The Rise of Tammy Hembrow

be our most highly requested deep dive. Every time we put up a question box asking who you want us to discuss, Tammy Hembro is number one. There's a definite fascination with her and I can see why because she has lived her life so publicly for so long now, but she's always kept it interesting for us. She's always kept her followers on their toes, particularly when it comes to her relationships. Oh she has now I want to

go back to the beginning. So. Tammy was born on the twenty second of April nineteen ninety four to her parents, Natalie Stanley and Mark Hembro. So it's pretty crazy because her parents actually met in Trinidad Tobago back in nineteen eighty nine when her dad was acting in a TV show called The Last Island. So Natalie was born in Trinidad and ended up moving back to Australia with Mark. So Tammy was the youngest of her parents' three daughters. She grew up with her sisters Amy and Emily, who

are four and two years old at rest, respectively. Tammy has described her childhood as being simple but fun. Her family moved around a bit but she spent most of her younger years in the Curumbin Valley, which is a really beautiful part of the Gold Coast which actually borders with New South Wales and it used to be part of the Southeast Queensland Rainforest. And am I surprise people to hear? But the town that Tammy grew up in had just eighty people, while only a handful of kids

went to her primary school. And Tammy said that she was naturally a very shy kid who was a barefoot flower child. It did surprise me that she grew up in such a small town. She doesn't really give off small town vibes, does show now while she was a shy kid, she grew up wanting to follow in her dad's footsteps and become an actor. So in Tammy's book Step Up, she described her dad as being somewhat famous in Australia. So I had to do a stalk of

Mark Hembrose Wikipedia. And he was a guest actor in a lot of eighties and nineties TV shows that I'm not familiar with, as well as acting in a lot of theater productions. The one TV role I got excited about was he was a guest singer on Mister Squiggle. He also played Georgie Saint on fifty five episodes of The Young Doctors in the late seventies. He was interviewed on Matt Zakowski's podcast Hastened to That one. He you could tell he loved talking about his acting days. Can

you say about himself? That made me that too. He was very sweet. He seemed very eccentric. That's the vibe that I got.

After seeing the lifestyle that Tammy is living now, I can't picture her living on a farm, but it is quite nice to know these details about her childhood now. Tammy's mum, Natalie, went on to marry a successful businesess man and had four more children, ava Scarlet, Honre and Maximus, and a lot of people have compared Natalie to Chris Jennet.

That is because there has always been this comparison that the Hembros are Australia's answer to the Kardashian family because there's so many sisters, so many siblings, and also because Tammy's mom looks a bit like Chris Jenny. I mean, there is an uncanny resemblance there. She has got the dark hair, she definitely looks a lot like her. I think the comparison between the Hembros and the Kardashians is often made also because there was a crossover there, and

we will go into that later in this series. Now, when Tammy was twelve, she decided to move to Singapore to be with her mum and her stepdad and her sisters Amy and Emily had already made the move to the island country, but Tammy saw out her primary schooling in Queensland. So Tammy's life in Singapore was the complete

opposite of what she'd been living in rural Queensland. Her stepdad was, as you said, Sophi, an extremely successful businessman and they were living an absolute life of luxury, and Tammy said it was unlike anything she had seen up close before and had only seen in the movies. Why am I getting crazy rich agents in my head? I love that movie. We have been visiting Singapore since our early teenage years, and it is such an incredible place. Like you say that as if we're there all the time.

I think I've been there like five times. Five times is quite a lot. I love in Singapore how you can only drive a new car, so there's only new cars on the road. You can't have an old bomb. A lot of people are walking around in designer gear. It's got a very rich vibe to it. In Tammy's books, she wrote a lot about what a pivotal part her stepdad's library played in this change. She said that reading books about successful business people in the library made her

want to become one herself. I love the fact that they were living in such an opulent house that they had their own library. I think that really bates a picture of our successful He was in business. Yeah, And it was clear that Tammy was really motivated by this success that she saw with her stepdad and wanted to follow in his entrepreneurial footsteps. Knowing that she wanted to make it big for a long time, Tammy didn't know

what she actually wanted to do. And Tammy said she began spiraling after leaving high school and started partying and smoking weed and she had no motivation and felt lost and depressed. And that was until she discovered meditation, which she said changed her. So from meditation, she turned to yoga and became an instructor and she then found her

passion for fitness and exercise in the gym. Yeah, and when she moved back to Australia, she ended up enrolling in a business degree at Bond University and chose to study business for two reasons. The first was she wanted to follow in a step dad's footsteps, and the second was because she didn't want to work at nine to five, which a lot of us can relate to. While Tammy was starting at university, this is when she started to

share fitness content on her Instagram. And this was at a time when Instagram was really at its infancy stage. No one was sharing content like this, and it didn't take Tammy long to hit fifteen thousand followers on the platform, which was a pretty substantial following back then because Instagram, as you said, it wasn't very popular. We didn't have heaps of influencers on it like we do now, And

in the meantime, Tammy wasn't enjoying UNI. The only class that really made sense to her was one about entrepreneurship, and it was in that class that she decided she wanted to be her own boss, and she figured she may as well make the most of the following she had and launched a business. So at nineteen, with one month of her studies to go, Tammy dropped out of UNI to become an entrepreneur. I don't get this. Why would you not just stick it out for one more month? No,

just to get the piece of paper. Yeah, because it gives you so much credibility and something to fall back on if things didn't go to plan. I remember hearing that Sarah's day had I think one semester left or half a year left of her teaching degree, and it always surprised me that she didn't just complete it. Mmmm. I know, I really don't get it either.

