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LTK | Fortune

LTK Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Amber Venz Box, Co - founder and President, LTK
Interviewer: Michal Lev-Ram, Editorial Director, Live Media; Editor-at-Large, FORTUNE 

MPW Next Gen 2023 - Fueling The Influencer Ecosystem 

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MPW NG 2023 - Fueling The Influencer Ecosystem 

In 2011, Amber V Box was a personal shopper looking to disrupt the creator economy. Today, Ben Box has built the largest global influencer marketing platform with more than $3.6 billion of goods sold in 2022 alone. In addition to working with more than 150,000 creators, more than 6000 brands partner with L T K to manage and scale their marketing campaigns. Amber V Box is joined by fortune editor at large Mahal Abram. Please welcome them to the stage. See, OK. Um I know we had like at least one influencer here, but raise your hand if you consider yourself a creator or an influencer. No, that's, that's an influencer thing to do. You really made an entrance? Um OK. So I'm assuming probably not everybody in the audience is familiar with L T K and I, I think let's just start with basics. What, what is it, what is the business? And then let's get into why you started it. So the business today is helping creators to monetize their content and we do that by helping them really get their arms around their shopping audience. And um we really are a platform that powers creator and guided shopping. So, three sided marketplace with our creators on one side, our brands, retailers on the other and then the shopping consumer um using our consumer shopping app. OK? And then get into your, you know, the story is as personal as it usually or oftentimes is of why you actually started this. But what were you doing before? And what prompted you to start LP K? Well, I'd worked on all sides of the fashion industry. I didn't know totally where I would land, but I had had a jewelry company, a denim company. I worked as a shop girl as a buyer. I worked in pr in wholesale in L A in New York and I had done it all and I was growing my jewelry line. When about the time I started this business, I was also doing personal shopping, which I'm based in Dallas, Texas. I had gone around to different boutique owners and set up deals with them where I would earn a set commission with them on anything I sold to my private clients. And so what that meant practically is that I would go into the stores. I would pull items in my customer sizes, bring them into their homes, file them, photograph them, exchange anything that didn't fit, return the stuff, build the charge. And then two weeks later, I would sit in the waiting rooms of those store owners for my $32 check for the jeans there and my 102 for the bag there. And I would spend days on days trying to collect from these retailers, but I loved what I did. And so I started a website in order to market that business. In 2010, the Dallas morning news put out a full page article that said meet the blogger and blogger was in full big type across the top of the page. That's when I found out that I was a blogger. I also found out that I was giving my services away for free. And I thought that editor really didn't listen in our interview. Like that's not what I said at all. This is a marketing website. But within a few months, I realized that that was absolutely true and that people were coming to my website to get product recommendations. Um And I had cut myself out of my own business after building a custom website, hiring a photographer and posting three times a day. OK. Uh The rest is history, I guess. Um where, where are you at today? Just give us a, some, some metrics so that we can have a sense of scale. And I guess what, what we launched in really 2011 was a modernization of that. So I was able, when we launched our business, um first was able to earn a commission on the sales that I drove online in my business. So it was really for you. You were your first customer? I was my first customer. I was, um, living at home eating my dad's cereal and I was highly motivated. People would say like, oh, did you risk it all? I was like, I risk it, I risked $236. Um, is what I risk, that's what was in my bank account. So, um, I had basically a dream and a desire and a need and today the business has grown considerably. So I think we're going on our 13th birthday this year 12. Um And we have about, let's see, 750 team members worldwide offices in 11 countries. Like I think there were some numbers shared earlier today just about kind of the volume that we're driving. One exciting stuff that I'm very proud of. Our mission is to make creators as economically successful as possible. And so we've opened up multiple lanes of earnings for them to really quantify the value that they add to the retail ecosystem. Um And actually just last month, we hit $2 billion in creator earnings through our platform alone. One billion of that was earned in the last year and a half, impressive, impressive numbers. And I definitely wanna, I sure we all have a lot of questions about what does this career actually look like. Um But, but going back to just the growth of the company, um you led this for quite a while. Family owned business, basically. Um, and you were profitable and then about a couple of years ago you took a massive round of funding 300 million led by Softbank. So tell us why you did that and sort of, you know how you're using those funds and just what it's how it's changed the company. Well, it's a, it's a really unique story because it, well, one, it started in Dallas Texas with a 23 year old girl who worked retail. Um And so that didn't make us very investable. Um Also being in the blogging space before that was part of common vernacular, didn't make us very investable. And um you know, neither. I'm a blogger who wanted to be funny. No, didn't work even, you know, even in um 2015, we did a small series a um and even then kind of doing the rounds for the first time and learning so much about that experience, you know, at one point I was my, I started the business um with my, who's now my husband was my boyfriend at the time. And when we walked in, they were like, oh, he brought his