Is it already time to catch up with Brooklyn McKnight? Yep.
Usually a “Where are they now?” feature is prompted only after decades have passed — enough time for life events to accumulate that warrant such an update.
Brooklyn McKnight (BBA ’21) simply has too much going on to wait that long.
McKnight is half of the media wonder duo, Brooklyn & Bailey. The pair took the social media world by storm as teens, amassing a following of over 87 million worldwide. Brooklyn earned her entrepreneurship degree from Baylor a mere three years ago — cum laude, we might add — and already had a litany of accomplishments and life events under her belt before she could hang her diploma.
In the three years since, she’s tacked on even more. Married now, she continues to innovate and evolve, with her husband’s help and support. Her most recent endeavor has seen her return to Waco to launch the second location of her Utah-born soda shop, Sip City, to ravenous demand — but that’s just scratching the surface of all that Brooklyn has going on.
“We have Sip City, obviously, which has two locations,” she explains. “And then I have a skincare line, which is in Walmart, and we just launched on Amazon yesterday… Then I have a clothing and beauty brand where we have our own online website people can tap on and we have a warehouse and an office, and so we do all of our own fulfillment and distribution.”
And, as if that weren’t enough, her social media empire is still alive and well, and still growing the following that has kept fans rapt with attention enough to overwhelm Sip City’s opening. The shop’s grand opening created lines around the building and across two major roadways when it launched this fall in Woodway.
Sip City specializes in what is known as a ‘dirty soda.’ As McKnight explains, “A dirty soda is kind of a concept that I think it originated mostly in Utah, [where] you have a soda in the morning, in the middle of day, and night. And so people just got creative and they started adding coffee creamers and they started adding flavored syrups and just kind of creating their own sort of combinations the same way you would do at Starbucks or some other coffee place, just with soda bases instead.”
The first location was a rousing success, so she turned her attention toward the Waco area for expansion — a natural, since her alma mater has played a big part in her business perspective, even with the business successes that preceded her time at Baylor.
“I graduated with a degree in entrepreneurship and corporate innovation,” she explains. “So obviously I took classes and met professionals and was taught by professors who have all had entrepreneurial experience, and just being able to learn from them and learn from my education. Now I am an entrepreneur and I’ve been able to kind of take that recipe of how to build a business and apply it to multiple different categories and watch it work.”
With multiple businesses underway — plus marriage and, soon, parenthood (she and her husband are expecting) — Brooklyn remains undaunted, and one need only consider her counsel to Baylor students who would follow in her path to have confidence in McKnight’s continued success.
“My best advice, is the hardest part is getting started,” she explains. “A lot of people have great ideas and they get paralyzed by the fear of risk, and there will always be risk involved in starting a business: financially, emotionally, time-wise. You have to just push through that. You have to just have faith in yourself and in your idea and make it happen, because most of the time the risk turns into reward.”
Sic ’em, Brooklyn!