Latest news with #Kipp
Business Wire
21-05-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
FIS Partners With Issuer-Merchant Collaboration Platform Kipp To Prevent Card Declines and Unlock Revenue for Debit Issuers
JACKSONVILLE, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- FIS ® (NYSE: FIS), a global leader in financial technology, today announced a strategic partnership with Letskipp Ltd. (Kipp), a collaboration platform for card issuers and merchants, to introduce an innovative non-sufficient funds (NSF) authorization solution to its debit clients. This first-to-market offer is designed to combat the long-standing challenge of declined transactions due to insufficient funds, which can help issuers recover lost revenue and drive top-of-wallet status with customers. With this solution, FIS is unlocking growth for its card issuing clients by helping to streamline financial operations, reduce friction and improve efficiency. Industry data shows that the leading cause of card declines is insufficient funds, causing revenue loss, customer frustration and higher contact center costs. For merchants, these declines result in lost sales and wasted product and time. For issuers, declined transactions bring unpredictability at the point of sale for customers, increasing consumer frustration and impacting loyalty. The solution offers issuers the ability to approve transactions even when the available balance is insufficient – without imposing overdraft fees on consumers – by enabling merchants to voluntarily pay a premium to authorize NSF transactions. This reimagined economic model can generate additional revenue for issuers while helping to preserve the customer experience at the point of sale. Through this partnership, issuers can quickly take advantage of this interconnected solution, helping money move dynamically through debit accounts, card networks and payment systems. 'As money moves between merchants, companies, and financial institutions and card issuers, every transfer should be timely and seamless. This partnership underscores FIS' commitment to helping our clients unlock new revenue streams and deliver smooth payment experiences,' said Jim Johnson, co-president, Banking Solutions, at FIS. 'Our NSF authorization solution with Kipp tackles a key point of friction in the payments journey, helping issuers retain customers and drive long-term value throughout the money lifecycle.' "We're excited to join forces with FIS to bring our innovative NSF solution to a broader market," said Chanan Lavi, CEO and co-founder of Kipp. 'By reducing declines, we're helping merchants and issuers to deepen customer relationships, protect transaction volume and grow revenue, without burdening consumers.' This solution reinforces FIS' accomplishments in helping deliver efficient, end-to-end experiences for businesses to bring the world's money into harmony. For more information about this solution, visit FIS is a financial technology company providing solutions to financial institutions, businesses, and developers. We unlock financial technology to the world across the money lifecycle underpinning the world's financial system. Our people are dedicated to advancing the way the world pays, banks and invests, by helping our clients to confidently run, grow, and protect their businesses. Our expertise comes from decades of experience helping financial institutions and businesses of all sizes adapt to meet the needs of their customers by harnessing where reliability meets innovation in financial technology. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, FIS is a member of the Fortune 500® and the Standard & Poor's 500® Index. To learn more, visit Follow FIS on LinkedIn, Facebook and X.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Kalispell-based nonprofit sees federal funds pulled, then restored
May 13—Cassidy Kipp opened an email on March 6 to find out that federal dollars meant to help pay for renovating the Community Action Partnership of Northwest Montana's headquarters had abruptly been pulled. The nonprofit, of which Kipp is the director of project development, connects individuals across Northwest Montana with community programs like heating and rental assistance. It was using the money on its new location at 1820 U.S. 93 S. in Kalispell, which also houses a recently launched subsidized child care program. The email, which had come from an intermediary responsible for dolling out the dollars, said that "without warning and without consultation, all of the grants were pulled nationally." The money had been rescinded the week prior, according to the message. Kipp immediately halted work on the new facility. The Community Action Partnership relocated at the end of 2024 to a new building along U.S. 93. The organization was in the middle of pre-development planning to spruce up the new place when the funds were pulled. "We had an engineer working, we had landscape architects going in," she said. "Thankfully, we hadn't accrued a ton of expenses in that window of time, but we had to just terminate all efforts and pivot," she added. The two grants funding the project came from the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Section 4 competitive grant program, which is intended to help