There’s something quietly radical about the way Kate Wilkes shops. She doesn’t chase trends. She doesn’t buy things she wouldn’t actually wear. She picks up a tumbler at Walmart because her friend swears by it, falls in love with it, and then shares it with her community because she’d feel guilty not to. That’s the whole system, and it works.
Known as @stylebythekate to her growing community of followers, Kate is a full-time speech therapist in the school system, a mom of three, and a creator who stumbled into this work in 2022 while on maternity leave. She started a social account with no strategy, no gear, and no plan beyond sharing things she found at Target. What grew out of that experiment is a community of real women who trust her to tell them the truth about what’s worth buying and what isn’t, and to show them, on her own body, exactly how it fits.
Target and Top Knots: Kate’s Origin Story
Kate’s creator journey began as a fun maternity-leave side hobby, when she started posting things she found while pushing a stroller through Target. Her format was simple: no try-ons, no voiceover, just sharing finds as she went along. Her early handle, “Target and Top Knots,” perfectly captured the unpretentious, everyday spirit she brought to the whole thing from day one.
The shift came when her followers started asking whether she had actually tried anything on. She hadn’t, so she started. And then Reels became a thing. And the account kept growing, and growing, until she realized that what she’d built no longer fit inside a handle that said “Target.” She changed it to Style by the Kate to reflect the personal quality of the content she created, and kept going.
What she didn’t do, and still hasn’t done, is try to become a different kind of creator than the one she naturally is. “I find it organic to just do my normal life and my normal routine,” she says. Her co-workers have told her that her videos are just… her. Family and friends who knew her long before she began posting say the same thing. As Kate puts it, “There’s no greater gift than being told, ‘I can tell that that’s how you are.’”
The “Midsize Mama” Who Shares Everything
Kate describes her style philosophy as “elevated casual.” She wants to get dressed in the morning, look put together, and then actually go do things: run errands, pick up her kids, get through a full workday in a school building where she needs to be functional and feel good at the same time. She doesn’t think anyone should have to choose between comfort and looking like they tried. “You can be the size you are and wear something cute and feel good,” she says, and that belief is the foundation everything else is built on.
Part of what makes her community feel safe is how transparent she is about the basics. She shares her size. She shares her measurements. She tells her followers when something runs small or large, when a waistband hits weird, when the fabric is going to pill after three washes. She’ll recommend something and then tell you to skip it in the same breath if that’s the honest answer. “I don’t know how to be any other way,” she says, and that’s precisely the point.
That transparency extends to the way she sources content, too. Kate doesn’t build her calendar around what’s trending; she builds it around what she personally needs. Going to a concert? She’s going to share what she packed, why she packed it, and then branch out from there into a broader summer collection for anyone whose life looks similar to hers. Her audience of midsize moms has told her, repeatedly, that this is exactly the content they’ve been looking for.
The Closet Basics Philosophy That Her Community Keeps Coming Back For
One of the things Kate is known for is her commitment to closet basics: the pieces you reach for on repeat because they’re genuinely useful and genuinely flattering. A good white tee. A quality pair of jeans you can re-wear seventeen times. A plain button-down that layers well with anything. A simple dress without too much pattern that you can dress up or down depending on where you’re going.
Her reasoning is practical in the best way. She goes to work in a school every day, which means she needs clothing that can be repurposed without looking like she’s just recycling the same outfit. She wants things that wash well, that stay in style long enough to matter, and that give her community genuine value for their money. She even notes washability in her captions, because for her it’s never just about whether something looks good, but whether it holds up to real life. “I love when I find the thing that I love,” she says, “and then I get it and it says dry clean only. I don’t live a dry clean only life.”
Her community is largely budget-conscious, and she knows it. Even when she shares something on the higher end of the price spectrum, she acknowledges upfront that most of her followers are going to lean toward the more affordable option. She’s made her peace with that, because it’s honest and because her community trusts her more for saying so.
