It has been an insane year for Amber Venz Box. In the course of 12 months, her online-shopping app, LIKEtoKNOW.it (owned by her Dallas-based company rewardStyle) has drummed up more traffic than Pinterest, Facebook, Tumblr or Twitter did in the same length of time.
“If you look at how long it took those platforms to reach 1 million users, we did it faster than all of them,” says Box, who began her career as a WordPress fashion blogger in 2010 and launched rewardStyle in 2011. She has since become a disrupter in the rapidly-changing retail landscape.
"You can be a creator just by the phone that you have in your hand. You have the platform to distribute your content now."
At last year’s SXSW Interactive, the Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur announced that rewardStyle was launching the LIKEtoKNOW.it app for online shopping. The app helps shoppers easily purchase products that catch their eye on social media. Just take a screenshot of the item, and you receive a push notification within seconds with information about the product and where to buy it.
Since the app’s launch, Box and her husband Baxter Box (who serves as company CEO) report that the number of shoppers using LTKI has more than tripled, while the number of influencers has more than doubled. There are also some 4,200 retailers on the platform that have more than a million brands.
Only four years ago, Box noted how social media was driving shopping and that “social shopping” — tastes and trends shaped by peers in social media — was growing. In 2014, her company started LIKEtoKNOW.it as a way for creators to make money when a follower made a purchase based on his or her post. Box had been a personal shopper herself and realized back in 2010 that even if her fans appreciated her style, she couldn’t get a commission from their purchases, as she would have in the days of offline personal shopping.