nonprofits carry out community development activities. Each grant amounted to between $40,000 and $60,000, according to Kipp. "We love those grants because they are capacity building grants," meaning they are meant to support the nonprofit's mission to provide services, Kipp said. But more than a month later, Kipp arrived in her office on April 29 to find another email: The grants had been reinstated. An official from the federal housing department told the Inter Lake that the grant program was halted for being out of compliance with President Donald Trump's spate of executive orders. Kipp said that the specific order the program was in violation of was "Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing," which Trump signed on Jan. 20. The federal agency told the Inter Lake that organizations could appeal the Section 4 grant revocations on a case-by-case basis. A national organization, Rural — Local Initiatives Support Corporation, which was responsible for distributing the grant funds, successfully appealed the cancellation, according to a post on the organization's website. "For over 30 years, [the Rural-Local Initiatives Support Corporation] has been a trusted steward of the Section 4 program—helping nonprofits grow, stabilize, and deepen their impact," read the post. Kipp said she is always looking for ways to make operations more efficient, but that the federal dollars funding building revitalization is not an example of wasteful spending or contributing to a woke agenda. "All we were trying to do with this particular programming is align with what the city requirements are for our campus space and to make sure that we are being a good neighbor," Kipp said. "We're talking about [eliminating] bunch grasses in the front yard, not about some woke agenda," she added. THE LEARNING Tree Preschool is a new low-income child care facility that can host up to 24 kids and holds story times, group music and cooperative games. Stockman Bank helped build a playground on the property, which also houses the Community Action Partnership's headquarters, said Kipp. The need for low-priced child care was identified in the nonprofit's annual community needs assessment. "It's a barrier that pops up time and time again, where people are constantly having to have that juggle of covering child care expenses and getting work," Kipp said. The Kalispell location is also home to a paid HVAC apprenticeship program. Participants conduct energy audits at homes and retrofit energy saving techniques like replacing windows, furnaces or woods stoves. "We're training young people to get out in the field," Kipp said. ALTHOUGH THE grants were restored, business is not as usual. Kipp said she remains on edge and will continue to be nimble with funding by finding ways to diversify revenue. "I think that everybody anticipates that there are still more cuts to come," she said. The nonprofit owns six different low-income apartment complexes, comprising of 152 units, most of which are dedicated toward seniors or individuals with a disabling condition, according to Kipp. Heating assistance remains the most used program, according to the nonprofit's end-of-year statistics. "What we found is that increasingly we are having more folks who are homeowners seeking help to alleviate things like heating burdens," she said. Reporter Jack Underhill may be reached at 758-4407 and junderhill@
Hamilton Spectator
05-05-2025
- General
- Hamilton Spectator
‘A day to never forget': Niagara's Lincoln and Welland Regiment played key role in Dutch liberation
It has been 80 years since Canadian forces accepted the surrender of the German army in the Netherlands on May 5, 1945, ending five years of Nazi occupation. Members of the Lincoln and Welland Regiment were part of the First Canadian Army, which played a pivotal role in that country's liberation from the Nazis in the Second World War. The Lincoln and Welland troops were battle hardened by the time they arrived at the Dutch-Belgian border. Members of the Lincoln and Welland Regiment take cover from German sniper fire in northwest Europe in 1945. They were part of the fierce fighting at the Falaise Gap, south of Caen in France, in late August 1944 when the Allies encircled retreating German troops and closed the gap they had been moving through. 'When they landed in France in July 1944, they would have been pushing west through Belgium and eventually into the Netherlands which would have been in the fall of 1944,' said Drew Neufeld, a master warrant officer and regimental historian with Lincoln and Welland Regiment. Unknown members of the Lincoln and Welland Regiment in the Netherlands sometime between 1944 and 1945 In October 1944, the Niagara regiment played a significant role in the Battle of the Scheldt, a crucial campaign to open the Scheldt estuary, a river that borders Belgium and the Netherlands with its mouth at the North Sea. 'It was very important that they opened the Scheldt estuary to be able to supply the soldiers efficiently,' Neufeld said. During the Battle of the Scheldt, the Lincoln and Welland group helped liberate Bergen op Zoom , a town just north of the Scheldt. A zoom is a canal or waterway. 'Press On' upon its arrival at the Lake Street Armoury in March 1945. The officer standing next to the tank is Major Edward J. Brady DSO. (B Company Officer Commanding). 