This influencer started a haircare brand — and its products are blowing up on TikTok
Amber Fillerup Clark is a momfluencer turned entrepreneur — how her brand wound up at Sephora.
Amber Fillerup Clark never thought her career would last this long. Often credited as one of Instagram's original "momfluencers," the 33-year-old has spun her social media celebrity-dom into a 13-year career and several million-dollar businesses — a feat she still finds surprising.
"I never had the mindset of 'I'm going to do this for a decade,'" Fillerup Clark told Yahoo Canada. "It was always, maybe I have a year left."
For those ill-versed in the history of Instagram influencers, Fillerup Clark launched her online career with the lifestyle blog Barefoot Blonde in 2010. One thing led to another, and her creative outlet became a full-time gig, racking up 1.2 million Instagram followers and enough brand partnerships to support her husband and four children.
For years, Fillerup Clark provided her followers with a rosy highlight reel of her life, sharing moments of marriage and motherhood. In December 2021, she announced she would stop posting photos of her children — a move that, she admits, lost her around 100,000 followers. As her online persona evolved, Fillerup Clark made a professional pivot away from creating content for other brands and launched Dae, her own clean haircare line.
"[I wanted Dae] to be a really dreamy experience," Fillerup Clark told me on a video call. Clean and desert-derived (the family lives outside Phoenix, Arizona), "I wanted everything about it to feel really magical — like you're romanticizing your haircare routine."
While the mom-of-four is hardly the first influencer to try their hand at a beauty brand, she's done something that many of her peers have failed to do — actually make it work.
Since launching in 2020, Dae has hit the shelves of Sephora — a major win for any beauty brand — and racked up more than 85 million views on TikTok (its Cactus Fruit 3-in-1 Styling Cream and newly-launched Stargloss Shine Treatment are BeautyTok favourites).
In dollars and cents, Dae raised $8 million in funding last year.
"It's not enough to just have a following. It's really not," Fillerup Clark said. "You have to be business-savvy and have the passion to keep it going. I think a lot of influencers think, 'Oh, I have this following and I can launch a company and make so much money,'" but it's so much more than that.
"How are you fulfilling orders two years from now? People don't realize how much of a grind it is. You have to be a businesswoman to run a company."
While an engaged fan base may help launch a brand, awareness doesn't equal sales.
Selfless by Hyram, the skincare brand founded by influencer Hyram Yarbro (921K Instagram followers, 4.6M YouTube subscribers) in partnership with The Inkey List, and Item Beauty, a makeup brand launched by TikToker Addison Rae (37.5M Instagram followers, 88.5M TikTok followers), were both pulled from Sephora, despite Yarbro and Rae's colossal social media followings.
Part of Dae's success could be credited to Fillerup Clark's history in the hair space. Barefoot Blonde began as a hairstyling blog, and alongside Dae, she founded BFB Hair, a brand of clip-in hair extensions.
"I've just always been obsessed with hair," she said.
Among Dae's ever-growing lineup, BeautyTok's beloved Cactus Fruit 3-in-1 Styling Cream is Fillerup Clark's personal favourite (and a Yahoo editor-approved product).
Cactus Fruit 3-in-1 Styling Cream
"You can do so much with it! You can slick your hair back. You can smooth your flyways; you can smooth frizz; you can shape curls. I mean, you can do anything with it truly."
The Monsoon Moisture Mask is the most "underrated in our lines," she said. "It's so delicious; it makes me sick. Like, it's just so good. I love how thick it is. It's truly like body butter for your hair — it's the most incredible mask."
Monsoon Moisture Mask
Dae's newest drop, the Stargloss Shine Hair Gloss Treatment, is "like combining your hair mask with your hair oil for a luxurious pre-wash treatment."
Stargloss Shine Hair Gloss Treatment
It "makes your hair so soft and shiny."
As for what lies ahead, the influencer is considering doing the unthinkable for someone in her position — winding down her social media.
"I've always told my audience that I maybe have a couple more years, I'm like maybe two to three years," she said. "I really want to focus on my family. My husband and I have other plans we would love to start together, offline, just for us."
"Starting businesses and having more of a long-term outlook for influencers is so important," she said. "I'm not just solely relying on this influencing world and having this illusion that it's going to last forever; because it's not, nor should it, honestly."
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