Two women clad in sheer pearl-dotted bodysuits with giant white roses strapped to their heads greet guests entering a Fashion Week party at Hotel Fouquet’s in New York City. A sign outside the room notes that the capacity is 74 people, but more than 200 guests have RSVP’d. The noise is deafening, though that matters little: the point of this party is to photograph and be photographed.
One woman wears a leopard-print minidress with a matching coat, another a blazer with no shirt underneath. Several women fix their makeup in the mirrored cocktail tables scattered around the room. Even the DJ pauses to take a selfie.
Many of the attendees have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers on social media, but the star of the night is Amber Venz Box, the host of the event and president and co-founder of LTK, one of the most popular influencer platforms in the world. Box, 36, usually keeps a relatively low profile: She lives on a ranch in Texas with her co-founder, CEO, and husband Baxter Box and their four kids in a location she won’t disclose for privacy reasons. But in this room, influencers clamor for a picture with the willowy redhead. Several call her their hero. One of the richest self-made women in the U.S., with Forbes estimating her net worth at $315 million in 2021, she helped pioneer the modern influencer economy by building a bridge between content creators and advertising dollars.
“We’ve come such a long way,” she says in a welcome speech. “Looking at the guest list for today, 10% of you in the room are LTK millionaires.” Everyone swivels their heads in search of these mystery super earners. A man next to me, clad entirely in black, whispers, “Damn, let me take off my sunglasses and take a look around.”
LTK has revolutionized the online shopping experience with what Box describes as a win-win-win model. The company allows influencers to post links to products they’re wearing, carrying, and decorating with on the LTK platform, which their followers can access via social media or the LTK app. If, for instance, an LTK creator posts a photo in a cute blazer on Instagram, one of her followers can click over to the creator’s LTK page to see where it came from and click from there to the brand site to buy it. The retailer makes the sale and pays a commission to the influencer and a transaction fee to LTK. The platform also offers creators information about their reach, their follower demographics, and what types of photos and videos are attracting attention. The company even connects influencers with brands looking for a specific type of person to promote a product—say, a furniture company seeking someone who appeals to 20-something women decorating their first apartments. LTK takes a cut of those deals too.
Box boasts that more than 8,000 retailers are on LTK, 40 million people shop through LTK creators every month, and LTK has helped 419 influencers become millionaires. She estimates that the company, which raised $300 million from SoftBank at a $2 billion valuation in 2021, will generate about $5 billion in sales for brands this year, much of which will come this holiday season. Last November, according to LTK, more than $200 worth of products were purchased every second through its creators.
Influencers are giving traditional advertising a run for its money: Goldman Sachs predicts the creator economy will approach half a trillion dollars by 2027. But Box saw the potential more than a decade ago. During her speech at the soirée, she thanks everyone for flying in from all over the country. She lists some of the brands at Fashion Week that are on LTK—Proenza Schouler, Ulla Johnson, Simkhai—and emphasizes just how much the market has changed.
“Cheers to this community, and I hope that you guys have a wonderful, amazing Fashion Week,” she says, “because Lord knows, these brands need you.”
Hours before the party, Box sits in her hotel room, fretting over what to wear. The choice is important not only because of who will see her outfit that night but also because LTK’s 4.4 million Instagram followers will be able to look up her ensemble and purchase it through the LTK app. She ultimately decides on a $2,065 blush-colored Costarellos gown, accessorized with a black handbag and pearl and diamond earrings.
Growing up in Texas, Box was an introverted kid who came to see fashion as a tool for attention. Her aunt, an artist, would paint her shoes for school. Box got kicked out of fifth-grade math class for knitting scarves she would sell to her friends. In high school she started making wire earrings, knockoffs of the gold ones she’d seen Jessica Simpson wear on Newlyweds. It wasn’t long before fellow teens were dropping off their prom dresses at her home so she could make jewelry to match their look.