'A lot of the company commanders will say it was the worst experience,' Neufeld said. 'The whole liberation, too, was kind of an anomaly where the commander of the German army at the time made a deal with the mayor (of the town), saying, 'If you don't give away our position and help the Allies, we won't destroy the (town), we will move to the north which would be the canal and we'll keep the fighting to the outskirts of the (town) and not really destroy the main part.'' Neufeld noted. In his book ' Because We Are Canadians: A Battlefield Memoir ,' Sgt. Charles Kipp with the Lincoln and Welland Regiment recalls planning of the siege of Bergen op Zoom took place in the basement of a home near the town that was owned by a Mr. Luijten, an English professor who acted as an interpreter for the Canadians. Their conversation inspired the title of Kipp's book. Following preparation discussions, Kipp says a toast was raised to the success of the coming battle, and their host asked why they appeared so steady and not nervous about what was to come. 'Because we are Canadians,' Kipp and his colleagues replied. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the freeing of Bergen Op Zoom by the Lincoln and Welland Kipp writes the Lincoln and Welland soldiers made their way into the town during the night on Oct. 18, swimming across the zoom and making their way to the top of a dyke and along a rail line that ran across it. Creeping along in the darkness, they came under machine gunfire. 'It was devastating,' Kipp writes. 'I could see and hear men going down all around me, but for some reason I was not hit.' Drew Neufeld, master warrant officer and regimental historian with Lincoln and Welland Regiment, in front of 'Press On' at the Lake Street Armoury. The Canadians escaped down the side of the dyke, back into the zoom. 'The sky over our heads was one big sheet of flames from the German guns,' Kipp writes. The surviving soldiers eventually made their way to an eight-foot-high wall outside a gin factory. 'Out of our entire company of about 30 strong, 13 men got into the factory,' Kipp said. The Canadians fought room to room and in the hallways, shooting in the darkness. 'We were just running all over and shooting everything we could see,' Kipp writes. 'It was pitch dark. The only light came from the muzzle flashes of the guns.' Of the 13 Lincoln and Welland soldiers who had made it to the gin factory, Kipp said only eight were left when the fighting was over. On Oct. 27, 1944, Bergen op Zoom was liberated by the Canadians. Neufeld said the Lincoln and Welland Regiment fought so fiercely in its push through the Netherlands, it gained a reputation for toughness among the enemy. 'One of my favourite quotes during that time was from a German prisoner who said, 'The Lincoln and Welland Regiment has no sentiment, no discipline and no mercy' because they were so tenacious and determined to meet their objectives,' Neufeld said. 'They effectively pushed their way through the Netherlands, along with the rest of the Canadian Army and Allied forces, into Germany.' The push through the Netherlands was a slow and bloody slog. 'I can only imagine the hardships and struggles they would have went through,' Neufeld said. '(They saw) the best and worst of humanity.' By the time the Netherlands was liberated on May 5, 1945, more than 7,600 Canadians had died in the eight months of fighting it took to get there. Days later, Germany formally surrendered, ending the Second World War in Europe. 'The Dutch people cheered Canadian troops as one town after another was liberated,' states a Canadian government website detailing Canada's involvement in the liberation of the Netherlands. 'This was a memorable time for the people of the Netherlands.' Jack Sinke was a six-year-old boy in the Netherlands when the Germans invaded in May 1940. Jack Sinke was a six-year-old boy when the Germans invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. He recalls being in awe of the invaders. 'It was kind of exciting at first,' said the 91-year-old Vineland resident whose family lived on a farm near the Belgian border. 'At first, the Germans were friendly, but later on we heard about concentration camps and stuff like that, then I looked at them like enemies.' In a 2011 letter to his grandchildren, Sinke recalled the Germans taking most of the locals' food and raiding store shelves and sending all the clothing and other materials back to Germany. 'My father raised pigs, but was only allowed to keep two for his own family,' the letter says. 'All the others he had to sell to the Germans for a cheap price.' Sinke's letter recalls the time his father was confronted by two German soldiers who came to the house demanding he hand over his two remaining pigs, but his father refused. 'The German shifted a bit, pretended to loosen his gun and said, 'If you don't give us those pigs, we will take your children,'' the letter says. 'Then my dad lost his temper and screamed, 'If you touch my children, I will kill you.'' Sinke says he got scared and hid behind his mother's skirt. Then it got quiet, and he looked to see the German soldiers leaving without the pigs. Sinke said he was 10 years old in the fall of 1944 when residents in his area got word the Canadian Army was pushing into the Netherlands from Belgium. 