Meet a 29-year-old influencer who calls herself a tradwife—but she’s really more of a homesteader

Gubba does not see much separation between the life she shares online and the business she has built around it. 

On social media, she teaches followers about food storage and homesteading. Her audience can also buy a homesteading guide, take her food-storage course or shop at Arvoti, the skincare company she launched after creating a tallow balm for her father, who had eczema.

“Whether I’m sharing a day on the homestead or I’m talking on my podcast or making skincare, it’s all rooted in those same values of simplicity and quality and just living closer to nature,” the 29-year-old, who declined to provide a name beyond Gubba, told Fortune.

Her operation sits at the center of a growing creator economy around traditional living. As homesteading, cottagecore and tradwife content converge online, the overlap has made the category more marketable. Creators now offer branded lifestyles, selling courses and products to followers looking for different versions of a simpler life. In other words, the market for a less digital, more self-reliant life is increasingly being built through one of the most digital businesses of all: the creator economy.

Gubba estimated that Gubba Homestead and Arvoti now generate seven figures in annual revenue. She considers herself a tradwife but sees what she does as homesteading first. In her view, homesteading is about developing practical skills and becoming more self-reliant. Tradwife, by contrast, is more about relationships and household roles.

But the lines are blurring, as practices that once belonged to distinct online communities are increasingly grouped together, according to Sara Reinis, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication who studies tradwife culture. 

Cottagecore, an online aesthetic that romanticizes an idyllic rural life through pastoral fashion, baking, gardening and domestic crafts, is often folded into tradwife content even though it does not necessarily carry the same expectations around marriage or household roles, Reinis told Fortune. Similarly, homesteading and tradwife culture can overlap, but they are not interchangeable.

“There’s a lot of the homesteading world that is not tradwife,” she said. “There’s a lot of the tradwife world that’s not homesteading.”

Even some of the creators most associated with the tradwife aesthetic resist the label, such as Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm. Nara Smith, whose elaborate from-scratch cooking videos draw similar comparisons, has also rejected it, saying in a Call Her Daddy podcast, “I don’t think a trad wife would be cooking in Schiaparelli.”

For former tradwife Enitza Templeton, the important difference is not whether someone bakes bread or raises chickens. It is the household structure behind the image.

“You can’t be a tradwife on your own, but you can be a homesteader on your own,” she told Fortune.

Templeton grew up expecting marriage and motherhood to anchor her adult life. She said traditional gender roles were reinforced within her Puerto Rican family and the evangelical churches she attended.

After preparing to be someone’s wife her whole life, she intentionally sought a partner who wanted the same arrangement. She married at 26 and became a stay-at-home mother of four before divorcing in 2020.

Watching polished traditional-wife content now, Templeton recognizes pieces of the workload she once carried. What she questions is how much of it viewers are actually seeing.

“I could chop up my day and make it look that beautiful too,” Templeton said. “Anybody could, but that’s not the reality.”

Templeton’s view of tradwife life is considerably more critical than Gubba’s. But their interviews and Reinis’s research point to the same distinction: Learning to bake bread, preserve food or raise chickens is not necessarily the same thing as adopting a particular household structure.

That distinction matters commercially. The same visual shorthand—a sourdough loaf, an apron or a backyard flock—can attract viewers looking for very different things. Some may want a canning technique or gardening hobby. Others may be drawn to the promise of a more traditional household life. In either case, a creator has an audience for products, courses and content.

“The tradwife fantasy is also about the fantasy of being an influencer who can make money at home,” Reinis said to Fortune. 

A younger market for an older way of life

The market is not confined to social media feeds. Tractor Supply, the largest rural-lifestyle retailer in the United States, told Fortune that interest in categories associated with homesteading has outlasted the pandemic-era boom. Backyard poultry, gardening and homesteading surged as people spent more time at home during COVID. The company said those categories have continued to deliver steady growth.

“We are seeing a fascinating demographic shift,” Kimberley Gardiner, Tractor Supply’s senior VP and chief marketing officer, told Fortune.

Customers shopping those categories tend to skew younger than Tractor Supply’s average shopper, she said. Millennials who moved into the company’s markets during the pandemic have stayed, while the retailer has seen a noticeable uptick in Gen Z consumers who are “stepping back from purely digital lives to seek out tangible, hands-on experiences.”

Canning, the method of preserving food by packing it into airtight containers, has seen especially strong growth among younger customers, according to Tractor Supply, while the average age of a new poultry customer is now more than a full year younger than it was a few years ago.

The company said creators are increasingly introducing consumers to gardening, backyard poultry and other hands-on hobbies. During its Chick Days campaign, Tractor Supply partnered with three creators whose content reached approximately 150,000 potential new customers.

For Gubba, the desire for something tangible helps explain why traditional living has found a receptive audience online. She began sharing food-storage advice around 2020, when empty store shelves and supply disruptions had people thinking differently about where everyday necessities came from. Interest from followers led her to create a food-storage course.

“I actually don’t think people are just drawn to the idea of being a tradwife per se,” she said. “I think they’re more drawn to the more intentional way of living.”

But she said the biggest misconception is that homesteading is about posting photos of the perfect kitchen or apron on Instagram. Social media can make the aesthetic easier to adopt than the work behind it, she said.

Homesteading also means practical skills like fixing fences and caring for sick animals, as well as continuing to work when things go wrong and just becoming more capable.

“People can copy an aesthetic,” Gubba said, “But it’s much harder to copy that way of life.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com