Box launched a jewelry line in high school and later sold it at the local store where she worked in college. “I thought that I was going to be the next Rachel Zoe,” she says, referring to the celebrity stylist who had her own reality show. She spent a summer living in a frat house in L.A. while interning for photographers and stylists. The next summer she shared a mattress on the floor with a friend in an apartment in New York City and worked as an intern for the fashion brand Thakoon.
“Anna Wintour was always popping in,” Box remembers. “It was sort of Devil Wears Prada in real life where they made us hide. Like, Anna couldn’t see anyone but Thakoon [Panichgul] when she came in, and they would give us a warning. It was a really open space so you’d have to crouch down behind a wall.” (Panichgul did not respond to requests for comment.)
When Box returned to Southern Methodist University for her senior year, she met her now husband Baxter, who had started a tech incubator. One day, he looked at her spreadsheets and realized her jewelry sales dwarfed what she was making as a sales clerk. “He was like, ‘Oh my god. Where is this money?’ And I was like, ‘You’re looking at it,’” gesturing to her clothes and shoes.
Baxter encouraged her to commit to the jewelry line full time, and she made a deal with his incubator to support the business. Still living in her father’s house, she shipped her wares to department stores in New York and set up stands at local markets. “My stuff was, like, really avant-garde. And at this market, I was next to glitter makeup bags,” she says. “I was sort of being snooty and a little offended about my positioning there. But then the first day, I sold $8,000 of jewelry, and they sold $400,000 of the sparkle bags.” She went home to complain to her father. “He was like, ‘Amber, sell to the masses.’” She didn’t have time to implement the lesson. It was 2008, and when the economy took a turn, the business began to collapse.
She worked as a personal stylist and made a decent living until she launched a fashion blog in 2010. The blog was featured in the Dallas Morning News and took off. But then her clients started enthusiastically buying the clothes she featured in her posts—without paying her for the advice. Dismayed, she went to a conference for fashion bloggers in New York on a mission to figure out how to monetize the blog. “I remember Leandra [Medine Cohen] from Man Repeller was onstage, and so I ran and grabbed her afterwards, and I was like, ‘Hey so, how do you make money doing this?’ She was like, ‘Well, I don’t.’ So literally no one’s making money.” (Medine Cohen declined to comment, but a source close to her says the Man Repeller founder does not believe that she would have ever characterized her business this way.)
Box had spent thousands of dollars on a laptop, a camera to photograph her outfits, a website domain, and a designer to build and maintain the site. “Fashion blogging was sort of like a rich-girl sport,” she says. She dreamed of making a commission on the clothes she recommended on her blog, just as she had working with brick-and-mortar boutiques. And so the first iteration of LTK, called RewardStyle, was born. She had $236 in her bank account the day it launched.
My home is a testament to the power of the influencer: I own a ridiculously efficient pepper grinder touted by several celebrity chefs, a Scandinavian rug hawked by a lifestyle blogger, and baby spoons recommended by a nutritionist turned momfluencer. That’s before I even reach my closet. If you are active on social media, particularly Instagram or TikTok, you can also probably pinpoint the people online who inspired you to buy certain items.
But Box spent years trying to convince Silicon Valley that influencers were the future of commerce. In 2010, Box convinced Shopbop, which had been acquired by Amazon, that influencers might drive traffic to the online retailer. Medine Cohen and other fashion bloggers came onboard.
“We went to San Francisco, did this whole tour, and everyone was like, ‘I’m gonna call my girlfriend and see what she thinks about this.’ The idea of monetizing fashion blogs, it wasn’t really clicking for them,” Box says. “And then one of the places that we went into, the secretary dialed in and was like, ‘Baxter Box is here, and he brought his wife.’”
Looking back, Box says being overshadowed by a man wasn’t the only reason it was difficult to launch a company with her romantic partner. Even before they were co-founders, when his incubator had a deal with her jewelry company, she felt a sense of inequity. “I still think the structure that was initially created was not appropriate,” Box says. “There was friction when he was getting paid and I wasn’t, and I was like, ‘This doesn’t make sense. I’m the one slaving away, and you’re getting the check every month.’”