'The Canadians were going to free us,' said Sinke, who recalls hearing the Allied gunfire in the distance and squadrons of Allied bombers flying over their house, en route to targets in Germany. 'The glass in the windows rattled,' he said. By early November 1944, his village had been liberated. 'We were so happy,' Sinke said. Engelbert Marinus points to the house he and his family lived in when the Netherlands were liberated by Canadians on May 5, 1945. Engelbert Marinus was born in Soestdijk, southeast of Amsterdam, in 1938. He noted the nearby airport was a frequent target of attack because it was wanted by both the Germans and the Allies. 'Most of my early life was dangerous and scary,' Marinus recalled. The former Grimsby resident who now lives in Stoney Creek said the family later moved to Ootmarsom , near the German border, where he started school. Marinus recalled the Canadians and other Allies appearing in the forests around the city. Liberation was at hand. 'There were Canadians, English, Polish, American and Australian camps meeting there,' said Marinus, who recalled visiting each of the camps and getting to try their food. 'I was welcomed as a kid,' he said. Marinus noted May 5 remains a special day for Dutch people. 'For me, it is a day to never forget,' he said. A reminder of the Lincoln and Welland Regiment's service in the Second World War sits in front of the Lake Street Armoury in St. Catharines. The M5A1 Stuart VI recce tank came into the regiment's possession in late February 1945. A St. Catharines Standard article from March 7, 1946, (the day after its arrival at the armoury after being transported to St. Catharines on the back of a flat rail car) noted the tank had been with one of the armoured units of the British Columbia Tank Regiment, but was disabled after it ran over a mine on the edge of the Hochwald Forest near the Dutch-German border. ''Gosh, I'd like to have that,' said Lt. Col. Rowan C Coleman, DSO, then commander of the Lincs,' the article says. ''OK, it's yours,' came the prompt reply.' The article says members of the regiment's pioneer platoon started swarming over the tank. 'In no time at all, they had ripped off the turret and gun, lightening the tank by four tons. It was rewired and repaired, and the limbering battlewagon came out of its death throes as a trim, speedy reconnaissance carrier,' the article states. On the front of the tank was 'Press On' — one of the favourite expressions of Lt-Gen Guy Simond, acting commander of the 1st Canadian Army, to encourage his troops in battle — painted in large white letters. The article noted when Press On arrived in St. Catharines, it was covered in flags and signatures. 'There are the flags of the countries touched by the tank: Canada, France, Belgium, Holland and, finally, Germany. Then there are autographs, dozens of them. Many boys from St. Catharines and other points in the Niagara district painted their names on the tank for posterity,' the article says. may 5 remains a special day on the calendar in the Netherlands, where the liberations is celebrated as a national holiday and the sacrifices of Allied soldiers, particularly Canadians, are remembered.
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Gov. Polis vetoes bill that would extend Colorado open records response timeline
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis speaks at the state Capitol on March 13, 2025. (Sara Wilson/Colorado Newsline) Colorado Gov. Jared Polis vetoed his first bill of this year's legislative session, rejecting a bill that would have changed the state's open records law. 'It would certainly be convenient for the Executive Branch to agree to weaken CORA, but as a representative for the people of Colorado, I support more, not less, openness and transparency,' the Democrat wrote in his Thursday veto letter, referring to the Colorado Open Records Act. Senate Bill 25-77 was a bipartisan measure that would have extended the timeline that a records custodian has to respond to a CORA request, except for requests from journalists. It also would have given entities more time to respond to a request if they decided the request was for financial gain, like obtaining information on a large group of people in order to solicit business. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX The bill was sponsored by Sen. Cathy Kipp, a Fort Collins Democrat, Sen. Janice Rich, a Grand Junction Republican, Rep. Matt Soper, a Delta Republican, and Rep. Michael Carter, an Aurora Democrat. Kipp and Soper ran a similar bill last year that died in a Senate committee. 'I was really hoping that he would decide not to veto it,' Kipp said. 'I think it is a very fair bill that we worked for a couple years on in order to get it into a good place. We have several elements of the bill that are good for both requestees and for requesters, and I think it would make things easier.' The bill passed on a 45-19 vote in the House and a 27-6 vote in the Senate, which would satisfy the two-thirds requirement to override a veto if the Legislature pursues one. The lawmaking session ends the first week of May. Kipp said sponsors are having conversations about pursuing a veto override. Polis took issue with allowing public officials to make those determinations on who the requester is and what their motives are. 