I was recently sitting on the floor of my closet, wearing a pair of coffee and wine stained pajamas, and asking Amber Venz Box to go through my Instagram and tell me if my life looked at all aspirational, commercial or shoppable. In short, if the things I chose to put on social media made other people want to buy my life.

Venz Box is the expert at that sort of thing, probably the expert. She’s the founder and President of the influencer marketing platform and agency RewardStyle, which connects social media influencers with brands so that they can monetize the content they create. She’s also the creator of LiketoKnowIt, a shopping app that helped make it possible for millions of people to easily purchase what they’ve seen on those influencer accounts.

Instagram wasn’t originally created as a place to buy things, but Venz Box is one of the entrepreneurs that made it a premier bazaar, a gleaming billboard for lifestyle and a one-stop shop for clout.

For the past year I’ve been reporting out “Under the Influence,” a podcast about mom influencers that digs into the economics, the psychology, the anthropology, the “how the hell did we get here-ness” of a world where a small army of women tells us what color to paint our walls, how to organize our pantries and how to properly swaddle our babies.

Most influencers I interviewed for “Under the Influence” mentioned RewardStyle in hushed and reverent tones, the way celebrities used to tell me the name of their facialist or shaman back when I was a gossip columnist, or the way my ex-boyfriend explained to people that he went “to school in Cambridge.”

That’s how I found Amber Venz Box.

liketoknowit celebrates official book launch during nyfw
Andrew Toth//Getty Images
Call Amber Venz Box the dean of social media entrepreneurs.

THE HARVARD OF INFLUENCE

More than a hundred influencers told me that Box was the reason they had turned their Instagram from a side hustle into a career. They told me that RewardStyle did two things. It taught them to be a better influencer and connected them with brands so they could make money. The numbers prove this. By 2017, Venz Box’s platforms had generated a billion dollars in sales for brands; that jumped to $3 billion by the next year. Venz Box told me that by the end of 2020 influencers who work with RewardStyle and LikeToKnowIt, sold more than $8 billion in products for both luxury and mass-market brands, according to the companies.

“There is a playbook for success as an influencer and I believe it is a skill that can be taught,” Venz Box says. “Let me say ‘skills’ plural, that can be taught. To succeed you have to be a polymath— you need marketing skills, business skills, performance skills and creative skills.”

RewardStyle isn’t as difficult to get into as Harvard, but it is close—according to its spokesperson, hundreds of thousands apply every year but they only have approximately 100,000 registered influencers, among them Molly Sims, The Home Edit, Studio McGee, Aimee Song, Louise Roe, Nastia Lukin, Kristen Taekman and Tayshia Adams. The application involves a review of a potential influencer’s social media feeds—examining their audience engagement, their aesthetic, how often they post, what kind of an audience they reach and whether their content is “shoppable.”

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Frazer Harrison//Getty Images
The founders of The Home Edit, pictured here with Reese Witherspoon, are some of the elite registered members of RewardStyle.

This idea of having a “shoppable life” is a relatively new concept. The word was coined by University of Pennsylvania researcher Emily Hund and University of North Carolina Assistant Professor Lee McGuigan.

“Shopability is this idea that any place, piece of content, experience could be a potential site of commerce,” explained Hund, who studies influencers through an academic lens at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. “Before RewardStyle, it was extremely difficult to monetize blog and Instagram content in any seamless way. There were some other companies doing the same thing, but they were the ones who did it better than everyone else. Once you’re in the club, being in at RewardStyle lends influencers instant legitimacy.”

After entry to RewardStyle's inner sanctum, budding influencers are trained to be finesse what they do. They are given tools to maximize their ability to make money off their content. They are told what kinds of posts do best (selfies do really well, duh). They are given tutorials on taking the perfect picture (great lighting, less clutter), on how to write a caption (be authentic, write it like you’re writing to your sister or best friend), on how to create an editorial calendar the same way you would for a fashion magazine.

“Not only does your content need to attract people, but it needs to be constantly refreshed with a regular cadence. You have to commit to a posting schedule and stick to it to show your future audience that your channels are a place to return to day after day,” says Venz Box.

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The last time I interviewed Venz Box she was also sitting on the floor of her closet because I told her that’s where she’d get the best acoustics for my podcast. Her baby bump was chicly sheathed in some kind of loungewear that looked like she was wearing a cloud and she appeared to have absolutely everything under control, including the recent launch of her 392 -acre design-minded yurt resort that had just opened in a West Texas ghost town. When I forgot to hit record, Venz Box very calmly just recounted everything she had already told me in a way that only a mother of three, soon-to-be-four, could do without losing her cool.

“There is the pre-children Amber and the post-children Amber, and while I am confident that the latter is a better person, she is also a little more undone,” she told me. If this was un-done Amber then I knew for certain I was some kind of troll living under a bridge.

ORIGINS OF A SOCIAL MEDIA ORACLE

Unlike most tech darlings, Venz Box, 33, doesn’t live in Silicon Valley. She’s unapologetically based in Dallas, where she’s lived since she moved back in with her dad after finishing college at Southern Methodist University during the 2008 financial crisis.

“My friends all moved back to their home states to live with their parents because there were no jobs; I spent all of my time working, trying to build my own business,” she said. Venz Box had just started a jewelry line and landed a job as a personal shopper at a high-end Dallas boutique, where she got paid a commission by retail stores for selling clothes to her personal clients. She also started her own website called Venzedits where she marketed herself and blogged about personal style. This was a savvy marketing decision that turned into a terrible business decision because pretty soon she’d cannibalized her own paycheck. She needed to find a way, and fast, to get paid for the online sales she was cultivating.

