Quick Bio
| Detail | Information |
| Full Name | Erin Schrader |
| Brand Name | Living in Yellow (LIY) |
| Nationality | American |
| Hometown | Goshen / East Elkhart area, Indiana, USA |
| Occupation | Blogger, Fashion and Lifestyle Content Creator, Entrepreneur, Brand Founder |
| Known For | Living in Yellow blog and brand; Gibson x Living in Yellow clothing collaboration at Nordstrom; building a seven-figure business from a personal blog |
| Blog Founded | 2011 |
| Major Milestone | Clothing line launched at Nordstrom (March 2018) |
| Team Size | Approximately 15 employees |
| Estimated Net Worth | Not publicly disclosed; seven-figure business confirmed |
| Platform Focus | Blog, Facebook, Instagram |
| Husband | Yes (married 10+ years as of 2017) |
| Business Expansion | Physical storefront |
Introduction: The Woman Who Built a Million-Dollar Brand From a Private Journal
Picture this: a young woman sitting at a desk in a credit union in Indiana, punching in her hours, doing her job — and quietly starting a blog on the side that almost no one knows about.
That is where the story of Living in Yellow begins.
Erin Schrader is not a household name the way a reality TV star or pop singer might be. She is something rarer and arguably more interesting: a regular person from a small town in northeast Indiana who turned a private creative outlet into a thriving fashion and lifestyle empire, built a team of fifteen people, collaborated with a major clothing brand sold at one of the country’s most prestigious department stores, and crossed the seven-figure revenue mark — all while still showing up to her day job for a while after she technically didn’t need to anymore.
Her story is about what happens when you stop waiting for permission to do the thing you love. It’s also a masterclass in how community, consistency, and a refusal to make fashion feel out of reach can take you somewhere nobody expected — least of all you.
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Early Life and Childhood: A Midwestern Foundation
Erin Schrader grew up in northeastern Indiana — a part of the country that doesn’t always get mentioned when people talk about entrepreneurial hotspots or fashion hubs. The area around Elkhart and Goshen is known for RV manufacturing, tight-knit communities, and a particular kind of Midwestern pragmatism that teaches people to work hard and not make too much of a fuss about it.
That background shaped Erin in ways she probably didn’t fully realize until later. She didn’t grow up surrounded by glamour or big-city fashion culture. She grew up in a place where people took care of each other, where a dollar had to stretch, and where you didn’t necessarily expect anyone to hand you an opportunity. You built your own.
She has a sister who went on to create Joyfully Said Signs, a business that makes farmhouse-style signs — another creative soul in the family, which tells you something about the environment Erin came from. Creativity wasn’t necessarily considered impractical in that household. It was just something you did, alongside everything else.
Erin eventually settled in east Elkhart, along the Upper St. Joseph River — a quiet part of Indiana that would become the unexpected headquarters of a nationally recognized lifestyle brand. The fact that she never left is one of the things that makes her story distinctive. She didn’t move to New York or Los Angeles to chase the fashion world. She brought it to Indiana instead.
Education and Early Career: The Credit Union Years
Erin’s path before the blog was not unusual for someone in her corner of the state. She worked a full-time job at a credit union. It was steady, responsible, and entirely disconnected from what she would eventually build. She was good at it, presumably, but it wasn’t where her creative energy wanted to go.
The gratitude journal was where that energy lived instead.
Erin had been writing in a personal gratitude journal regularly — a private practice of recording the small good things in a day, the moments worth holding onto. It was something just for her. Then, somewhere around 2011, she started thinking about moving that habit online. The thought wasn’t to build an audience or launch a career. It was barely more than the idea that the internet might be a quieter, more permanent version of a paper journal.
She didn’t tell anyone about the blog at first. Not her family, not her friends. It was going to be a private space, a digital continuation of what she was already doing for herself. And then it wasn’t private anymore — and everything changed.
Career Beginnings: The Blog Nobody Knew About
Living in Yellow officially launched in 2011. The name, at its heart, reflects the philosophy Erin brought to everything she created: yellow as a color of warmth, optimism, and the kind of everyday beauty that people walk past without noticing. It was about finding that and leaning into it.
