Matilda Djerf Is Still Here

However, Djerf is still here—the NYC pop-up marking her first return to her US audience. After the article came out, she released a statement of apology to the newspaper in the initial report, and set about figuring out how she could change her company, and herself, to weather the storm.

To hear her tell it, the article came out after a dizzying few years for the brand, which she and her fiancé, Rasmus Johansson, launched together in their mid-20s with little business experience. She describes it as experiencing almost staggering growth year over year, which, of course, was thrilling but also exposed the cracks in the company that they either didn’t know how to, or didn’t have time to, properly fix.

“It was very much just head down,” she recalls. “How do we put out fires? Everything was so manual…. We were like, How do we build, how do we make sure that the systems are working smoothly? I think that given that we didn’t have prior experience, we didn’t really fully understand that the systems needed to be updated all the time.”

She later uses a different analogy: “You’re running and you try to catch up, but you don’t fully figure it out in real time.”

In person Djerf is friendly and animated when discussing her brand and the women who love it but becomes more guarded when the topic of the article comes up, often thinking long and hard about what she wants to say. When asked how the allegations impacted her personally, she insists she doesn’t want to rehash. The individual claims, she says, also aren’t worth relitigating. What matters is how her employees felt, no matter how she saw her actions at the time.

“It’s not my space to think about [that],” she says. “People’s feelings were hurt and that’s the thing; it’s not my space.”

Right now Djerf has a more pressing question—how does she convince her fans that she is the same warm, approachable, stylish older sister, the mentor to her so-called Djerf Avenue Angels, that they grew to revere? Her answer is in going back to basics and trying to actually meet them in person.

Rather than feeling nervous to put herself back out there following the scandal, Djerf says, she craved it. She wanted to look her fans in the eye and assure them she was still here.

“I was very eager to meet my community. I was very eager to meet my girlies again and to have that, have a moment with them,” she says.

Amir Hamja

The now $250 billion influencer industry is often compared to a gold rush, and for good reason. To become a popular creator is akin to striking it rich one day out of the blue, with all of the benefits but also all of the pitfalls. The usual pattern is that an influencer will blow up quickly, secure extremely lucrative partnership deals soon after, and before they know what is happening, find themselves running a million-dollar business. And while many scoff at how “easy” the job is for those at the top considering how much they get paid, it’s also incredibly easy to fail almost as spectacularly as they grew, due to cancellation, irrelevance, bad business decisions, or a combination of all three.

Djerf’s story is not unique in that respect. Born and raised in Borås, a small town in western Sweden, Djerf always loved fashion and being creative, and marched to the beat of her own drum. When she was in elementary school, her father’s military career took the family to Monterey, California, to live for a few years, which she said opened her eyes to the world outside her bubble back home.