She Was the Go-to Fashion Girl in Her Sorority. How 1 Sister's Advice Changed the Trajectory of Her Career (Exclusive)
- - She Was the Go-to Fashion Girl in Her Sorority. How 1 Sister's Advice Changed the Trajectory of Her Career (Exclusive)
Tabitha ParentJanuary 7, 2026 at 4:00 AM
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Hannah Lizzy
Hannah Krohne. -
In September 2025, fashion influencer Hannah Krohne, who goes by Hannah Lizzy online, quit her job in corporate fashion to pursue an influencing career full-time
Krohne, who first began posting on TikTok in 2022, had never considered the possibility that her fun fashion content (which was born in her sorority house bedroom) could be a full-time anything — until she started making her yearly part-time salary in two months
She also reveals to PEOPLE why, three months in, she thinks "every post is like a lottery ticket"
On Friday and Saturday nights during her sophomore year, Hannah Krohne was running a tight operation out of her Syracuse University sorority house bedroom.Lines of glammed-up girls, prepped and ready for a night out on the town, would come in and out of her door like it was a swinging door in a busy kitchen, hoping to snag a piece from the now 23-year-old's incredibly equipped closet."I was obsessed with clothes," Krohne laughs, telling PEOPLE that you would have been hard-pressed to find a day when there wasn't a new package with her name on it waiting on the Tri Delta house porch.It was a suggestion from her roommates in 2022 that changed the game for Krohne. Influencers were really "becoming a thing" at that time, Krohne explains, and her friends encouraged her to take advantage of the budding online niche."[They] were like 'I think you should just start posting this on TikTok. You might be able to get free clothes,'" she recalls. That was more than enough to sell Krohne."Say less," she remembers thinking.
"A switch just went off, and ever since then, I've posted every day multiple times," she shares.
Growth in her accounts was exponential. She started posting around February or March of that year, and by December had racked up 10,000 followers. Six months later, she had multiplied that count by 10, sitting at a whopping 100,000 followers.Krohne's eye for sartorial success was evident online early, as she posted videos getting ready for nights out in college with her girlfriends from her bedroom.
While her friends often opted for simple jeans and a cute top outfits, Krohne was usually decked out in a Danielle Guizio low-rise mini skirt (which you'd almost have to credit her with popularizing based on the number of times they appear in her videos), paired with a sickeningly cool leather Akino top and chunky, platform knee-high boots.She had the "going-out bin" of any college-aged girl's dreams, and what's more, she was always down to share, frequently posting giveaways for her budding group of followers.However, posting on social media was largely a side gig for Krohne while she finished up her undergrad, studying entrepreneurship and marketing at Syracuse, where she graduated in 2023. All the while, she was collecting experience in the fashion world — interning at David Yurman and then later with Danielle & Alix, a New York City-based celebrity styling duo.
Hannah Lizzy/TikTok
Hannah Krohne.
She was still posting throughout the experiences, growing her follower count in the background, but her college classes and these summer gigs were preparing her for a "real" job, and she wasn't at all mad about it — in fact, she was excited."At that time, I definitely was not thinking that I would be able to be a full-time influencer," she admits."I thought you had to have millions of followers in order to do it full-time," she says.During her senior year of college, Krohne also started her full-time job, working in digital merchandising and strategy at British online fashion retailer ASOS — a significant boon to her content. She was in charge of curating the "edits" on the fashion retailer's site and analyzing data to see what would work the best.
"It gave me so much inspiration for content because all day, I was just researching trends and I had access to a lot of the data of what was selling well at ASOS," she says of how her full-time job bled into her influencing.
"So I could use that and turn that into something informative for my followers for content. It definitely went really hand in hand," she explains.
Krohne now boasts a total of 484,700 followers across her TikTok and Instagram, and the summer after her senior year was "huge" for her. She gained around 150,000 followers and, suddenly, other opportunities started to pop up as well.
"Things were starting to happen with brand deals where it wasn't just a few hundred bucks anymore," she says. "When I announced that I was moving to New York City, I was getting invited to all these events in New York. And I was like, 'Oh my gosh, like, I wanna go to all of these.'"So, just six months into her first, entry-level corporate job, Krohne went part-time.She cut both her hours and her salary "in half." With 20 hours back in her life, Krohne went ham on posting content, linking to her affiliate links, posting on her LTK and ShopMine and sourcing brand deals.In the back of her mind, her exit strategy was building, but she wasn't quite ready to sever ties with ASOS just yet."Even though it was only 20 hours, it was such a huge part of my identity," she says of her corporate job. "So I was so scared, and I knew the goal with quitting this job was to never have a corporate job again.""I had this mindset of 'OK, if I quit my corporate job, I have to make sure that I will have a steady income every day for the next 50 years until I can retire, or else it's a failure.' In my head, the failure was having to go back."So, for a few months while she was part-time, Krohne started tracking her expenses, seeing if she could pay for her lifestyle without ever dipping into the money she was making from her ASOS job. She had an account for her influencing money and an account for her corporate job to better track her expenses.
Hannah Lizzy/TikTok
Hannah Krohne.
"And then that was when I was like, OK, this could be a thing," she says. It got to a point where Krohne was making her yearly part-time salary in just two months.So, in September of 2025, Krohne quit her full-time job.
"It was getting to the point where I had fallen in love with being an entrepreneur," she said. She was getting on all the social platforms to optimize her content, using apps to automate sending DMs to followers and more. "I fell in love with being scrappy."Like with any new job, there was, of course, a learning curve. One of the so-called luxuries of a corporate job is that many things you don't think about are somewhat automated for you: like insurance, retirement funds and taxes.For influencers, that is not necessarily the case. All of a sudden, Krohne had to figure out how to set aside money (about 30% of her earnings, to be exact) for taxes. She learned the hard way that when Revolve sent her clothes, she would be taxed on the monetary value of the items, as for her, that's taxable income.
Hannah Lizzy
Hannah Krohne.
"So what I didn't read in the fine print of this Revolve Gifting was that they were gifting it in exchange for posting. AKA, the clothes are the income in exchange for my post, so they're taxing it like it's income," Krohne laughs at her early mistakes.Interestingly, Krohne is not in TikTok's Creator Rewards program, saying she felt it "messed" with her viewership. You also won't find her promoting anything from TikTok Shop either, despite the fact that it may positively impact views.Why? She just hasn't found anything worth shouting out. Being genuine to her followers is more important to Krohne. She says she's often found that her posts that go most viral are the ones she posts on a whim — the less curated, candid videos.
It's those kinds of videos that she tells people looking to make the corporate-to-influencing switch, like she did, to lean into."Every post is like a lottery ticket," she advises, saying that consistency when posting is key. Krohne herself set a goal a long time ago to post at least four times a day, and has stuck with it ever since."It could go viral, and you never know," she says. "Don't wait until the content is perfect to post it.""My most imperfect content is always the stuff that goes viral. It's me talking about how I have to pay taxes on my Revolve stuff because I'm an idiot and didn't read the fine print. Even with me trying on clothes in a hall and then the clothes don't fit right, people find it interesting."Essentially, she says, even "if you think that your life is mundane and normal, people think it's so interesting."
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