In the beginning, the blog was small. Erin was sharing it with a handful of people. Then a few more. Then word spread in the way things spread online when something genuine connects with people who were quietly hoping for exactly that.
The content was never aspirational in the way that made readers feel bad about themselves. Erin wrote about what real life looked like. She covered fashion from stores that actual people shopped at — Nordstrom, yes, but also LOFT, Express, and Target. She shared travel stories and home decorating ideas and the kinds of everyday moments that made up a life. No $4,000 handbags. No weird runway looks that nobody would actually wear on a Tuesday. Just real clothing for real women, paired with the kind of writing that felt like it came from a friend rather than a brand.
That approach resonated. Within six years of launching, Living in Yellow had over 150,000 followers on Facebook alone, and the number kept climbing. Mothers reached out to say the blog made their chaotic days a little more manageable and a little more fun. Women who had given up on fashion said Erin gave it back to them. The community that gathered around the blog was not passive — they were invested, loyal, and emotionally connected in the way readers rarely are to purely commercial content.
Erin kept her credit union job during this entire period. She was building a parallel life, one Facebook post and blog entry at a time, without any certainty about where it was headed. She sold sidebar advertisements on the website. She pursued sponsorships for posts. It was a side hustle in the most classic sense — something she loved, something that was growing, and something that hadn’t yet replaced her income.
The moment it did — the moment she finally left the day job to pour all of herself into Living in Yellow — became a turning point that other aspiring bloggers and entrepreneurs would later point to as proof that the road from hobbyist to professional is real and passable.
The Rise: From Side Hustle to Seven-Figure Brand
By the time Erin made Living in Yellow her full-time focus, the platform was already significant. But the growth that followed showed what was possible when she could give it everything.
She grew her Facebook following by 100,000 people in a single year at one point — an increase that speaks to how strongly her voice was landing with an audience that was hungry for the specific thing she was offering. Authenticity without pretension. Fashion without shame. A reminder that beauty could be found in ordinary life.
Living in Yellow crossed into seven-figure revenue territory. This is a number Erin has shared publicly — and remarkably, even after reaching that milestone, she stayed at her credit union job for a while. It wasn’t just inertia. It was the kind of cautious, Midwestern sensibility that says: don’t count your chickens, keep your head down, make sure this is real before you leap. She leaped eventually. But she did it on her own timeline.
The team grew with the platform. She hired people to help manage the site, handle social media, and keep the editorial calendar running. At its peak, Living in Yellow had a staff of approximately fifteen people — a real company, with real employees, operating out of northeastern Indiana.
Major Achievement: The Nordstrom Collaboration
If there was a single moment that announced Living in Yellow to a national audience beyond the blogging world, it was the collaboration with Gibson, a women’s apparel brand sold through Nordstrom.
The connection started the way many meaningful partnerships do: Gibson came to Erin. The brand had noticed what she was building and reached out to explore how they might work together. Erin pitched them the idea of an actual clothing line — not just a sponsored post or an Instagram campaign, but a real collection that reflected her values and her audience.
Gibson x Living in Yellow launched in March 2018. The collection was carried on the Nordstrom website and, initially, in two physical Nordstrom locations — including the Galleria in Houston, where Erin threw a launch party. The line featured accessible basics at price points between $32 and $79, in sizes XXS through 3X. The sizing range was itself a statement: this was clothing for the full range of the women who read Living in Yellow, not just a narrow slice of them.
Erin described the design philosophy as creating pieces that could carry a woman from work to the end of her day without missing a beat — clothes made in fabrics comfortable enough that you wouldn’t want to take them off. That mission statement sounded simple. It was actually the result of years of listening carefully to what her readers actually needed.
The collection performed well enough that Gibson and Living in Yellow produced a second round — a cozy collection that launched later in 2018 and was embraced warmly by both LIY fans and the broader fashion blogger community.
The Nordstrom collaboration was a credibility milestone. It meant that a blogger from Goshen, Indiana had built enough trust with her audience that a nationally recognized retailer wanted her name on their clothing. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because the relationship between creator and community is genuine.