girlfriend. Um So, you know, that experience, we've come a long way since 2015. Um But really, yes, by all they tell you, she brought her assistant. No, exactly. We're, we're fantastic co founders, very different sides. Um I'd highly recommend the co founder um, you know, I had hit many ceilings before, with other businesses before, um, this one taking off. But yeah, with, so we're a unique story because we, um, we're profitable for many years. We were family owned. Um, we had always owned the vast majority of the organization. The, the series A 2015 was a very small piece of the, the organization. Um, and so a unique story, but it allowed us growth capital to kind of pull our road map forward with a business that was already working. Um And then to kind of give some relief and excitement. Two team members had been with us for a decade. OK. Um So, so I wanna hear a little bit about, you know, we, we the earlier session talked about Gen Z. Um You have some really interesting data. Um You, you did a study on Gen Z that showed nearly 80% of their shopping originates from social media, 90 per 92% of Genz rely on influencers to inform their purchases across nearly all categories. And um it, it really speaks to the, the, the trust that this generation puts in creators and influencers. And so I'm wondering, you know, obviously we've got such diverse industries represented here, but what can the leaders in this room take away from that as they're hiring this generation uh selling to this generation or maybe they are in this generation, they're a very unique, unique group and the younger that they get, the more that they rely on creators. So it was part of that study too. We found that this generation, Gen Z, they actually trust creators more than their family or celebrities, which was surprising even to me. And so, you know, there was a movement recently uh kind of a topic of conversation around like de influencing and this concept for some people took that to mean that like influence, you know, creators had maybe like less influence. Um But that's certainly not what the data says. Um What, what is the, the influencing? So there's for us candidly, there's a lot of different definitions. Um what it, what it was initially meant to do was, you know, we this mascara, not this mascara. Um I think it was picked up as a, you know, in the kind of the press machine if you will as something of like anti creator or that creators have less influence over their audiences. It is candidly probably has four different definitions and depending on the publication, you saw something different, but it was certainly d is not something I ever want put on our industry, but the also tells us that that's not the case. And so with these, with Gen Z, we're seeing that even if they have a brand that they've already opted into 50% of them in this national shopper survey say they have switched their core brand to a new brand because of what a creator has told them to look at. And if you think about this generation, um you know, they spent what the last three years online being entertained by essentially digital friends, they have high trust with that are sharing everything from their mental health challenges to maybe depending on your generation. I know millennials like oftentimes, you know, maybe it's your pregnancy story or your birthing story or the road to getting there. I mean, there's really intimate details that have been shared. But this group grew up up with a phone in their hand, connecting with other people digitally and they are known as candidly, sadly the loneliest generation. But that means that really the core, like their core relationships even exist online. So it's so important that you are leveraging those hyper niche network and groups to be able to reach your customer. So I think from that, from a marketing perspective, which was your original question. Um You know, today, leveraging creators to market allows you to set your product in the context of a very niche group. So that that person um that's using the product can set it. Maybe it's in the context of like an age group or even a part of the nation, um a certain niche group that they already have trust with and I call it like an irrational trust with this person, but they're able to put that product in context um that really like resonates with that group and that's just not something that we've ever been able to do before in digital advertising. Um I want to go to you guys for questions and just a second. But, you know, you brought up the irrational uh element here aren't purchasing decisions, a lot of them, whether it's gen Z and it's influencers or it's the kind of more traditional way. Um aren't a lot of that, isn't it just all irrational? You know, it, it's a high trust environment, someone who's been using the same face cream for 20 years for some reason. No. You know what, as a creator, what's interesting about this space is some people will say, well, like, oh they're just like paid to talk about these things. So that's just why they talk about these things. But I can tell you that creators to really make money, make money with commerce and commerce creators cannot afford for that mascara to show up and be crappy mascara. If I told you, it's going to make your lashes look amazing and you show up and it doesn't, you are not shopping from that creator ever again. And so there's a higher risk with a commerce centric creator than anything else. And so really the industry and the way that we've kind of built it engineered and facilitated it is like, it's high trust because you can't buy to trust you, you've lost the customer forever. And I just want to point out I know we started with glossier. We're talking about cosmetics right now. This is way much, much bigger than cosmetics. This is not a platform for, for makeup. It just happens to be kind of one of the earlier use cases for. Exactly. You know, we started in fashion because that's, you know, at the time I was, you know, buying dresses and then we expanded into home as I could get an apartment and then the beauty when I found out I had wrinkles and then, you know, all of a sudden in like weddings and like, follow the lifestyle. