Emma Chamberlain, the 18-year-old Gen Z influencer with 8 million Instagram fans – and US$3 million in the bank
She sells her own merchandise, has a video partnership with supermodel Karlie Kloss and recently made Time’s ‘100 Next’ list of rising stars – what’s the secret of this self-described ‘Stupid Genius’?
Emma Chamberlain is an 18-year-old influencer with more than eight million followers on both YouTube and Instagram, but how much do you really know about this teenager and her meteoric rise to fame? Here, we look at everything the young social media personality has done so far.
Chamberlain was born on May 22, 2001. She grew up in San Bruno, California, a suburb just south of San Francisco where – coincidentally – YouTube's headquarters are located.
Her parents divorced when Chamberlain, an only child, was five years old. She found YouTube at an early age “to connect with other people and see what they were up to,” she told The New York Times.
Growing up, Chamberlain's family struggled financially. “There were times when we couldn't even go to the movies, when I was a kid, because there wasn't enough money,” Chamberlain told Forbes in 2018.
But even as a child, Chamberlain loved making videos for her friends. “I always had an outgoing personality. That was the one thing that I was known for,” Chamberlain said. “When I was younger I had a gut feeling that I was going to use my personality in some way, but I didn't know how.”
Chamberlain taught herself how to edit videos, and started posting to her self-titled YouTube channel in 2017, the summer before her junior year of high school. She filled her channel with vlogs and DIY content, much of which her dad, an artist and photographer, would help her film.
Her first video to go viral came in July 2017 when she did a “haul” – a popular YouTube trend where you show off items from a shopping spree – from the dollar store. “That was apparently a YouTube trend at the time, and it ended up working in my favour,” Chamberlain told W Magazine.
After that first viral video, success seemingly happened “overnight,” Chamberlain told Forbes. She got an agent, and dropped out of high school right before her junior year to do YouTube full-time.