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How Style Blog They All Hate Us Paid Off for Two Friends

Tash Sefton and Elle Ferguson turned shared fashion inspiration into a blog, online boutique and paid brand work. The founders’ reported career move is clear; their total earnings are not.
From TheFinanceBase Team3 min to read
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They All Hate Us paid off for founders Tash Sefton and Elle Ferguson in a concrete career sense: the fashion blog grew into an online boutique and brand-work business that allowed them to leave their jobs at Australian retailer General Pants. The available accounts describe several ways the business earned money, but do not disclose the founders’ total income or profits.

How They All Hate Us started

Sefton and Ferguson met while working at General Pants in Australia. Sefton led womenswear and Ferguson worked in visual merchandising. They bonded over fashion and began emailing colleagues inspirational images, editorials, quotes and runway pictures. The email chain grew so large that it overwhelmed the office server; Sefton’s husband suggested turning the shared inspiration into a blog. Her husband, Mark, later helped build the website. PerthNow reported the origin story in 2014, while ELLE Australia recounted it at a 2016 event.

How the blog became a business

The transition was gradual, rather than an overnight payoff. By 2014, PerthNow described the blog as having helped the founders leave their day jobs and as having developed a popular e-boutique. At a 2016 event, the founders described leaving employment as frightening and said they made the move after the blog had gained recognition.

Ferguson later explained that she waited until income from the blog and sponsored posts was sufficient before leaving her job. That is her account of her decision, not a disclosure of the pair’s combined earnings. She also said the online shop let readers buy an edit of the founders’ favorite items, and that the launch-day selection sold out. In a retrospective GLOW JOURNAL interview published around 2019, Ferguson described the business and its growth.

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Where the money came from

The accounts point to three commercial components: selling products through the boutique, paid brand work, and the audience reach that made promotional work valuable. They do not give a breakdown of how much each contributed.

Online boutique

The e-boutique offered a curated selection of fashion products, rather than only publishing style inspiration. Ferguson’s account of the launch-day sellout illustrates demand for that edit, but does not establish the store’s overall sales or profit.

Sponsored posts and brand collaborations

Ferguson said blog and sponsored-post income was enough for her to leave employment. PerthNow reported brand collaborations with Cotton On and Witchery, and attributed a fee of $750 for a single Instagram promotion to Ferguson in 2014. That is a historical, one-promotion figure—not a standard rate, recurring income estimate, or measure of profit.

Audience and editorial choices

PerthNow reported 2.5 million visits per month, more than 300,000 new visitors per month, and 80 percent of readers returning daily in 2014. These are dated audience figures from that report, not current traffic metrics. In a later interview, Ferguson said the founders avoided banner advertising and chose brands they liked. That statement describes their approach; it is not an independent audit of audience size or business performance.

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What the historical numbers do—and do not—show

The figures reported over the years refer to different measures and should not be treated as one continuous traffic or revenue series.

  • 2014: PerthNow reported 2.5 million monthly visits, more than 300,000 new visitors per month, and 80 percent of readers revisiting daily. It also reported Ferguson’s $750 fee for one Instagram promotion.
  • 2016: Tash Sefton said 40 percent of orders were being shipped to the United States in an interview with Beauticate. This describes the order mix at that time, not current sales geography.
  • Around 2019: Ferguson said the site had reached 7.4 million readers per year at its peak in the GLOW JOURNAL interview. The article does not show an exact publication date, and the figure is her retrospective account rather than an audited metric.

Visits, visitors, returning readers, orders and readers per year are not interchangeable measures. None of these figures reveals revenue, expenses, profit, or how income was divided between the founders.

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What is known about their payoff—and what remains unknown

The clearest evidence of financial success is the reported career transition: the blog and its commercial extensions became substantial enough for Sefton and Ferguson to leave their jobs. Their model combined a shop with sponsored content and brand collaborations, drawing on an audience built through fashion publishing.

The available accounts do not establish either founder’s total earnings, the business’s revenue or profit, or each founder’s share. They also do not show that affiliate links were a material source of income. The current operating status of the original blog and store is not established by these historical accounts.

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For a personal-finance reader, the useful distinction is between a business becoming viable enough to replace employment and knowing exactly how profitable it was. The first is reported; the second cannot be calculated from the figures published here.

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