'The bill leaves the custodian with far too much power to define who is and is not a member of the media, and what is and isn't news,' he wrote. 'For instance, a public official may deem a request from a media outlet focusing specifically on climate change as not meeting the statutory definitions of 'newsperson' or 'mass medium' given the perspective of some elected officials that climate change is categorically not news.' The bill relied on existing definitions of 'mass medium' and 'newsperson' found in state statute related to courts and court procedures. Polis also objected to the creation of different CORA response timelines for different types of requests, ranging from three days for journalists and 30 days for businesses seeking records for financial gain. 'A newsperson, a member of the public, and a person seeking financial gain may all request the same information and, under this bill, get access to that information on different timelines,' Polis wrote. 'To ensure fairness and confidence in public transparency, all legitimate requests for public transparency under CORA should be treated equally under the law, without preference for some requestors over others.' But to Kipp, the bill's intention is for the government to not conduct 'market research' for businesses on the same timeline and cost for others seeking public records. The bill's bipartisan group of sponsors and supporters had argued that the bill was intended to give public officials a reasonable amount of time to respond to an increasing volume of requests. 'People should be able to get information that they want to get. So what we're mostly doing with this bill is trying to clarify the processes for requesters, and to give those public entities and records custodians just a little bit more time to fulfill those requests, because it's become just an overwhelming burden,' Kipp said. The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition's advocacy committee had asked Polis earlier this month to veto the bill, arguing in a letter that it would create unnecessary barriers 'for people seeking to gain a better understanding of state and local government activities in Colorado.' SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
New York Times
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Strange Allure of Watching Other People Tear Up Their Homes
You see her first from behind, just before she steps away toward a tall, plain wall. You get time for a blink — that's it, maybe a tenth of a second — and then a sonic boom of indie pop drills into you, drums and rattling high-hats and a detonation of ahhhs, as a jump cut reveals that the double-height wall has been newly repainted and festooned with quadrilateral molding, angles prim enough to have been sliced by a chef's knife. Next to her handiwork, the woman stands beaming in a sundress. In the caption, a battle cry: 'We can ALL tackle hard things!!!!!' I have watched this video some 300 times. This is easily done, because it is only 20 seconds long. It's snappy, merry, somehow animalistically pleasing. The video loops on its own. You could imagine it playing out endlessly, until the worms take over, until the end of time. The woman is Lisa Chun, a 42-year-old mother of three. Chun is no interior designer, carpenter or architect: Five years ago, she worked in operations at Kipp, the charter-school network. But one day during the pandemic, marooned indoors and binge-scrolling social media, she had a sudden hankering to renovate the entryway of her house. Everyone and their mother seemed to be embarking on soup-to-nuts D.I.Y. projects at the time — and so, egged on by inspiration, stir-crazy and jonesing for a creative outlet, Chun reached for her nail gun. Just for kicks, she decided to film it on her iPhone. Nowadays Chun is one of the most popular home influencers in the world, and she makes multiple times her former salary by showing off her self-taught building and decorating. At the start, 'I had no idea people made money from this,' Chun, known to her million Instagram followers as @ told me recently when I visited her in the house that made her famous: a two-story, colonial-style new-build in suburban Bergen County, New Jersey. Since then, nearly every inch of the house has been torn up by Chun's own hands. There's that molding in the foyer ('I had to relearn math for this'), the laundry-room countertop she cut and varnished ('My first time using a saw'), the drywall she faux-lime-washed ('Real lime-washing can rub off, which is not kid-friendly'), the stone fireplace she thickly outlined with a technique called 'overgrouting' ('@chrislovesjulia, who's kind of my gold standard, taught me that'). To watch a few of Chun's 800 posts and Reels on Instagram is to be whipped onto an M.C. Escher escalator of possibility. Many, like the before-and-after transformation of the foyer wall, are panoramic delights meant to pique curiosity on an app's algorithmic homepage. Other videos are frenzied and brightly lit how-tos, typically cut into choppy, hyperspeed time lapses. Chun shows up in T-shirts