Personal Life: Family, Balance, and Motherhood
Erin is married — her husband of more than a decade by her mid-career years — and she lives in the Indiana area where she has always been rooted. The details of her personal life she keeps relatively private, which is its own kind of choice in an industry that often rewards oversharing.
What she has spoken about is the challenge of building a business while also being a wife, and eventually, a mother. Balancing motherhood with running a fifteen-person operation and managing a public-facing brand is the kind of juggling act that never becomes easy, no matter how much practice you get. She has been open about it being hard and about finding ways to make it work rather than pretending the tension doesn’t exist.
Her sister’s presence in the entrepreneurial world — through Joyfully Said Signs — suggests a family where starting things, building things, and making things is considered a perfectly reasonable way to spend your time. That kind of background matters when you’re trying to take a risk on a creative career. Erin had, in her own family, proof that it was possible.
The community aspect of Living in Yellow is also, in many ways, a reflection of Erin’s personal values. She genuinely seems to like people. The connections built through the blog — the women who write in, the readers who recognize her at conferences, the followers who feel like they know her — are things she speaks about with real warmth. The coolest part of what she does, she has said, is the relationships.
Challenges and Difficult Periods
No business that grows from zero to seven figures in roughly a decade does so without friction.
Erin’s journey included the particular challenge of building something entirely new in a place that wasn’t known for it. There weren’t many successful bloggers in northeast Indiana, and there certainly wasn’t a roadmap for turning a lifestyle blog into a fully staffed company with a Nordstrom collaboration. She was figuring it out as she went, which meant making decisions without the benefit of precedent or local peers who had walked the same road.
The transition from blogger to employer is a shift that catches many content creators off guard. Managing fifteen people is a completely different skill set from writing engaging posts and building an Instagram presence. Erin had to learn how to delegate, how to hire well, and how to maintain the authenticity of the brand even as the operation behind it professionalized.
The evolution from blog to physical storefront — another expansion in the Living in Yellow journey — brought its own set of logistical and financial realities. Running a retail space is labor-intensive and capital-heavy in ways that digital content is not.
And underneath all of it was the ongoing challenge of staying connected to what made Living in Yellow resonate in the first place: the genuine voice, the real-life perspective, the sense that Erin was a person you actually knew rather than a brand you were being sold to. Scaling that without losing it is perhaps the hardest thing any creator-turned-entrepreneur has to do.
Financial Situation and Net Worth: What We Actually Know
Erin Schrader has confirmed publicly — through her appearance on the podcast Life with Loverly with Brittany Sjogren in April 2025 — that Living in Yellow reached seven-figure revenue. That means the business generates at least one million dollars per year, and has for some time.
No precise net worth figure has been publicly verified. Anyone citing a specific number — the AI-generated pages claiming $2 million or $5 million — are guessing, and not well-informed guessing at that.
What we can say with confidence is that Living in Yellow is a multi-channel business with meaningful diversified revenue. Income streams include sponsored content and brand partnerships on the blog and social media platforms, affiliate marketing commissions when readers purchase products through Living in Yellow links, the clothing collaboration revenue from the Gibson partnership, the physical storefront, and potentially advertising. A team of fifteen employees represents a real payroll, which means the revenue supporting it has to be substantial.
For comparison, fashion and lifestyle bloggers with audiences in the hundreds of thousands and multiple revenue streams typically earn anywhere from several hundred thousand to well over a million dollars annually, depending on partnership quality and conversion rates. Erin’s track record — seven-figure confirmation, a Nordstrom collaboration, fifteen employees — places her toward the upper end of that spectrum among regional lifestyle creators.
Her net worth, accumulated over a decade-plus of building a real company, is likely in the multi-million dollar range. But the honest answer is: she hasn’t said, and no verified figure exists.
Current Activities and Life Today
As of 2025 and into 2026, Erin Schrader remains active across Living in Yellow’s platforms. She appeared on Life with Loverly in April 2025 to share her entrepreneurial journey — an indication that she continues to engage with the broader creator community and is willing to be a resource for others navigating similar paths.
