How the D’Amelios Built an Empire Using TikTok

Ask Charli D’Amelio about her meteoric rise to fame, and she’ll tell you it was all a lucky accident.
In 2019, she began a TikTok channel , making dance and lip-sync videos with her friends in her Norwalk, Connecticut, bedroom. Eventually, her sister Dixie joined her.
Almost overnight, the two sisters garnered millions of followers and became, at one point, two of the highest-paid and most influential content creators on the platform.
“I think every day it was kind of waking up and being a little bit confused and wondering, ‘But when’s it all going to stop?’” Charli says. “There was no way to understand what was happening at the time because it had never happened the way it did on TikTok. It was just a very weird time.”
But their success can’t be completely chalked up to chance. With a father who worked in brand marketing for the clothing industry and a mother who is a former model, one could say the two were primed for a brand-focused platform such as TikTok .
“I think this started from our childhood,” Dixie says. “The biggest thing our dad would say to us is protect your brand and how are you going to grow that?”
“The biggest thing our dad would say to us is protect your brand and how are you going to grow that?”
It was sage advice that helped turn Charli’s and Dixie’s videos into a multimillion-dollar business and helped them spin off their own brand company.
“I think even though we didn’t know we were going to start a brand company, from the beginning, we knew something more was going to come. My dad was just always really good at looking at the long term and setting us up for life instead of just, ‘Make as much money as you can with your 15 seconds of fame,’” Dixie says.
At the time of writing, Charli is the second-most followed TikTok creator with 151.2 million followers. In 2021, she made $17.5 million from sponsorships, according to Forbes. She was invited to compete on Dancing With the Stars , and Dunkin’ Donuts, her favorite coffee chain, named a drink after her.
“I think even though we didn’t know we were going to start a brand company, from the beginning, we knew something more was going to come,” Charli says.
“I think even though we didn’t know we were going to start a brand company, from the beginning, we knew something more was going to come.”
Meanwhile, Dixie, who has 22 million followers, has spun her TikTok fame into a pop music career, releasing her first two albums in 2020 and 2021. In 2021, she toured with the Jingle Ball concert alongside megastars such as Ed Sheeran.
Together, the sisters have worked with high-end fashion brands such as Prada, Puma, and Burberry; created a miniseries for Snap called Charli vs. Dixie; and launched a clothing brand, Social Tourist, in partnership with Hollister. Their combined earnings in 2021 were $27.5 million.
But that was just the beginning. That same year, the entire family debuted the first season of their reality show, The D’Amelio Show , on Hulu. The third season of the show premiered in September 2023.
More recently, the family has harnessed the girls’ success to launch their own branding company. D’Amelio Brands launched in 2022 with an initial seed round of $6 million. To date, the company has launched a line of women’s footwear, a skincare line, and a fan merchandise company.
They’ve also started their own VC company that focuses on minority- and women-owned businesses.
We sat down with the whole family to learn how they’ve done it all—and where they plan to go next.