and leggings, laughing and holding paint rollers. In just a few quick-cut shots, she bores a filtered-water dispenser into the mud room, or slaps LED light strips onto the underside of a chunk of wood to turn it into a luxe display console, or 'hacks' IKEA wardrobes into a custom walk-in closet. On each project, Chun is both foreperson and laborer, script-flipping a gender stereotype of physical housework. (Her husband might pop into a shot to steady a scaffolding ladder or hold a curtain rod, but the best thing he can do is to 'take the kids out for a drive and leave me alone in the house,' Chun told me.) Her videos are full of upbeat, can-do attitude, the words I'm so happy with how this turned out! constantly invoked, like a witch's spell. One particularly well-performing video she made in 2022, in which she describes herself as a guide for 'high-impact, one-day transformations' and 'high-end looks on a budget,' ballooned her follower count from 35,000 to 400,000 in just days, Chun told me. The comments on this post can be sorted into four types: There's 'You are such a boss,' 'Your house is beautiful' and 'Please come to my home,' and then, 'I'm over here struggling to organize my pantry.' Squarely in this last category do I fall: I have never tried to renovate my home, because I do not own a home, and — by the way prices and mortgage rates are trending — maybe won't ever. For me and most of my unfortunate millennial brethren, homeownership is something of a fantastical notion, not the plausible ambition it once was, before today's intractable housing crisis. But even so, dwelling in my New York City rental apartment, roughly the size of Chun's two-car garage, I can happily spend hours, days, watching home influencers knocking down walls in their cavernous basements or pouring concrete for outdoor pools. Why is this? Call it a Covid thing, the pandemic's stay-at-home orders sending our biological nesting impulse into overdrive. Call it garden-variety visual envy mashed with rampant consumerism: The internet goads us to infinite-scroll for new rugs, curate our houseplants, cruise Zillow and Architectural Digest for entertainment. For that matter, call it the wages of globalized e-commerce, a cheap and fast-shipping home-décor market letting us effortlessly cycle out a room's style from 'midcentury' one week to 'Japandi' or 'cottagecore' the next — because even if we don't own the house in which we live, the least we can do is make it look nice. And when we inevitably grow tired of our own cramped interiors, we can thumb open the screen and tumble freshly into love with other people's houses, like Chun's, for both antidotes and mirrors to our own joyful mania. It goes far, far back, this domestic obsession of ours. Some 50,000 years ago, Paleolithic proto-decorators on the Indonesian island Sulawesi scribbled out a warty pig on cave walls; Skara Brae, a preserved settlement off the coast of Scotland, shows us that humans were living inside houses by 3,000 B.C., alongside tidy furniture items like dressers, hearths and cupboards. Before the nearby volcano pummeled it into nothing, the city of Pompeii was infatuated with interiors: Upper-crust citizens loaded their homes with sumptuous frescos of gladiators and gods, which their poorer neighbors sometimes tried to emulate in their own residences. When archaeologists dug up Pompeii's middle-class House of the Larario, they exposed four small rooms and a ritzy courtyard featuring similar posh frescos to those found in richer houses. Already in 79 A.D., the house was a place of aspiration, a place to be improved. Unlike other things our modern Pinterest age has popularized, the house had already been an object of mass public gawkery for decades — through gurus like Martha Stewart and Bob Vila, then through the kaleidoscopic cable programming invented and popularized by HGTV. Since its founding in 1994, HGTV has continually refurbished its wall-to-wall lineup of fungible, fanatically watched shows, which tend to paint real estate as an exhilarating challenge. 'There's so many different ways of telling a house story,' the network's head of content, Loren Ruch, told me. 'People are just curious about how people live, how they design their places.' A more recent breed of show has emphasized the housing hustle: Programs like Netflix's 'Selling Sunset' and 'Owning Manhattan' follow brokers as they hunt down luxury properties, as well as their own paychecks. A guy who fixes the feng shui of people's homes is one of the biggest creators on TikTok, though not as big as the guy who goes around pestering strangers on the street about how much they pay in rent. Enter the Cambrian explosion of D.I.Y. influencers. Entrepreneurs like Chun building empires from and through their own living rooms offer a far closer and chummier scale for viewers than the polished productions of before. Armed with only a phone camera and a single house (and limitless amounts of pep), these people don't feel like influencers. They feel like vicarious versions of yourself — if only you had the time, or the energy, or the space. For those who do have all those things, there is unparalleled market opportunity. Amanda Vernaci is another self-starter who caught the home-reno bug in the pandemic. 