Frustrations compounded when they both decided to work full time on LTK—in the same room. “I would get calls and he would be G-chatting me, like, ‘Why didn’t you say this? You should have said that.’” Box eventually decamped to the bathroom to take her meetings. “Those were awful years,” she says. “We did break up several times. We never told anyone at the company, and we never behaved differently, because we didn’t want any of the company to think, ‘Oh no, what’s going to happen? The founders broke up.’”
The Boxes did, eventually, figure out how to work together: they operate out of separate buildings on their ranch and meet with each other in the car on the way to pick up their kids. And the rest of the world did, eventually, catch up to Box’s vision.
Companies slowly realized that potential customers were more likely to buy a product from an influencer whose taste they already trusted than from an ad put in front of them by an algorithm. A 2022 Pew Research Center study found that 30% of adult social media users had purchased something after seeing an influencer post about it, a number that jumped to 53% for those who follow creators’ accounts. “Influencers offer a huge benefit to brands moving into spaces with customer bases who are unfamiliar with them,” says Jared Watson, a professor of marketing at NYU who specializes in the influencer economy. And then there are the parasocial or one-way relationships that followers form with influencers they love. “It feels like it’s a request from a friend or family member to check out this product, and they feel like they’re not going to be led astray,” Watson says.
In 2013, the Boxes launched LiketoKnow.It, a new platform with a focus on driving sales from social media. Consumers bought $10 million worth of products promoted by its creators. In 2015, they bought $50 million. In 2016, they bought $150 million.
Paradoxically, the success made Box nervous. She felt too dependent on the fickle practices of social media sites. This fear had manifested when Pinterest, without warning, turned off outside links one day in 2012. (They turned LikeToKnow.It’s back on when Barneys complained that it had an ongoing ad campaign using its links.) So Box’s team began to build the LTK app, launched in April 2017, to cultivate a space that is less reliant on other social platforms. It saw a massive boom during the pandemic when creators suddenly had endless time to post everything from Target lamps to Chanel earrings—and shoppers endless time to stare at their phones.
The business grew so much that Box began to feel overstretched and, in 2023, decided she could no longer reside in a big city. “I am a pleaser,” she says. “There’s guilt with every no. It’s really nice to say, ‘Sorry, I can’t come to your birthday party or charity thing. I don’t live in Dallas anymore.’” She was also concerned about how her social media presence was impacting her family. “In Dallas, especially, we are a recognized family, and it is uncomfortable to go into restaurants and other places, because I know I’m just being watched all the time, and I know my kids are being watched in the same way, because they’ve been part of the story online,” she says. Which isn’t to say she’s stopped posting about them entirely. On a recent trip to New York City to celebrate her daughter Birdie’s 9th birthday, Box chronicled the family’s outfits for their various excursions with links to LTK.
Watson of NYU says LTK has turned into the tool of choice for influencers. Individual social media sites like TikTok have ways to shop within the app but cannot offer creators data on engagement across other platforms. And competitors simply do not have as many brand relationships as LTK, which was early to the space. “They effectively make it a really nice one-stop shop for creators,” he says. “And success begets success. One of the reasons LTK is crushing it is because all influencers hear about from one another is LTK.”
If you’re intrigued by the idea of becoming an LTK millionaire, know that it’s not as simple as posting a few mirror selfies. The company now boasts more than 300,000 creators, but it remains selective. There’s an application process in which Box’s team analyzes influencers’ engagement on social media, their aesthetic, and whether their content is shoppable. Once accepted, creators participate in a boot camp on how to light their pictures, write captions, and create an editorial calendar. “You also need credibility,” Box says. “For example, now that I’m living on a ranch, my wardrobe has changed entirely. I have a huge boot collection because there are snakes where I live.”