The physical storefront continues to operate alongside the digital presence. The team continues to run. The brand that started as a private journal entry in 2011 is, fourteen years later, a functioning company with employees, a real-world location, and an audience that has stuck around because what Erin built is worth sticking around for.
She lives in Indiana. She stayed. And from that place that nobody would have predicted as the headquarters of a nationally recognized fashion and lifestyle brand, she keeps doing the work.
Final Words
The story of Erin Schrader and Living in Yellow is genuinely useful — not as a fairy tale about overnight success, but as a very specific lesson in what happens when you’re honest about who you are and what you’re actually offering.
Erin never pretended to be something she wasn’t. She didn’t position Living in Yellow as a luxury lifestyle destination or chase the aspirational end of the market where the real margins are but the audience is small. She went in exactly the opposite direction. She made fashion feel like something everyone could participate in. She talked about stores real people could afford to shop at. She wrote like a person having a conversation rather than a brand managing a message.
That decision — to be real — turned out to be the most commercially savvy thing she could have done. And it happened because she wasn’t making a commercial decision. She was just being herself.
From a gratitude journal to a seven-figure company, from a private blog to a Nordstrom capsule collection, from one woman at a credit union to a team of fifteen people working together in northeastern Indiana — the Living in Yellow story is proof that you don’t need to be in the right city, or have the right connections, or start with any particular advantage. You need to find your voice, be consistent, and be willing to share something true.
Erin Schrader found her voice in 2011. She never stopped using it.
FAQs
1. Who is Erin Schrader?
Erin Schrader is the founder and creator of Living in Yellow, a fashion and lifestyle brand based in northeastern Indiana. She built it from a personal blog started in 2011 into a seven-figure business with a physical storefront and a clothing line sold at Nordstrom.
2. What is Living in Yellow?
Living in Yellow is a fashion and lifestyle platform originally launched as a blog. It covers everyday fashion, travel, home décor, and lifestyle topics aimed at real women who want accessible, affordable style — not runway looks or luxury price tags.
3. Where does Erin Schrader live and work?
She is based in the Goshen / East Elkhart area of northeastern Indiana and has kept her business rooted there throughout its growth, rather than relocating to a larger market.
4. How did Living in Yellow start?
Erin originally began a private gratitude journal and eventually moved it online. The blog launched in 2011 and was initially kept quiet — she didn’t even tell her family and friends about it at first.
5. What job did Erin have before blogging full time?
She worked full time at a credit union while building Living in Yellow on the side. Notably, she kept that job even after Living in Yellow had crossed into seven-figure territory, leaving only when she was confident the business was stable.
6. What was the Gibson x Living in Yellow collaboration?
In March 2018, Erin partnered with women’s apparel brand Gibson to create a capsule clothing collection sold on Nordstrom’s website and in select Nordstrom stores. The line featured affordable basics priced from $32 to $79, available in sizes XXS through 3X. A second collection, the Cozy Collection, followed later that year.
7. How big is the Living in Yellow team?
At its scale, Living in Yellow has employed approximately 15 people, making it a genuine small business operation rather than a solo creator project.
8. What is Living in Yellow’s net worth or revenue?
Erin has confirmed publicly that Living in Yellow reached seven-figure revenue. No specific net worth figure has been officially disclosed or independently verified. Estimates from AI-generated websites should not be taken as accurate.
9. Does Living in Yellow have a physical store?
Yes. The brand expanded beyond its digital presence to include a physical retail storefront, reflecting the brand’s growth from a blog into a multi-channel business.
10. What makes Living in Yellow different from other fashion blogs?
Erin built her brand around accessibility and authenticity. She consistently focused on clothing that real women could buy at stores they already shopped at, without pretending fashion required a large budget or a particular body type. The extended sizing range in her Nordstrom collaboration was a direct reflection of that philosophy.
11. Does Erin Schrader have a sister in business?
Yes. Her sister runs Joyfully Said Signs, a business that creates farmhouse-style signs — another creative entrepreneurial venture within the same family.
12. Is Erin Schrader still active in 2025 and 2026?
Yes. She appeared on the podcast Life with Loverly with Brittany Sjogren in April 2025 to discuss her entrepreneurial journey. Living in Yellow continues to operate as an active platform and business.
