influencer movement, which was merely beginning to emerge. "1 exec told Venz Box, 'I kind of get what yous're proverb, merely nosotros piece of work with models and magazines. If I told my boss I was going to pay a girl who takes pictures of herself in an alley, I would lose my task."
The young entrepreneur was relentless, leveraging every possible connection. She once got a meeting with an exec at Net-a-porter in London through an intern's boyfriend'south sis, who was roommates with a girl who did design work for the visitor. But then the Shopbop numbers started to come in, and Venz Box had a real story to tell.
In 2014, she and Baxter got married. A year later, the couple had their starting time child, and rewardStyle secured $15 meg in funding on a $290 million valuation. Everything went into hyperdrive. Influencers began flocking to the platform, and, suddenly, retailers and brands were all-in.
In 2016, Venz Box was invited to speak at SXSW in Austin and was given a coveted spot in the lineup: immediately following former President Barack Obama. "Here I was, a pregnant girl with curled hair and imitation eyelashes, telling a bunch of tech guys and investors in the room about influencer marketing," she says. At the conference, she and Baxter met executives from Chappy, a New York-based image-recognition software startup. The Boxes caused the company and developed an app chosen LIKEtoKNOW.information technology, which influencers can utilise to create shoppable content on walled-garden platforms like Instagram. Information technology was another game-changer.
Today, the platform has grown from Venz Box'southward single blog to an operation involving more 100,000 influencers. More than 100 of them accept become millionaires through commissions earned via their LIKEtoKNOW.it shops. Amidst the most successful is Wendy Nguyen of Wendy's Lookbook in New York. She aligned with rewardStyle in 2012; today, she has more than than ii million followers.
"What Amber and her team developed was incredibly novel," Nguyen says. "She also gathered all of us bloggers together and created a community so nosotros could share all-time practices. We went from chatting on forums with just $.25 of information to becoming and being viewed as private content creators. [rewardStyle] gave us the opportunity to be in command of our monetization. It empowered united states of america."
Noting her innovation and affect, Dallas Fed Chief Rob Kaplan asked Venz Box to serve on i of his advisory boards. She, in turn, asked him to help introduce her at an October 2020 event at SMU, when she was presented with the school's Emerging Leader honor. Venz Box, he said, "uniquely understands central populations. Her business concern creates opportunities for people to be successful who might not otherwise be in the workforce. And I think in that regard, she has inverse the landscape."
As information technology enters its second decade, Venz Box's operation continues to evolve. Information technology has hired fifty people in contempo months, bringing the total to near 300, and has another l positions to fill. It likewise invested in tech updates to the app, such as LTK Shopping Video and LTK Search. And on July 1, rewardStyle and its LIKEtoKNOW.it app volition rebrand as LTK.
Fifty-fifty as the company continues to focus on edifice its influencers' businesses, Venz Box sees meaning opportunities with brands. LTK currently works with well-nigh five,000 retailers that represent 1 million brands. Brands are now establishing their own LTK shops, independent of retailers.
"Our client base on the brand side is growing dramatically," Venz Box says. "It'south exciting to meet what make entrepreneurs are able to do when they plug into the LTK platform and have the power of a directly-to-consumer business, versus waiting on a larger player to market their appurtenances." Last year, shoppers made $1 billion in purchases via the LTK app. Based on midyear figures for the trailing 12 months, that number has jumped to $2.8 billion.
Along with super-charging LTK and launching Ruddy and The Local Chapter (encounter sidebar on page 45), the Boxes, in the past five years or so, accept become a family of half-dozen. There's Birdie, who's 5; Boyce, 4; Bizzy, ii; and Boots, viii months. Even more impressive, the couple has establish a way to get in all work. It starts with setting boundaries, Venz Box says. She and Baxter too learned it was of import to have clear lines of responsibility within the concern. These days, she typically works from habitation while he heads to the office.
A bigger adjustment was learning to manus off tasks to others. "I hit my ain ceiling," Venz Box says. "An inability to delegate is going to cease anyone from growing beyond a certain point. A mentor told me, 'If someone can practice something 80 percent equally well every bit you, permit them do it.'" And so, she does. Venz Box gets the children ready and fed every forenoon and packs them in the car for school. Her home squad takes information technology from there. She and Baxter block off nights (until the kids are in bed) and weekends for family time.
As she reflects back on her company's decade in business, she says the influencer movement is still in its infancy. She credits Baxter with helping her focus on strategy and crafting a vision for the hereafter. "Every bit a founder, you have to be a futurist," she says. "You lot have to figure out how to ride the wave—and not just effort to paddle faster than everyone else."
Getting Away From Information technology All
Many DFW execs have lake houses or mountain homes. The Boxes have a small community of yurts in the Chihuahuan Desert.
After raising $fifteen 1000000 in Serial A funding in 2015, the growth of rewardStyle really began heating upwardly. Venz Box and her hubby, Baxter, traveled the world, trying to win business organisation from major brands and retailers. Only after 2 years of constantly trekking from Prc to Dubai to Paris and other markets, the couple realized the pace was not sustainable. "We used to piece of work nights and weekends—we lived for piece of work," Venz Box says. "We needed to build in some family fourth dimension and some rest."
The couple spent some time near Large Curve National Park and fell in dearest with the area. In 2017, they bought 400 acres on the western purlieus of the park to build an oasis where they could unwind and unplug. Staying in the Solitary Star State was important; Baxter is a seventh-generation Texan "and very proud of that," Venz Box says. They wanted to do something that had a light footprint on the country and settled on the thought of building yurts. Knowing that others might desire to get away from it all, too, the couple built one residence for their family and 4 additional yurts (about 600 square anxiety in size) to rent out through a side business they formed called The Local Chapter. Guests have ranged from NBA stars to execs on growth teams at tech companies. "It's absurd to see who chooses it and needs the space," Venz Box says. "It's such an interesting foil to life online."
The posh yurts go for virtually $420 a nighttime and take a nearly perfect rating on Airbnb. They feature Texas-based products, from luxurious Sferra linens to Stori Modern outdoor furniture, with books by Texas authors on the shelves. One affair you won't detect: televisions. "We encourage people to take time to look up at the stars or sit on the porch and look out," Venz Box says. "You can see our international border—Mexico is just on the other side of the Santa Elena Canyon; it'south pretty cool; it'south a very special place."
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Christine Perez
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Christine is the editor of D CEO mag and its online platforms. She's a national award-winning business organization announcer who has…
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