The company also recruits. It has targeted reality stars like Whitney Port from The Hills, who attended the Fashion Week party, and Daisy Kent from The Bachelor, who was one of 360 creators at the 12th annual LTKCon summit in Dallas three weeks later. “It kind of gives me meaning outside of the platform of the reality show or whatever I’m doing,” says Olivia Flowers, a Southern Charm alum. “They teach me how I can promote my brand, which is me.”
Box likes to hold up Emily of the Netflix show Emily in Paris as a model influencer. “Be Emily and then also make what you’re doing in your life shoppable,” Box tells her creators. I point out that many people—even fans of the show—find Emily insufferable exactly because of her influencer tendencies: her wild fashion choices, her overly peppy demeanor, her insistence on taking photos of every aspect of her life. “She’s not for everyone,” Box says, laughing. But Box does think Emily could be successful on LTK. “I would tell her to keep being positive and happy. I tell our creators that. Also, respond to followers. If they message you and say they bought the jeans, they want your acknowledgment and validation. They should respond, ‘I hope you liked them. What did you wear them with?’ I call being a creator the hospitality business.”
Jen Adams, an interior-design guru with 3.1 million Instagram followers, personifies this attitude. Walking out of the Fashion Week party, she is stopped every few steps by someone she has mentored. She hugs each new person and bounces with joy as she talks about the impact Box has had on her life. “The Nordstrom Anniversary Sale has always been a big event for creators. We call it Christmas in July,” she says. One year, LTK reposted one of Adams’ pictures the night before the sale. “When that day’s commission came in, I literally fell out of bed,” she says. One of LTK’s most successful creators, she now employs 15 people, all of whom, she notes, are moms, and all of whom are supported by her LTK affiliate-link business, as is her own family.
How much money does she make on LTK exactly? She won’t say. Several other influencers I speak to are similarly circumspect. If they are indeed millionaires, though, they are in the minority when it comes to the overall creator economy. Of the estimated 50 million people earning money by promoting content, only about 4% earn more than $100,000 a year, according to a 2023 report from Goldman Sachs. And yet the number entering the space is likely to keep growing. A Morning Consult poll last year found that 57% of Gen Z and 41% of adults overall would become an influencer if they had the opportunity.
Asked how the company can maintain both its rate of growth and its air of exclusivity, Box says LTK is looking to broaden its reach overseas as well as expand its smaller verticals, like wellness and cooking, in the U.S. Kit Ulrich, LTK’s general manager of the creator shopping platform, points to pickleball as an area of particular interest to sports brands looking to boost sales.
Though Box sold another company she co-founded, a platform that connected customers with nail technicians, to Glamsquad in 2023, she sidesteps questions of an LTK acquisition, saying only that she is always open to “strategic opportunities” but is focused on “future-proofing” the business. She knows, after all, that others want in. Instagram launched Instagram Shopping so users can buy from brands without leaving the app, and TikTok has TikTok Shop, though in November TikTok began letting its users link to LTK in their posts.
LTK introduced full-bleed, scrollable videos, à la TikTok, this year and has been incorporating AI learning to connect brands with creators. Meanwhile, the company has not forgotten what happened with Pinterest and continues to urge creators to grow their followings on its own app. Box says internal metrics show engagement on Instagram has been plummeting since the spring. “Individual creators have less power and control about whether their community is going to see them at any given time,” Ulrich says. “Then you run the risk of not being able to earn as much money.” Instagram did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Maybe someday Box will kick up her designer boots and retire to the luxury yurt vacation retreat that she and Baxter opened near Big Bend National Park in 2020. But if she learned anything from her early days trying to turn her passion into a livelihood, it’s to recognize the challenges ahead but not be cowed by them. She recalls going to the store she worked at in Dallas and telling them about the new business she was launching. “The owner was like, ‘No one’s ever gonna pay somebody for online sales. So when it doesn’t work, you can have your job back.’” She’s good.