When I first wrote about YouTube megastar JoJo Siwa, she was 16 and had just bought a house in Los Angeles, complete with a rainbow-colored bed and a duvet cover with her face on it.
Her technicolor world looks very different now. So do the questions.
When Siwa joins our Zoom call, I hardly recognize her. Gone are the bright rainbow clothes and the side ponytail anchored by the trademark bow that defined her. They’re replaced by a more understated denim V-neck top and a slicked-back hairstyle.
Still, one thing remains: her bow. Granted, her sartorial signature is now in a muted palette, but it’s still there, decorating her long blonde hair. Siwa still has that million-dollar smile that made over 12 million people subscribe to her YouTube channel, and the ease that comes with someone who has years of navigating life as an internet superstar under her belt.
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After all, the 22-year-old has already lived many lives. At 9 years old, she competed on season two of “Abby’s Ultimate Dance Competition,” placing 5th for showcasing her high-energy dance techniques.
After becoming a staple on Lifetime’s reality show “Dance Moms,” she signed an exclusive licensing deal with Nickelodeon at 13 that helped turn her personality into a global brand.
She appeared on TV shows and in movies, performed live music, and had her namesake and face on bows sold worldwide. Her only concert tour, which ran from 2019 to 2022, brought in over $26.9 million in ticket sales alone in its first year, according to Billboard.
Each milestone expanded her reach, but not necessarily her control. “I basically had control over 0% of my IP back when I was with Nickelodeon,” Siwa told Business Insider.
Though her image powered a business that would sell over 80 million of those bows — whose sales have generated over $400 million, according to Forbes’ conservative estimate — she wasn’t calling the shots. A decade later, after years of waiting out contracts, Siwa is reclaiming the business she helped build by launching her own bow line.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve personally made a JoJo Bow myself. It’s been about 12 years,” she said, referencing the company she started with her mom, JoJo Bows. Now, she said, “Every single bow, I’m hands-on, designing, picking the color, every single thing is my choice.”
Ownership became the point.
“The biggest lesson that I learned is when it’s your brand, when it’s your IP, stick to what you believe,” she said. “Don’t let people sway you. Don’t let people change you.”
Making a million-dollar empire
Siwa didn’t chase fame necessarily. As a child, it felt like an extracurricular activity.
“My mom used to be like, ‘Honey, let’s go hang out with your friends that are your age,’” she said. “And I’d be like, ‘No, I want to film a YouTube video.’”
Siwa’s first video, posted almost exactly 11 years ago, was a simple Q&A in which she answered questions from “Dance Mons” fans who became invested in her. (It has since amassed over 1.2 million views.)
Other early videos included YouTube staples at the time: unboxing fan gifts, room tours, a “baby food challenge,” and vlogs. Then, in 2016, she released her debut single, “Boomerang,” which has since amassed over a billion views on YouTube.
Nickelodeon was paying attention and signed Siwa to a multi-year talent and licensing deal in 2017, catapulting her from reality-show fame to the mainstream limelight at just 13 years old. Through her deal with Nickelodeon, Siwa not only co-hosted “Lip Sync Battle Shorties” alongside Nick Cannon but also leveraged the company’s global licensing apparatus, scaling her company, JoJo Bows, into a multimillion-dollar merchandising operation.
Within a few years, Siwa was at the center of a full-scale empire: She became one of the network’s flagship stars, launched merchandise lines with major retailers like Claire’s and JCPenney, toured arenas, and built a fan base of over 12 million YouTube subscribers.
And many of them weren’t just buying into Siwa — they were buying bows.
Cate Hellman for BI
She’d always been a little bit of a contradiction, though. She grew up quickly in the limelight yet struggled to shake off the child-star label.
“I remember being 20, and people were like, ‘She’s the little girl from “Dance Moms,”‘ Siwa recalled. “It was never like, ‘She’s a 20-year-old who built this incredible empire.’”
Back then, success for Siwa meant scale: follower counts, view counts, sold-out arenas. Now, “if I get through a day without crying, that’s success,” she said. Her goal for 2026 is to simply cry less. So far this year, she estimates she’s cried three times — “exceptional work on my behalf,” she quipped.
Backing herself
The JoJo Siwa brand was now instantly recognizable. And the child star, still not 18, understood that her image was inseparable from her success. She felt compelled to protect it.
Siwa eventually pushed for more creative control, a tug-of-war that eventually spilled out into the public when she criticized Nickelodeon in 2021, writing on Twitter (now X): “Working for a company as a real human being treated as only a brand is fun until it’s not.” The post appears to have been deleted since then.
For Siwa, though, the fight over control started long before that tweet.
A couple of years earlier, when she was 15, Siwa said Nickelodeon tried to produce a JoJo doll sporting two buns without running it past her. The collectible dolls, part of her licensing deal, were originally conceptualized to bring Siwa to life — colorful, with a side ponytail, and, yes, that bow.
“I freaked out,” Siwa said. “As a kid, the side ponytail and bow was who I was. That was my complete identity. And so for them to just change it felt like they were trying to change me.”
Siwa said she texted the president of consumer products the moment she saw it. “I said, ‘No. 1, I hate it, but No. 2, I’m really hurt that people would do this without talking to me,’” she recalled. “‘I’m really hurt that no one would consider talking to JoJo about JoJo.’”
“The best thing I ever did was put my foot down when I needed to and say, ‘This isn’t happening.’”