is what Tammy said about her timeline with Reese. How long have me and Race been together?

to a friend's party. He was actually like really good friends with the guy who was having the party, so he was there as well, which was just such a coincidence, and we just talked on night. We hung out together that whole night time at the party. We fell in love from there. We were just inseparable. He was obsessed with me, like he was not gonna lie, pretty obsessed with me. But I was obsessed with him too.

very excited now. When it came to choosing the now infamous name, Tammy said.

feel like it was him. Just wanted to share because I keep seeing Wolf everywhere. It's rumored that Kylie changed the name because of Tammy. We will go into Tammy's connection to the Kardashians a little bit later, but from

a top level. Kylie and Tammy became friends after she modeled for Chloe's brand Good American, and Tammy was infamously stretched out of Kylie's twenty first birthday party and was also linked to Kylie's ex Tiger, So it is likely that Kylie was well aware of Tammy's son's name, and just hours after Kylie went public with her son's name, Tammy shared a photo of her and her son Wolf

with the caption Wolfe's mum. At the time, Tammy was also pregnant with her third child, Posey, and she had a lot of people trying to guess her unborn child's name. Tammy responded to one of the name guesses on TikTok with the comment, actually like the name Stormy. At the moment. Stormy Now is, of course the name of Kylie's first child. I absolutely love the pettiness of influencer and celebrity baby names because it's the biggest fuck you if you copy

someone's name. But in the real world it would be taken as quite a compliment if you like someone's name.

And Tammy said that the job sucked and she would cry after shifts because people would hang up on her. Can you imagine if you were someone that got a call from Tammy herbroke Why do I feel like she wouldn't be that good on the phone. I feel like she would grumble in that situation. I think anyone would.

It doesn't sound like a fun job. No, Well, she ended up leaving that job to work in a clothing store, but she said that she was barely making ends meet and the highlight of her day was posting about the gym, so she went five times a week even while she was pregnant. And while most people love that she was young, pregnant, and positive, Tammy also copped criticism online for working out while she was pregnant. She was even told that her body wouldn't be the same after she had a baby,

so she couldn't be a fitness guru. I'm really feeling for nineteen year old Tammy here. It seems like she is facing some very unfair judgment and criticism now. In her book, Tammy said that when people tell her she can't do something, it gives her more motivation. So it seemed like this really made her more determined to prove the naysayers wrong, and she forged ahead with the idea

of her own business. And ironically, Tammy's following skyrocketed when she started sharing about her pregnancy and motherhood alongside fitness Now. The goal was to save enough money to launch her business idea, a fitness ebook called Tammy Fit, and she was motivated to launch an e book because her gym post got so many likes that she figured a workout

guide was the perfect business idea. The initial outlay was four hundred dollars for someone to illustrate the exercises in the PDF, so once she saved the money, she quit her job in retail and focused on tammy Fit full time. Now. The launch of tammy Fit coincided with another massive milestone for Tammy, the birth of her first child, so Wolfe

was born via an emergency C section. Tammy did plan on having a vaginal birth without medical intervention, but said it didn't take long for her to be rolling on the floor in pain, begging for an epidural, but instead the best of us, doesn't it now. Unfortunately, a Wolf's heartbeat was elevated and he was in distress, so they

opted for the emergency C section. I feel like Tammy was really clever and strategic about the release date because almost immediately after the birth of wolf that's when she launched her fitness ebook, and that is when so many eyeballs would have been on her page because so many people were so interested in this young mum who was having her first child at nineteen. I mean, yes, it was a strategic move in the sense that people would buy it, but it was really difficult for her personally

because it was such a double whammy for her. She was dealing with being a first time mum and also a first time business owner, so in between looking after her newborn son, Wolf, Tammy sent out the PDFs herself. She also started earning money from Instagram promotions, and she saved all the money she earned from the PDFs and her Instagram promos and put it all back into her her business. So she decided to take her PDF guides

to the next level and launched an app. At the time, no one else was doing fitness apps, and Tammy did what her stepdad taught her capitalize, reinvest, and grow, so all the money she earned was invested straight back into the Tammy Fit app. We now know that app has been downloaded over one point seven million times. It's pretty remarkable and I don't think enough people give Tammy Hembro credit over her business brain and just how she was able to grow something from nothing.