The Power of Authenticity
Ask many successful content creators about their strategy, and they’ll lay out a detailed content calendar filled with posts that fit their audience profile and are scheduled for release at optimal viewing times.
For the D’Amelios, however, that was not the case. The plan was to have no plan—and according to them, that was one of the major contributors to their success.
“I think it was actually the lack of strategy that kind of intrigued people a little bit,” Charli says. “The fact that all of this happened so quickly. And, you know, there’s no guide; there’s no rule book; there’s no way to do or not to do this.”
Especially in the beginning, Charli and Dixie didn’t post consistently. Rather, they posted when inspiration struck them and didn’t force posts when they had nothing to post about.
By doing so, they created a more authentic feel to their content and began to build that much sought-after trust from their audience.
“I think our biggest thing is, especially now that we’ve been working on creating content for such a long time, we do it when we are fully ready to. That’s what we’re going to do. Because I feel like people can tell, and they get bored if you seem uninterested,” Dixie says.”People can tell, and they get bored if you seem uninterested.”
“People can tell, and they get bored if you seem uninterested.”
Most of their content, she admits, is made in the middle of the night, when she says they have the most energy and are feeling a little silly.
Charli, meanwhile, calls herself one of the least consistent creators on social media. She may not post for a while before inspiration strikes her, and then she posts several videos at once.
Doing it that way, she says, gives her the freedom to create without feeling forced, and it helps prevent burnout.
“It’s not going to come to you every single day at the same time,” she says. “When it’s time to make videos, you have to really move with yourself.”
Charli points out that it would have been impossible to have any kind of strategy, even if they wanted to. TikTok, after all, is still a new platform , and its users—who tend to skew younger—are hard to pin down.
The pair’s mother, Heidi D’Amelio, still isn’t quite certain how Charli and Dixie garnered so much appeal in the early days. With no content or growth strategy and having done no audience research, they both still managed to pull in millions of viewers a day.
“I remember Charli sat and ate a bowl of soup. It wasn’t even live. It was just for a TikTok video, and she was gaining a million followers a day. There was a trend,” Heidi says. “I don’t know how many of these same exact videos Dixie did where she’s just staring right in the camera. Didn’t do anything—a million followers a day.”
The D’Amelio family—Marc, Heidi, Dixie, and Charli — on the cover of the Foundr Magazine issue 128.
Resonating With Their Audience
Soon, major brands were courting Charli and Dixie, hoping the sisters would endorse their brands to their millions of followers.
Here, too, the sisters’ commitment to authenticity played a huge role in the brands they chose to work with—and the success of those endorsements.
“I’ve just noticed with my own people that support me … the best brand deals and the best products that I’ve pushed that have gotten the best feedback are the things that they see me using every day when it’s not ‘hashtag ad’ or they have seen me wear this for years,” Charli says.
She points out that her audience is very good at sniffing out a fake endorsement. In fact, she likes that about TikTok users because it pushes her and other creators to endorse only the products they can genuinely get behind.
Dixie agrees.
“The audience on TikTok, they like authenticity, and I feel we’ve done a really good job promoting things that we like,” she says.

 
Being Parents and Business Partners
As Charli and Dixie’s fame grew, their parents, Heidi and Marc, stepped in to support their daughters and build their brand. But Marc stresses the fact that he and his wife never pushed the sisters to create content.
“The joke was that Heidi and I would make the girls do content. I have no idea how many times they post [or] what they post, nor do I care,” Marc says.
In fact, one of the most difficult parts of running the D’Amelio family business has been to strike a balance between work and home life.
“We talk about it all the time,” Marc says. “That’s the hardest part is when to be Mom and Dad and when to really have us use our age, our experience, and our wisdom to really push through when we know intuitively it’s the best thing for Dixie and Charli and when to back off and just be ‘Hey, I want to be Dad right now.’”
He says that he and Heidi never wanted to be the stage parents everyone thinks of when they picture parents managing their kids’ careers.
“I think listening has been something that I’ve worked really hard on,” Heidi says. “And there have been moments when the girls have been like, ‘Let’s not talk about work.’ And I have to really hear them and listen to them and respect that because they’re right.”
The D’Amelio parents have brought in a team to help them manage Charli and Dixie’s careers and let them be Mom and Dad. They’ve also rented office space to make clear delineations between work and home.
“It’s hard because we’re all on our phones. We could all be sharing videos or talking about videos. And next thing, it’s a work conversation that comes out of nowhere. And so we have to respect those boundaries of ‘yeah, we’re not talking about work right now,’” Heidi says.
At the end of the day, however, both Heidi and Marc help steer Charli and Dixie to make good decisions for their careers.