Business Insider reached out to Pam Kaufman, Nickelodeon’s president of consumer products at that time, but did not receive a response.
A similar conflict played out, she said, when she starred in the Nickelodeon-produced musical drama film “The J Team” in 2021, directed by Michael Lembeck. In it, she plays a young dancer — a fictionalized version of herself — whose world is upended when her longtime coach retires. Siwa said she clashed with Lembeck because he wanted her to dress and style her hair differently from her signature.
“He said, ‘Well, this is my movie,’” Siwa said. “I remember saying to him, ‘Well, you can call Nickelodeon and tell him you’re going to have to do ‘The J Team’ without the ‘J.””
It worked. Siwa kept her signature look in the film.
Lembeck’s representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
“The best thing I ever did was put my foot down when I needed to and say, ‘This isn’t happening,’” Siwa said.
Even though Siwa was dealing with much behind the scenes, her public criticism of the company occurred the same year that she came out as queer at 17 in a series of Instagram and TikTok posts.
Although the initial public response was largely positive, she said there wasn’t the same level of support behind the scenes.
In the 2024 documentary “Child Star,” Siwa recalled how the president of Nickelodeon asked her: “What are we going to tell the kids?” She said he then had her call every retailer selling her merchandise, from Claire’s to Walmart, to assure them she wasn’t “going crazy.”
Siwa did as she was told, but her relationship with Nickelodeon was never the same, she said. In the documentary, she said she “basically got blackballed” by the company.
A spokesperson for Nickelodeon told The Hollywood Reporter that they were “unaware” of the incident she referenced and that she “was certainly not blackballed by Nickelodeon.”
Representatives for Nickelodeon declined to comment.
Reclaiming what was hers
JoJo’s signature bows didn’t start with Nickelodeon, though. They date back to when she and her mom, Jessalynn Siwa, started selling them to local hair salons when Siwa was around 4 years old. They were her signature throughout her run on “Dance Moms,” before she and her mom left the show in 2016.
At its peak, JoJo’s bows, backed by the Nick licensing deal, expanded into major retailers such as Amazon, Walmart, and Target, sold around 35 million units, and generated millions in revenue. Some schools in the UK even banned them because kids couldn’t handle the excitement over who nabbed the latest designs.
Eventually, though, they also stopped feeling like hers.
“It really got out of my control,” Siwa said. “It kind of just became like, ‘Oh, JoJo, here’s your bow.’ And it’s like, wait, but I didn’t really have anything to do with this bow.”
Cate Hellman for BI
Siwa said she understood why Nickelodeon stepped in to scale the bow business. As a teenager, she thought it made sense for professionals with more experience to take the reins of a company that grew so quickly.
Still, there were times when decisions were being made without her that felt uncomfortable.
“The company president changed, and then the rest of the team changed, and that’s when it started to kind of change,” she said. “I was a bit like, ‘Hey, can I get the rights to that back? I don’t really like where this is headed right now.’”
Siwa waited years until her contract expired to regain the rights to how portions of her brand and content could be used. After starting 2026 by changing her social media moniker to Joelle Siwa and teasing plans for the year, fans now know what Siwa is up to.
She announced a partnership with Royal Caribbean’s Utopia of the Seas, inviting fans to have the “ultimate JoJo Siwa fan adventure” in the Caribbean, and now she’s also launched two new bow collections.
One is for kids with designs inspired by candy and songs, and the other, Joelle bows, feature more grown-up styles. Siwa’s latest collections revisit her signature accessory with a new level of oversight. This time, she’s picking the color and detail of every single design, including a special line of 23 bows for her 23rd birthday coming up in May.
Learning to have fun
When it comes to doing business, Siwa told me she still has just one non-negotiable: Anyone who works with her must also work with her mom.
“She is Superwoman — a partner in crime, and we make every choice together,” Siwa said. “If it’s a bad one, we’re in it together. And if it’s a good one, we celebrate together.”
“Dance Mom” fans are already familiar with Jessalynn Siwa, who appeared on the series regularly alongside Siwa, often butting heads with instructors and other parents while advocating for her daughter.
The 51-year-old mother of two ran a dance studio in Omaha, Nebraska, that closed in 2016 after two decades. She then dedicated most of her time to managing Siwa’s career.
“My job is to tell her the truth,” Jessalynn said. “We’re like a two-person team: A pitcher and a catcher.”
Cate Hellman for BI
Who’s who depends on the day, but Jessalynn said they “only throw strikes.”
Of course, like any mother and daughter, they butt heads. “We have the ‘I’m her mom’ relationship, and then we have the working relationship,” Jessalynn said, explaining their dynamic. “As a working relationship, we go around and round — in a good way.”
For Jessalynn, seeing Siwa take control of her bow company feels both meaningful and “surreal.” After all, it was Siwa’s mother who first started putting the accessory in the star’s hair.
“Every mom, when they have a baby girl, they put a bow on their head,” she said. “To have her be the queen of the bows … and have people loving them because they love your daughter and they want to be like her, it’s so crazy. It’s unreal.”
At 22, Siwa wants to tell herself to slow down and enjoy the ride a bit more. Her message to rising stars is more pointed: Think carefully about whether fame is a life you truly want, not just a moment you’re chasing.
“I remember, at 18, feeling like I didn’t have a choice — people were always going to know who I am,” she said. “It worked out great for me … it has given me literally everything, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