Running a Business Without Letting It Take Over
At one point in the not-so-distant past, Kate was just flying by the seat of her pants, as she puts it. No schedule, no system, just showing up whenever she could and hoping things stuck. As the account grew and the demands on her time multiplied, she realized that approach wasn’t going to hold. She’s a speech therapist, a mother, and a content creator, which means she’s running three jobs at once, and one of them required a more deliberate structure.
She mapped out when she could actually work. After school, before picking up her kids: that’s when she edits, answers emails, and films. Sundays are when Target drops new inventory, so Sunday mornings belong to scrolling the website and saving things for later. These routines aren’t glamorous, but they’re sustainable, and sustainability is what makes the whole thing function.
The bigger shift came in January, when she hired an assistant to handle graphic creation. She still curates all the images and directs the aesthetic; her assistant just takes those assets and turns them into polished graphics, which frees Kate up to spend her limited creative energy on the parts of the job that only she can do. “I realized that maybe I can’t do everything myself,” she says, with the kind of hard-won calm that comes from actually learning it the hard way. “You need to switch your mindset into being a business owner and a creator and treat that with the same lens you would any other job. Because it is a job.”
On Brand Partnerships: Authentic or Nothing
Kate is selective about brand partnerships in the way that can only really be described as principled. Partnership requests come in regularly, and most of them don’t make the cut: protein soda, random sneaker brands she’s never worn, products she hasn’t had time to actually test. She’s not interested in going down a rabbit hole of collaborations that don’t mean anything to her, because her community has trusted her specifically because she protects that trust.
The partnerships she does accept are the ones that feel like natural extensions of the content she was already creating. Walmart brand campaigns work because she genuinely shops at Walmart and shares from there constantly. “Those are easy and organic,” she says. “I can just pick what I’m already going to buy anyway.” Fashion collaborations are generally easier for her to say yes to because she can almost always find something she’d genuinely want to share.
Where she draws the firm line is products she hasn’t tried. If she doesn’t know yet whether something is good, she’d rather wait until she does before telling her community to buy it. That standard costs her some deals, and she knows it. She’s made peace with that too.
What Success Looks Like to Kate
Ask Kate about milestones and she doesn’t reach for follower counts first. She reaches for a story about a woman who sent her a DM asking about shapewear. Kate told her she hates shapewear and will not be recommending any, but then the two of them spent a genuinely good stretch of time going back and forth about compression bike shorts: what works for wearing under dresses in summer, what doesn’t, which Amazon options were worth it. Eventually the woman sent Kate a pair she liked, and Kate sent one back to her in return, a small exchange between two people who have never met in person. That conversation is one of the highlights of her creator career.
Her account has grown slowly by her own description, and she’s had to make a deliberate choice to accept that pace rather than fight it. She doesn’t compare herself to other creators, because she’s learned that comparison is “probably the worst thing you can do.” She sticks to her lane, keeps doing what she knows works, and measures the quality of what she’s built by the conversations that happen inside it. “I’m still able to make an impact even with my smaller numbers,” she says. “That’s meaningful to me.”
Finding Mavely at the Right Moment
Kate came to Mavely the way a lot of great things arrive: through a friend who vouched for it. A fellow creator mentioned her own rep and offered to put Kate’s name in, and though Kate had heard of Mavely before, she hadn’t been fully active on the platform until that introduction gave her a reason to dig in.
Since joining, Kate’s worked with a few different members of the Mavely team to help her get her profile set up and her storefront organized, walk her through brand deal strategy, and help her figure out how to maximize what she was already sharing. Through each of those relationships, Mavely has helped her structure her approach to affiliate links in a way that fits her values: she shares what she actually uses, she links it, and the income follows naturally from the trust she’s already built.
For a creator whose entire business is built on authenticity, that alignment matters. Mavely meets her where she already is, giving her the tools and support to do what she’s always done with more structure and cleaner infrastructure behind it. As Kate puts it simply: “Everything I share, I either own or want to own.”
Follow Kate on Instagram at @stylebythekate. For more creator stories, visit the Mavely blog.
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