I like this part of the story. Venz Box is very upfront about the fact that she launched RewardStyle to further her own business aspirations. We never hear male tech founders say that. They always pontificate about saving the world when what they really aspired to was selling our data and our souls using an algorithm originally created to rate the hotness of inaccessible girls on campus.

After some brainstorming Venz Box and Baxter Bo, her boyfriend at the time, decided to build a platform that would link bloggers with brands and pay them a commission of each sale. Some fashion and mommy blogs were using affiliate marketing at the time, but there weren’t many agencies connecting bloggers directly with brands and trying to streamline the process.

liketoknowit celebrates official book launch during nyfw
Andrew Toth//Getty Images
Amber Venz Box and Baxter Box launching a LiketoKnowIt book during New York Fashion Week.

Amber eventually married Baxter, an MBA with an engineering background whom she described as “the yin to my yang,” the reason “everything clicked with RewardStyle.” But the ingenuity and the grit was all hers. The hustle is in her blood. Both of her grandmothers were seamstresses who taught her to sew and knit, and these days she enjoys sharing the anecdote that in the fifth grade she was asked to leave math class because she was caught knitting and selling scarves in the back row.

The couple officially launched the RewardStyle website in 2011. “When we started it was impossible to get in the door at any of these brands,” Venx Box says. “No one wanted to hear about a blogger, nor work with or pay a blogger.” They had to convince many a skeptic behemoths that blogs were the future of commerce.

In 2014, they launched LiketoKnowIt. That website did exactly what its name promised. If you liked something on Instagram—a dress, a sweater, a dog collar—they would tell you how to know where to find it. If you’ve bought anything on Instagram in the past six years you have probably used or at least seen the LiketoKnowIt links. But back then, Instagram shopping was clunky, mostly because the Instagram founders really didn’t want Instagram to become a shopping destination. They had originally envisaged their platform as a beautiful place where average people could easily tweak their photographs to make them seem wonderfully above average.

“The Instagram founders initially were a little bit horrified by this that people would be using this creative space to make money,” explained Sarah Frier, the author of No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram. “They thought the idea of having billboards across this beautiful art space that was Instagram would just make it completely unusable. So, what happened was, people learned to weave in what was essentially advertising into posts that didn't look like advertising. That these products would get just weaved into regular everyday life and wouldn't disrupt what worked on Instagram. Instead it would just be unclear to people whether it was an ad or not, and in that way it was more effective.”

In 2015 RewardStyle raised $15 million in funding. Investors valued the venture at $290 million.

SAGES OF PANDEMIC SHOPPING

The first iteration of LiketoKnowIt was a newsletter service that allowed consumers to 'like' an Instagram post and receive ready-to-shop product links directly to their inbox. Then, in 2017, the LiketoKnowIt shopping app made purchasing even easier for avid digital shoppers. It became mecca for people who like to shop from influencers, who wanted someone else to tell them what to buy. Within the app an influencer could tag nearly everything in their lives and consumers could buy it with a tap.

With the rise of constant shoppability, Venz Box was off to the races. But then, the pandemic hit and suddenly even more people were shopping from home.

liketoknowit celebrates official book launch during nyfw
Andrew Toth//Getty Images
The influencer Jessica Wang is an alumnus of RewardStyle. She boasts 1.7 million followers on Instagram and 4.9 million on TikTok.

Last year, Venz Box says that RewardStyle and LikeToKnowIt sold 2.5 billion in product for more than 5,000 brands like Neiman Marcus, Urban Outfitters, Reebok, Kendra Scott and Wal-Mart and grew their influencer content by 43 percent amidst the pandemic shopping mania.

Beyond the fact that Venz Box's platform sells a lot of stuff, it offers something else to many aspiring entrepreneurs, especially women. Think what you want about social media influencers and the way they choose to make their money, but it is a job. And for a lot of women it is a job that they can do while they take on a lot of the other unpaid labors of womanhood—care-taking, child-rearing, homemaking, cooking, even cleaning—except here they are rewarded for them.

“We have now 100 RewardStyle millionaires,” Venz Box claimed. Though she declined to say who exactly they are, she did note that these were people who were not millionaires before joining the agency. They made their money selling through the platform. “These are women who have come on the platform, built their businesses, and are now making over $1 million through our platform alone."

Critics of influencers worry they’re manipulative, that they’re showcasing only the perfect parts of their lives in order to sell you things they are being paid to use. That's fair criticism but forgets the fact that advertisers have been using women to sell to other women since the dawn of modern marketing. What is different this time is that the advertising can find you anywhere, anytime in the palm of your hand. It feels much more intimate now.

In addition to talking to hundreds of influencers for “Under the Influence,” I made the decision to fully immerse myself in their world, to see if maybe I could join them, if I could make my life shoppable and monetize it. It’s the kind of idea that can only be born in a postpartum haze of hormones, to report something out like a mad hybrid of J.C. Wiatt, from Baby Boom, and Hunter S. Thompson.

Venz Box was encouraging about my prospects. She told me to apply to be a RewardStyle influencer and go from there. That’s how I found myself asking her which parts of my life are shoppable.

She stopped scrolling through my Instagram when she saw a picture of my daughter Bea in a grey onesie with the words TINY FEMINIST emblazoned across her chest.

“That would be an amazing post for LikeToKnowIt,” Venz Box said. “That one would be gold because so many people would love that piece, and they would want to have it and share it. That one would do very well,” she told me as one of my children began banging on the closet door asking me to find them a very specific pair of orange socks. “You can do this,” she added helpfully.

Her encouraging words echoed in my head as I Googled to find out if those orange socks would make me a commission…

All episodes of Under the Influence are available on Apple Podcasts.

Headshot of Jo Piazza
Jo Piazza
Jo Piazza is author of seven critically acclaimed books, both fiction and non-fiction which have been translated into more than ten languages, including her most recent, Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win.