Triple E Mercantile sits inside a family-owned Ace Hardware in Cibolo, Texas: ranch goods, curated products, and brands Allie Eklund, her sisters, and team have personally selected. When it opened, she says it generated around three times the revenue of a standard Ace grand opening. She had spent a decade building the audience that showed up.

Allie is a fashion, beauty, and lifestyle creator with a decade-long career spanning Instagram, TikTok, and affiliate platforms including LTK. She has long-term brand partnerships with Nordstrom and Aritzia, runs Triple E as an owned product and retail business, and appears on the Bravo reality series “The McBee Dynasty: Real American Cowboys.” And, according to Allie, none of these businesses are separate.

“Part of making it in the creator world has been building out multiple revenue streams,” she says. “Whether that’s creating content, modeling, entrepreneurship, running a business behind all of the brands, I do a little bit of everything.”

The through line is what she calls an “ecosystem,” i.e., a set of businesses that reinforce one another rather than compete. Brand partnerships generate affiliate revenue; affiliate relationships surface products she later stocks at the mercantile; the mercantile creates in-person brand experiences she folds back into content. It began, as most symbiotic collaborations do, with something far simpler.

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She Negotiated Brand Deals Before She Called Herself a Creator

Allie and her sister signed with Wilhelmina Models around age 17. The arrangement was initially transactional: model for clothing brands, collect the fee. Allie immediately saw a longer play.

From the modeling work, she and her sister began negotiating brand deals to post on social media. Those deals grew into longer-term collections, which she could then link on affiliate platforms. “I’ve always kind of viewed it as one ecosystem of opportunities,” she says.

Allie and her team now negotiate content ownership in most of her contracts, treating what she posts not as output but as an asset she holds. Her long-term deals with Nordstrom and Aritzia represent one tier of that structure; her affiliate work across LTK and Revolve represents another.

The principle she draws from ten years of those deals is direct. “You don’t necessarily need millions of followers,” she says. “You need to understand how to serve and monetize the audience that you already have.”

The Ranch Predates the Brand

Triple E began with no commercial intention. The Eklund family had owned the ranch in Texas for years before attaching a brand to it. When Allie and her sisters decided to share it online, they sold more than anticipated. “Triple E started as a hobby,” she says. “The ranch was there way before the brand, and our friends and family loved it so much we ended up thinking, well, maybe we should put this online and see what happens.”

The decision to open Triple E Mercantile inside a family-owned Ace Hardware followed the same test-then-scale logic. Rather than taking on the overhead of a standalone storefront, Allie used existing infrastructure, including the foot traffic and community a major hardware brand already commands. She is also direct about the commercial rationale of the pairing. “Shockingly, their online sales are a very small percentage of their business,” she says. “I really believed in bringing value into Ace Hardware as a company.”

The boutique concept was intentional. “It is a female store inside of an Ace Hardware,” she says, “which has kind of been the barrier that I’ve been breaking my entire life and career. Even as far back as my business degree, I was one of the few women in the class.”

After the mercantile’s grand opening exceeded expectations, Triple E is now looking to expand into three additional Ace Hardware locations, alongside wholesale plans and product lines scheduled as early as spring next year. Her next collection draws from the ranch’s exotic animals, sourced from South Africa and India and preserved on the family’s no-kill property. The collection, planned for fall, will tell the story of how those animals arrived and why they are protected.

Every Production Day Covers Both the Ranch Brand and the Brand Deals

Managing a decade-long creator career alongside two active businesses requires, in Allie’s telling, a system. She calls it time blocking. Mondays and Fridays are for team meetings. Tuesdays and Thursdays are filming days. Wednesday is for editing and reviewing numbers. Triple E content and brand deal content are shot in the same sessions.

“If you lean as close to the line on what you actually do day to day,” she says, “you’re going to wake up every day excited to do it, and it’s going to be easier to storytell because it’s authentic.”

Her platform strategy follows a similar efficiency logic. Every video goes everywhere: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LTK. She makes no distinctions between platforms at the outset. A video she recently posted received 4,000 views on TikTok and 4.4 million after she posted it to Instagram’s Trial Reels feature. “You literally never know,” she says. “I always say post away.”

She is skeptical of follower count as a measure of commercial health. “In my opinion, it’s always been less about the followers and more about what you’re doing with the existing followers,” she says. “If you’re posting products that you actually love, people can tell.”

On the commerce side, she relies on a mechanic that prompts followers to comment a keyword, which triggers an automated DM with a product link. “Every additional step that you make someone take creates friction,” she says. “If someone’s already watching the video and interested enough to comment shop, I want to immediately meet them where they are.”

Every Brand Deal Is Also an Entry Point Into Triple E

For brands approaching Allie, working with her does not mean accessing one creator and one audience. In her terms, it means accessing the mercantile, in-person events, and a community built across both the content business and Triple E.

“When you collaborate with me, there’s always the opportunity to collaborate with Triple E too,” she says. “It’s not separate, it’s intertwined.” Brands she already partners with on content deals, including HydroJug and Blume, have gone directly into the mercantile, giving them a physical retail presence alongside the digital campaign.

The arrangement also addresses a concern that has followed creators who launch their own product lines: the perception that they are competing with the brands they represent. Allie rejects the premise outright. Triple E stocks multiple brands rather than one exclusive line, functioning more like a department store than a single label. “There’s room for everyone to get involved,” she says. “No one’s competing against each other. We’re all intertwined in the ecosystem.”

She’s Packaging a Decade of Knowledge Into a Course Launching in September

“Allie Academy,” a creator education course, is scheduled to launch by September. Allie and her team have been building it for a year and thinking about it for five. The course will include video lessons, templates, email scripts, and homework, built on the premise she has operated by for ten years.

“I taught myself everything,” she says. “I was constantly studying and immersing myself in scenarios where I could learn more. I wish that I had a guide to know what I know now that’s taken me 10 years to learn.”

The “Academy” is, in many ways, the extension of the “ecosystem” she has spent a decade building. The content business, the ranch brand, and the mercantile all served the same audience. The course expands the definition of who she is building for.

“There’s so much money to be made out there, especially for women who are staying at home or haven’t worked or have kids,” she says. “There’s a way to incorporate it in all seasons of life, and I feel called to teach women how to do that.”

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