How Instagram influencers become enterprises, and what happens next – Fast Company

By the time Amber Fillerup Clark landed a major profile in The Atlantic in 2017, the blogger and Instagrammer had already spent seven years at the top of her game. Clark launched her blog—which has since been renamed but at the time was called Barefoot Blonde—in 2010, and quickly rose to the top of the mommy blogger ecosystem.Today, more than a decade later, Clark has garnered 1.3 million Instagram followers, oversees nearly a dozen full-time employees, and Dae Hair, the beauty brand she launched in 2020, is the top-selling clean hair care line at Sephora.But while Clark, and an entire generation of first-wave Instagram influencers, have evolved their businesses from image makers to brand builders, the social media landscape has also continued to change—and these days she’s feeling a pressure to pivot.“It’s a shift right now, actually, and I’m spending most of my time on TikTok,” Clark tells Fast Company on a Zoom call from her home in Arizona. “Everyone is just shifting away from Instagram—I feel like if they don’t seriously change their algorithms back to what they were, Instagram is going to become obsolete, like Facebook.”Not that Clark relies on social media for income any longer. In 2016,…
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