how much I make as a fashion substacker (spoiler: it’s not $275,000)
a transparent look at subscriptions, affiliate income, book writing, chronic illness, and three years of running this newsletter.
Over the weekend, I hit a milestone — three years on Substack! If you’re new here, welcome! In the unflattering community, we challenge everything we’ve been taught about style and then choose which pieces we want to keep and which we want to let go of. We look at clothing as an expression of our true selves and something that we can use to care for ourselves.
To celebrate this anniversary, I’m adding a new perk for paid subscribers, something I haven’t done since I started my newsletter!
I’m going to start doing monthly live calls.
The community we’ve all built in the chat is so delightful that I want to continue the conversation in person via Substack live. Every month, I’ll ask for volunteers from paid subscribers and will draw one name to have a styling session with me. So many of the frustrations with our wardrobes are universal, so we’ll do it on live and the rest of the paid subscribers will be invited to show up and learn as they follow along!
In the call, we'll focus on one topic that has been a stumbling block for the “client” — it could be defining their style, letting go of clothes that no longer fit, brand suggestions and shopping, fit, capsule wardrobe creation, or mindset and body image.
On top of that, I’m doing an anniversary sale today! You’ll get access to these monthly live calls and all the other perks of the paid tier for just $3.75 a month instead of the monthly subscription price of $6.00. The sale applies only to annual subscriptions and you’ll keep that discounted rate forever — no future auto-renewing at a higher price. This discount is only good until Sunday night!
On to the income discussion.
Recently, there was a big hubbub about an article in The Cut in which a fashion Substacker shared that she made $275,000 per year. People were either incensed by the person commodifying their audience to make big money or by the idea of people being incensed at a woman making big money.
As usual, my take is in the grey area. I abhor business models that depend on overconsumption (half of this Substacker’s income was subscriptions and half was brand partnerships), and also, my day job is as a stylist who helps people find the right items to buy (among a host of other things they hopefully take from our work together).
My clients pay me for this service, but if I share other items I find with the public, I do believe I should be paid (typically via affiliate linking, when I share a link that might earn me a commission, but just know that at least half of the items I share are small brands that don’t have affiliate links) for the labor and knowledge it took to find them.
I’ve always tried to balance deinfluncing consumption and sharing things I genuinely recommend. It’s impossible for money not to be an influencing factor which is why I’ve never done sponsored content and have rarely taken gifted products (among the tempting offers currently in my Instagram DM’s are mushroom coffee and socks 🤣, but a few of the more substantial gifts have been Universal Standard clothes and rentals from Rent The Runway).
I’ve only accepted gifts that are things I’ll actually use, wear, or recommend to my clients. Hopefully, this means that when I recommend a product, you all trust that I do, in fact, think it could be helpful to you, and I’m not sharing it just to make money. By the way, I’m not sharing this to get a pat on the back, just to try to explain my thought process around it.
As part of my yearly anniversary reflection, I wanted to add my more nuanced and, shall we say, less financially successful perspective on being a fashion Substacker. In fact, since this post last year, my Substack growth has been 0% and my income has been cut in half.
Read on to see:
How much I spent subscribing to other people’s Substacks!
How many different streams of income I have
How much of my income they make up
How much I made in affiliate income and subscriptions
What effect finally treating my chronic illness has had on my income
How I’ve fit book writing into my schedule and income streams
Of course, I’m putting this info behind a paywall both because it’s sensitive information and (transparently) because I typically get a big boost in subscribers on these annual posts. Again, if you subscribe during my anniversary sale, you’ll get a 25% discount on a yearly subscription forever.