A ‘Love Is Blind’ star says he doubled his income by influencing part-time. Now, he and his wife are using the extra money to travel and buy a house.

• Many reality stars use their newfound fame to launch careers as influencers.
• “Love Is Blind” star Brett Brown did something slightly different.
• Brown kept his day job at Nike but does some brand deals for extra income.

There are a lot of potential benefits to being on a show like “Love Is Blind.”

For starters, you could meet the love of your life. That is, after all, technically the goal of the Netflix hit, which first premiered in early 2020 and became a wildly successful binge-watch while people were quarantining during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But even if you don’t fall madly in love and end up married to someone you met behind a wall, there are many other reasons you might risk embarrassing yourself on reality television.

It’s hardly a secret that appearing on a popular reality show can be a savvy career pivot for contestants who gain enough fame (or infamy) to build a robust social media following that captures the attention of advertisers and brands. But that was the furthest thing from Brett Brown and Tiffany Pennywell Brown’s minds when they finished filming season four of “Love Is Blind.”

As one of the few couples who actually got married and had a relatively noncontroversial courtship on their Seattle-based season of the Netflix reality show, the Browns at first had no interest in joining the reality star-to-influencer pipeline while enjoying their newfound wedded bliss. Plus, they both had jobs they loved, anyway.

But once the show began airing in March 2023 and the pair became fan favorites, they each gained a public platform they realized offered some real financial potential they would be foolish to ignore.

Brett and Tiffany both kept their day jobs after appearing on ‘Love Is Blind’

After their season of “Love Is Blind” wrapped filming in May 2022, Brett and Tiffany both went back to their regular jobs and kept working as the season aired in March 2023.

Brett is still Nike’s director of immersive design, a role he’s held since 2021. Tiffany, meanwhile, left her role at as a client lead recruiter at Amazon when she moved from Seattle to Portland to be with Brett and was job hunting at the time she and Brett spoke with Business Insider.

Like many reality stars, the couple has been presented with a number of opportunities to partner with brands since appearing on the show. But the security of having full-time jobs — or at least one full-time job among two of them — has allowed them to be discerning.

“I feel like I’ve been pretty picky,” Brett told BI. “It’s just like, does this really align? Is this who I am? Does this resonate? Will I come across as like, ‘Oh, I’m just doing this for money?'”

“I’m not just going to do something because it pays,” he added.

That attitude also ensures Brett and Tiffany’s online presences stay authentic, too.

“It’s always been important to just stay true to who I am,” Tiffany said. “That’s going to come across so much whenever you are talking about a product on your social media.”

Creating content for partnerships isn’t as simple as pressing post, either — it takes time, which can be limited when you’re working full-time or job hunting.

“I do have a little bit more flexibility now, but it doesn’t mean that I’m going to take on everything,” Tiffany explained. “For me, there’s a long game to this, not just simply saying yes to every opportunity that we are presented.”

Influencing as a side-hustle has been lucrative for the ‘Love Is Blind’ couple

Brett said that he earned “a little bit more” than his full-time job salary from influencing alone in 2023, effectively doubling his income, while Tiffany added that they’ve each individually made over six figures in the social media space.

But their financial success, the couple isn’t about to ditch their original careers to influence full-time.

“I just love what I did, and Brett loves what he does, so we shouldn’t have to give that up. If anything, it is great to have supplemental income,” Tiffany said, noting that the extra money helped her and Brett get closer to their goal of buying a home. (The pair later announced on Instagram that they’d closed on a home in September.)

Juggling maintaining a public profile and working a full-time job can mean the Browns are sometimes spread a little thin. But both Brett and Tiffany emphasized they value being able to disconnect and focus on their relationship, which they call “the most important thing.”

They also love being able to log off and enjoy traveling the world, something they’ve been able to do more of with the supplemental income they’ve made from influencing.

Years before ‘Love Is Blind,’ Brett made a career change

It took Brett a long time to land his dream job at Nike, which is why he’s adamant that he’ll continue working in the footwear industry despite his reality TV success.

After years of feeling burnt out working in the video game industry, Brett found a passion for designing shoes and began posting his designs on social media as hobby. He only had a few hundred followers, but it was enough that the head of 3D at Kohan, a New Hampshire shoe company, spotted his work and sent him a DM.

That conversation turned into a job offer. Even though Brett hadn’t been considering a career change and didn’t have any formal training in footwear design, he took the leap.

After a year at Kohan, he landed a job at Nike. He recently celebrated six years at the footwear company.

Switching careers “wasn’t something that I set out to do,” Brett said. “I just started doing something that I love to do and unexpectedly turned into a new career path.”

His advice for how others can make a career change is simple: follow what excites you.

“I feel like if you lead with passion, opportunities will come,” he said, “and when they do, I feel like you’ll just be that much more happy and fulfilled because it came from a pure place.”