million dollar business to look after. Whilst this would be challenging, I think it also worked really well for her Instagram because people were excited that there was another pregnancy that they could follow along with. I mean, it's a bit confusing whether this pregnancy was planned or not, because in Tammy's book she acted as if falling pregnant a second time wasn't planned. But in a Q and A back in twenty sixteen, she said this and.

to have another C section. Saskia was born at thirty seven weeks and five days, and the post birth recovery was really tough on Tammy. Her scarcely open and she had to have it dressed and packed every day for a month. Looking back at an old blog from this time, I was really shocked to discover the whole Saskia was a month old, her dad, Reese Hawkins, went on a boy's trip to Bali. Keep in mind Tammy was still having to get her scar dressed daily, and at this

point she also had a toddler to look after. So Red Flagg got a good move, and knowing what I know now, it is clear that things were becoming rocky between the pair. As a viewer, it appeared like Tammy was doing everything while he was doing the absolute bare minimum. Yeah, in one blog I saw he was complaining about how tired he was, Yet Tammy had been the one getting up and doing all of the feeding with a newborn

without any help. In Tammy's book, she opened up about this and wrote, my partner was busy when the babies were born, so it was all down to me. I was determined to do it all by myself, which again highlights to me how remarkable this woman is. She's nineteen and twenty one and she's running a business whilst looking after two very young kids. Rather than slowing down, Tammy

did the complete opposite. So, with two children under two and a million dollar business to run, Tammy decided to launch an active wear brand, Saskia Collection, named after her newborn daughter. A lot of people thought she was taking on too much, but for Tammy, it was a move that felt right. She's very smart. She knew that she had to strike while the iron's hot. She has a

newborn daughter, there's a lot of interest around her. Let's launch an active wear brand named after the daughter, who has a unique name.

want to make my own clothing line. That's interesting because Kayla, it'ds seen, has had a similar philosophy where she didn't want to have so many sponsored posts on her Instagram. She wanted to have her own app and her own brand so that she didn't have to rely on it. And Kayla has been someone even though she doesn't have her own active wear brand, who has just worn whatever

whatever she likes, not because she's getting paid to do so. Hmmm. Well, with Tammy, it got to the point where she couldn't physically do it all anymore with her two businesses, and finally she asked for some help and that came in the form of her older sister Amy working with her at sask A Collection. And at the time, sadly, Tammy felt like she couldn't trust outsiders because she had people

trying to leach off her. There'd be so many people trying to grow a following off the back of her and potentially also people spreading rumors about her and her relationship if they got into deep Yeah, exactly, and with Amy being her sister, she felt like she could trust her,

plus she actually had her own business experience. Unfortunately, though, it didn't take long for things to deteriorate between the sisters, so Tammy and Amy began having constant arguments about the direction of the business, and Tammy felt like Amy wouldn't listen to her or respect that she was the boss. Oh, we've all been there before, haven't we running businesses with sisters. It's a very interesting dynamic because I feel like everyone wants to be the boss, and it would be difficult

having your younger sister telling you what to do. It's particularly difficult when you're all the same age and you'll want to be the boss's well or. Tammy actually ended up firing Amy from her role as general manager of Saskia Collection. It's just something that we would do, and Tammy says their relationship improved as soon as they stopped working together. Is that a bit of a sign? Okay, no,

we will still be working together. Funnily enough, Amy is now the general manager of Tammy fit and Tammy says Amy was instrumental in her business's success, so maybe it was just the wrong business model. Yeah, And in an interview she said she wouldn't have been able to do it without Amy. Lovely Now. In her book, Tammy revealed that relationships are the most important thing to her, but it also her Achilles heel, which I think we can

all probably agree upon. She said she was struggling to juggle her business and personal life and then everything came tumbling down. After four years, two children, and a pear shaped engagement ring, Tammy broke up with Reese Hawkins in June twenty eighteen, and in her book, Tammy explained it got to the point where every time she spoke to Reese things fell further apart.

the other person's fault either. It's the relationship. The relationship failed, not you, not one, not the other, but your combination.

Saskia's dad. And in recent years she's tried to be really respectful of Reese and the role that he plays in his kids lives because she's really aware that anything she says about him in the media, her kids can go and read. Yeah. She has put a lot of effort into her co parenting relationship with Reese Hawkins. Now. Tammy revealed that breaking up with Reese was the hardest thing she's ever gone through as a child of divorce parents.

She hated the idea of becoming a single mum, and she had been so determined to make things work, but in the end, she said that they were young, and people change.

then that illusion seemed to be shattered when they broke up. Yeah, and this is the point where everyone became utterly obsessed with Tammy Hembro's love life because we met her as a young pregnant woman who had a partner, this doting partner he was painted online to be, and suddenly there

were cracks in this perfect image. Yeah, and whilst we have touched on the fact that Tammy has been very respectful and a great co parent in the years to come, when things were fresh after this breakup, there was a lot of animosity between the pair and there was a bit of slinging publicly online, which we will get into in next week's episode, because that is where we are going to.

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