'I went to Home Depot and bought my first table saw and was like, 'OK, I'm just bringing people along for the ride,'' the Michigan-based Vernaci, a.k.a. @comestayawhile, told me. In 2019, she had never so much as looked at a power tool. Now, 'many bruises on my knees' and 1.4 million followers later, she has shiplapped her ceilings, handcrafted Shaker-style cabinetry, epoxied her garage. About 10 brands ping her inbox every day pitching deals, she says; even employing a suite of business managers and assistants, Vernaci can barely keep up with the demand. The homegrown home influencer who comes with a built-in audience is every furniture or décor business's advertising dream — and they can charge brands upward of $10,000 for a single video. Brands clamor to work with these individuals because they're 'more relatable, like a trusted referral from a friend, than stars on a TV show,' Kayla Cummings, a creator also based in Michigan, told me. Cummings followed her childhood friend Vernaci's steps into the niche industry in 2021, and now, through filming house content — much of which features her goofing around with Vernaci in their newly sparkling kitchens — she has made enough money to leave her job as a social worker. 'Everybody needs or has a couch,' Cummings told me. So her thinking went: 'If I'm going to be already talking about this couch that I need or have, then how can that be monetized?' In Reno, Nev., the influencer Anne Sage, who is currently revamping an old house that belonged to her late grandfather, told me she is choosy with brands, yet can still pull in around $160,000 per year in revenue, which she considers 'pretty damn good for posting 15-second videos on the internet.' Sage has recently grown concerned about the social costs of her work, though, after an influencer friend told her that brands are now adding 'de-influencing' clauses into contracts that prohibit creators from talking about decluttering, repurposing old items or shopping less. 'That was really interesting and sad,' Sage, who started blogging about home décor 17 years ago, told me. 'And it was like, Do I want to be in this world anymore? I've been part of creating a problem that I'm now waking up to.' Yet the influx of newbies, chasing capital of their own, won't stop. A decade ago, when the Los Angeles interior designer Orlando Soria started working in home-décor media as an HGTV assistant, he ran in a circle of 'maybe 50 O.G. bloggers, design-content producer types,' he told me. He and those 50 are still in business — but they're astonished at how many other D.I.Y. home influencers seem to be out there now: 'Over 500,000? A million? It feels like it.' Soria eventually hosted his own show on HGTV, 'Build Me Up,' that ran two seasons; during the second season, in 2020, he says he made about $5,000 per episode, which broke down to only $11 per hour of work after taxes and his agent's cut. But the next year, through his own online persona as a consummate Soria was able to book $250,000 in brand partnerships in a single month. (Not all of that money ended up materializing — several brands delayed or canceled deals later that year when Covid resurged. Today, Soria says he makes around $150,000 a year.) HGTV, now the dinosaur in the home-media space, knows it can't outcompete the upstarts — but it can join forces with them. One afternoon last month, I dropped in on the network's Atlanta set of 'Married to Real Estate,' a newish series hosted by the polyglot designer-builder couple Egypt Sherrod and Mike Jackson. The show is something like a hard-hat 'Keeping Up With the Kardashians': Each episode has the pair bouncing between their own home with their kids, their real-estate and design offices and whatever client's house they're currently tearing up. 'We went to a couples therapist once, and she told us to break up,' Sherrod told me. In another era, HGTV might have rolled the couple off their tidy assembly line — as they did with Chip and Joanna Gaines, the stars of 'Fixer Upper' who slowly leveraged years of TV celebrity into their own media kingdom, Magnolia. But modern-day HGTV, nervous about aging cable viewership and young influencers' nibbling into its market share, has to squint beyond the moat of its own control. In the pandemic, it began casting talent from Instagram and YouTube. Executives now sit in conference rooms canvassing TikTok. Sherrod and Jackson were already internet-famous when they pitched 'Married,' seeing a chance to amplify their own existing businesses. 