Before launching her own swimwear brand at 14 and designing a collection with Aéropostale, Déjà Clark spent her free time pretending to make YouTube videos. “When I was very little, like 7 to 8 years old, I would always pretend to make slime videos,” the 15-year-old tells Her Campus in an exclusive interview. “[Making videos] was always something I wanted to do, so that being what I do now is so cool.”
Clark has truly turned her childhood dreams into reality, amassing millions of followers across social media platforms and building a career that goes far beyond content creation. Alongside her success on social media, Clark launched her own swimwear brand, Sunny Dé, and recently designed a collection with Aéropostale inspired by her love of streetwear and Y2K fashion. For Clark, the collection gave her a chance to see her designs go from sketches to something tangible. “It felt so surreal,” she says. “Seeing a little drawing of a sample to seeing it actually in the store, and actually feeling the clothing. It was so cool.”
As her career and online presence have continued to grow, Clark has also had to navigate the challenges that come with growing up in the public eye — including online hate and the pressure of having millions of people watching. But through it all, Clark says one thing has changed just as much as her career: her confidence. “I wasn’t very confident when I first joined social media,” Clark says. “But now that I’ve grown up with people watching me, I’m kind of used to it, and am a lot more confident now.”
For Clark, growing up online has meant learning how to be comfortable with being seen — and sometimes criticized — from a young age. Having her mom, fellow creator Kat Clark, alongside her has helped her navigate the less glamorous parts of being in the public eye, from online negativity to the pressures that come with having an audience. “It’s definitely been good having my mom, and having her understand the same things that I do,” Clark says. “Having her there has definitely helped a lot.” Clark says the biggest lesson she has learned from her mom is “to not care what people think.” She says, “She’s always told me that. The haters are just jealous, so that’s something that I always like to think.”
That mindset has become especially important as Clark has stepped beyond social media and into entrepreneurship. At 14, she launched Sunny Dé, inspired by her childhood in Australia where she lived just minutes from the beach. “I was always there, always swimming,” she says. “So I was like, why not create my own swimwear brand and have other people wear something that I like?”
Designing clothes also gave Clark another way to turn her creativity into something real. “I always liked the idea of seeing people wearing things that I’ve designed,” she reflects, “That was always a good drive for me.” Her motivation to see others wearing designs she created and loved helped inspire the pink and blue color palette of the first Sunny Dé collection — two of her favorite colors.
That same creative instinct eventually led to Clark’s collaboration with Aéropostale. Of all the pieces in the collection, Clark’s favorite is a pair of jorts. “[The jorts] have a little leopard and flowers printed on them. I think it’s so cute,” she says.
For someone who has already accomplished so much at 15, Clark isn’t necessarily worried about having her entire future figured out. As for college, she says, “I honestly haven’t thought about that yet. I’m still focusing on my career and designing.” Her vision board also reflects that mindset. Some of the goals she wrote down for this year — including reaching 1 million subscribers — have already come true. Now, rather than looking too far ahead, she’s setting her sights on the next milestones in her everyday life. “One of the things on my vision board was getting my license, and hopefully that is coming soon,” she says.
As she continues figuring out what’s next, Clark is living by the same advice that helped her grow from a kid pretending to make YouTube videos into a young creator building a career of her own: don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. “Sometimes, being uncomfortable is a good thing,” she says. “You have to be uncomfortable to get comfortable with things.”