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Um, but yeah, it's expanded far and beyond and even, you know, our newest customers are in the tech base, finance base, you know, major hotel chains, cars. Um, it's, they're really making all lifestyle decisions. It's not longer just like, how do I get dressed? But how do I think about a certain brand? And so whether you're an energy company or a car company or even a charity, you need that creator to really, first of all, have you integrated into their content from someone that they've kind of opted in to follow. Um, and put it in a context that they can rationalize and understand and have that emotional tie to because that they, this generation wants to have an emotional attachment to the products and things in, in their spending and that's very different than generations before. Ok. Questions for Amber, please. Raise your hand, we will bring a microphone over to you and we've got one over here. Hi, I'm she. Murthy L T K was such a pioneer of the creator economy. Many, many years before that term even existed. And in the past five years we've seen an explosion of businesses designed to help creators make money, help them monetize their brands. How do you think about your business and contextualize it in the wake of so many more entrants into this space? How do you stay differentiated in that context? A great question. And thank you. It sounds like you're well versed in, in this industry. Um You know, L T K started with a, with a mission that was like very personal to me and to our friends and, and it still very much so is, and I think that that passion and the soul of our business is so important. I tell our team members all 750 of them. This is not a mission statement that's on the wall. We're not secretly running some other business. We only make money when our creators make money and that alone is wholly different and makes us behave and invest very differently behind our creators. You know, K as a shopping platform, I wish we had more than three minutes for me to jump into this. But if you think about our creators have transitioned, where they communicate and where they build their communities over time. It started on kind of like blogs, you can think of that movement into social media. That transition was easy when social media was really more about communities and about humans today. It's about entertainment. It's not about relationship. As we move into this next chapter. There is a huge void that LTK is filling both relation and to guide purchases, which are something that the large vast majority of, you know, culturally normative now to both follow people have a relationship with someone online and to shop from them, you know, 77% of gen Z is doing it. That's 21 more percent higher than any other generation. It's only moving that way. And as entertainment platforms are not filling that void for a creator, have their own storefront and to be able to work with any brand across the board, which makes them even more legitimate and have higher trust with their audience and have that, you know, candidly on the business side to have that rate pressure and decision making, ability and control of their business. When you think about this group of entrepreneurs, there are solar preneurs, some of you are as well. One of the things that makes their work very challenging is that for the last 10 years, they've built their businesses on a platform that's wholly misaligned to them and that they do not own. So imagine waking up every day when your business is many of you, you, you know, I call it building the empire. It's like brick after brick, after brick. And it's more valuable day after day. But imagine working in an industry where you built those bricks and everyday bricks are being taken away. And so for those creators that have a home base that's wholly aligned to them, is it makes it where they have a very bright next chapter. Do we have another quick question for Amber? Hi, I'm Erin Parks. I am not an influencer. I'm probably what people assume, not your target market, but I've been following you since 2010. I know that Dallas article. Um and I think people uh have a hard time realizing how much you've done for women entrepreneurs. So a huge, huge. Thank you. I saw that you opened, I say in Brazil a week or two ago, can you tell us what it's like going international with something that I kind of already thought was everywhere if it's on the internet? So tell us more. Yeah. No, absolutely. So we do have creators in 150 countries. And so we make our technology available in all of those places in 11 of those countries. We are, you know, have deep dived local teams, you know, who are, are natives and understand the language, the nuance of everything. Um I think anyone who's worked internationally can tell you that the playbook does not like copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, certainly across, across the globe, there's such a nuance even down to the language that's used in the powerful words there. I found very early on when I was the one personally traveling and opening up these businesses that what motivates a French creator is very different than what motivates a German creator versus American creator. So you take you name your platform. And so what, where we've been successful is having those local teams on the ground um who are usually proven entrepreneurs who um have a passion for this space and a passion for kind of what you, what exactly what you said, like we are putting entrepreneurs in business. Um We have over 200 women who are now millionaires to the L T K platform growing very quickly. Um And so what percentage are women, by the way on the platform? Um It's, it's super high. It's, it's north of 90. Um You know, I say the we're growing in other categories as well, but this is, this really started out being a very kind of female centric business as far as like shopping online. Um And so, and all of our L T K millionaires are women. How many of them are there? It's over 200. Wow, it's amazing Amber. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me here today. I'm so honored to be in this room. Wow. I've, I've never been in a room like this before. So we please come back. Thank you. So much, you?

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