'When you find talent that has a passionate following that wants to come with them to HGTV, that's lightning in a bottle,' Ruch told me. On 'Married,' the production apparatus was a well-oiled machine: Within 15 minutes, a crew of six swept into the stripped-bare client's house and set up a tall key light among the sawdust and wiring. Sherrod and Jackson breezed in and began performing a grout-and-schmear over a kitchen facade, which would give the stone an aged look. Off to the side, one of the show's executive producers, Steve Kantor, gave bits of direction ('Talk about how nervous the client was!'), while a construction worker with AirPods in his ears revved a power drill for background noise. An hour and a half into shooting, it was already time to wrap the scene: Among their myriad other projects, Sherrod is unveiling a furniture and décor line that will be sold in big-box stores like JCPenney and Kohl's this spring, while Jackson needed to prep for hosting 'Smart Home,' another HGTV show; they also had to pick up their children, feed them and clean up their own house, so it could be filmed the following day for another episode. We are not passive viewers of all this content. Some part of us would love to replicate the D.I.Y. handiwork that we're seeing, swimming in, all the time. But most of us are exhausted or clumsy or too busy — or live in rentals where ripping up a ceiling beam is forbidden — so, instead, we vicariously enjoy the home influencer's progress, window-shopping these quick and easy dopamine jolts. And we get to traipse through her private living spaces, too, invading the intimacy of her bathrooms and children's bedrooms, dragging our own prurient desires and judgments, like peasants storming into Versailles during the Revolution. As the fundamental dream of homeownership slides further out of reach, an ordinary person's home, it turns out, can be anybody else's Versailles. If HGTV, 30 years ago, offered viewers an upscaled reflection of their own homes, then home content nowadays, to younger generations like mine, is more like a crazy fun-house mirror — showing enchanting, mythical pleasures bereft to us in the real world. Millennials these days might be buying homes at dramatically lower rates than baby boomers did at their age, but they're shelling out 23 percent more on home décor, according to a report from the real-estate company Opendoor. Even the people who do own homes today are moving less than they did 20 years ago, per a Redfin study. What else is there to do but watch other people fulfill our own wishes? Of course, it's not always so rosy inside those lovely homes we see on the screen. Breeya Shade, an influencer in Northern California, experienced firsthand the parasocial anti-fandom that can ensue when she posted a video of herself painting over her granite kitchen countertops. 'It was an out-of-body experience, seeing so many people so furious about what I did in my own house,' she told me. 'Someone told me — I'll never forget it — that I 'should swallow nails and then go get an M.R.I.' I have gotten so many death threats. I still get them.' And then there is the more literal pain of living in a house full of gaping holes, splintered wood, rusted wire. Vernaci was once 'nearly decapitated' by a flying board; Shade started off furniture-flipping on the daily, but scaled down her projects because of the toll on her body. Shade and her husband also had to move out from the suburbs and into the countryside after their neighbors complained of noise from all the hacking and sawing. (Now they live next to farmers, who run loud tractors all day long.) Back in New Jersey, I asked Chun if, having turned her home into a business, she ever feels trapped, smothered by the physical abode to which she must now constantly tend. 'For sure there will be days of cabin fever,' she told me. 'But I find that, now that I'm older and my home is more precisely designed to my preferences, I actually want to be home more. I'm increasingly a homebody.' The double economic success doesn't hurt: Almost each room brims with handsome chairs and tables and doorknobs that brands either sent free or paid Chun to promote. And even if all these P.R.-gifted goods tend to contribute toward an identikit beigeness on the Instagram Explore page, that's not necessarily a problem for home influencers' revenue. Though the average may not be getting rich, someone with a million followers can clear — through partnership gigs, affiliate marketing, private consultations, speaking engagements, influencer-education courses and product lines — six, seven or even eight figures a year. Room by room, Chun and I walked through every nook and cranny earmarked for future renovation. There was her daughters' upstairs bathroom, which needed deeper cabinets behind the mirrors to accommodate the two girls' ever-expanding skin-care products; the tiles peeling off the basement wall because the recent cold snap across the East Coast had caused them to come unglued; the in-progress backyard, where, in a rare instance, she has hired outside contractors to help set up an outdoor kitchen. ('Have you ever tried to dig a hole in the cold ground? It's hard. That's why murderers get caught, because they don't end up having the energy to bury the body.') The workday isn't just the time on camera: When not filming, Chun is editing videos, strategizing with her manager and writing a book about household operations from her home office — which has self-installed wall shelves and an adjustable standing desk she fluted with pole wrap. Despite her admiration for Joanna Gaines, Chun has no desire to ever be on TV, she told me. Fame is thorny; entrepreneurship is liberating. Leaving Chun's house that day, I turned back, wanting to have a final look at the formidable empire she has constructed. But it was a long street of stately homes, all dressed in similar elephantine tones and sloping roofs, and I found myself disoriented. Which house had I just left? I couldn't quite tell.