Building Business Partnerships
Marc and Heidi also helped bring on outside partnerships to move Charli’s and Dixie’s careers beyond TikTok fame.
“We did put an effort into making sure that we set up the teams properly. And we did put an infrastructure in place for business managers,” he says. “That stuff’s really important—business managers, agents. We knew we didn’t know everything.”
In 2020, as the sisters transitioned from social media stars to full-fledged celebrities, the family signed with United Talent Agency (UTA), a global agency that represents leading actors, athletes, writers, and media personalities.
“They saw more than just two young girls posting on TikTok,” Heidi says of UTA. “They saw a full plan of our family and what could be, and they sort of painted that picture for us.”
That same year, Dixie would turn her sights to music, releasing her first pop song, “One Whole Day.” In 2021, the sisters launched a podcast, Charli and Dixie: Two Chix.
In 2022, Charli appeared on (and won) Dancing With the Stars. Both sisters have presented at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards, with Charli winning Best Female Social Star in 2021 and Best Female Creator in 2022.

Launching Their Own Brands
There’s nearly nothing predictable about social media fame except the certainty that it won’t last forever. The family decided to leverage their celebrity and build a more lasting business by starting their own branding company. Just this year, the company launched D’Amelio Footwear.
“Everything was on the table—or a lot of things were on the table,” Marc says. “And it just so happened that someone we knew had a long history in designing women’s footwear. And I was a firm believer that we didn’t just want to slap our name on something or do it as a licensing deal—that we actually wanted to do that heavy lifting.”
While some brand companies might release multiple random products just to get out in the market, the D’Amelio family has been more deliberate in their choices. The products had to feel as authentic as the content that helped them build their brands.
“A following doesn’t always translate to sales,” Marc says. “Fans don’t always buy products. And I think what we’ve learned and what we’ve always known from the beginning is to create something that is high-quality and is a real brand.”
For Marc, footwear was a natural progression of the sisters’ online brands, something that fits well with not only Charli’s and Dixie’s followers but the followers Heidi was building, as well.
“A following doesn’t always translate to sales.”
The D’Amelios have learned that if they want full control of the success of their brand, they have to put in the work. That includes everything from owning their direct-to-consumer (DTC) initiatives to reaching out to retailers and attending trade shows.
Working with retailers rather than selling DTC gives them a more accurate picture of order quantity and helps them collect feedback on their inventory.
In the few months they have been on the market, D’Amelio Footwear has been featured across social media and in major fashion magazines. They have launched exclusive pop-up stores in select malls, as well.
But the real thrill has come from seeing their shoes on the street.
“I was walking in LA, and I saw someone wearing D’Amelio Footwear,” Dixie says. “Just seeing someone wearing something that we created as a family with our last name on it just brought me so much excitement and joy. I think that’s the coolest thing about doing the brands because you get to share your start-to-finish creative ideas.”

Taking Time to Reflect
It took just four years for the D’Amelios to achieve a level of celebrity most work their entire lives to attain. It’s moved so quickly that they have barely had time to stop and take it all in. At times, it all seems unreal.
“So many exciting things are happening all at once, you kind of just move from one to the next that you really don’t—until a little bit down the line—sit back and realize, wow, I actually did that. And that was really cool. And I’m really proud of myself,” Charli says. “Sometimes for me, in my head, it’s like, well, that’s not really me. It’s hard to understand that the same person I see when I wake up in the morning is also the person that’s doing all these really, really cool and crazy things.”
For Marc, the last four years have been nothing but a source of great pride.
“For a dad, I could look at what Dixie and Charli did and take one of the things that they’ve done, and that could be enough to make me be proud of them for the rest of my life. And then they just keep outdoing it,” he says.
“For a dad, I could look at what Dixie and Charli did and take one of the things that they’ve done, and that could be enough to make me be proud of them for the rest of my life. And then they just keep outdoing it.”
He recalls seeing Dixie perform at Madison Square Garden and watching Charli win Dancing With the Stars. And he says he couldn’t be prouder.
Because at the end of the day, it’s their bond as a family that keeps them going and grows their success.
“There’s no amount of money or notoriety that takes the place of what you have in the mutual love and respect of a family,” Marc says. “And I think that’s the most important thing. I think that’s why we do resonate with a lot of people because people see and feel the love we have as a family for each other. And I think it resonates.”

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