How one woman turned content creation into a billion-dollar retail business

LTK co-founder and president Amber Venz Box joins Market Domination to share the story behind LTK, the platform that reached $6 billion in annual retail sales.

I started a blog back in 2010 and I was making recommendations to an audience based on my fashion finds that I loved. and what I realized then was I actually couldn't make any money off of those recommendations online, the way I could offline as a personal shopper. So, we created LTK to really move that offline business online. Um, so, you know, where we started in fashion, it's across beauty, home, lifestyle, travel, grocery, recipes, activewear. And so you think about whether you're following a blog, a newsletter, social media, or even just an LTK on the app, people are they're sharing kind of their passion and there's trusted recommendations from those individuals. We help them actually turn their passion into a business. So our mission is to make creators as economically successful as possible and the core way that we do that is connecting any recommendation they're making to the vendor who's actually selling that product where they can actually earn a commission when people go and purchase the items that they're recommending.

And then how does how Amber, how does LTK then make money? Like, what's the business model? Explain it to me.

Yes. So we take a transaction fee on every transaction running through our platform. So we're incentivized to set the creator up for success. We give them the tools and the infrastructure to actually create the content and connect to 8,000 retailers that are uniquely integrated. So, it's everyone from Big Box to Shopify and Etsy stores. It's really anything our creators want to talk about, which is so important when it comes to authenticity and be able to choose whether it's keto bars or what they're wearing to work out, they have the opportunity to to share that authentically. Um, and we're connecting them with those brands and on the on the brand side, we actually have just launched a new platform that's really the operating system for creator commerce. You know, this is an industry that we invented and we're continuing to innovate and pioneer. And so what we did over the last year was build a platform that actually exposes our hundreds of billions of data points and make those available to every brand, unlimited seats. They're able to come in, find the right creator, use semantic search, hey, I'm looking for runners who also are into, um, you know, trail racing. And we're finding those for them, finding the right people, sharing everything about their performance, their audience, um and getting them to that right person to make a connection. This industry, like you said, is set to grow pretty materially and we felt like the unlock would be releasing the tools, democratizing them. So you're not paying SAS fees. We've already we're moving through the SASpocalypse. Let's give them the tools for free to make sure that they're finding the right creators to be successful.