“She’s a princess. She looks like a princess, she talks like a princess, she walks like a princess, everything about her is like a princess. That’s what I love about her,” Jett Puckett tells me at the Miami F1 Grand Prix when I ask how he knew his influencer wife, Campbell Puckett — whom he affectionately calls “Pookie,” much to the delight of their 1.5 million TikTok and Instagram followers — was the one.
We’re at the Hard Rock Beach Club in 90-degree heat, trying to talk over roaring car engines and ear-splitting house music. The couple known for their outfit-of-the-day videos are dressed true to form: He’s wearing a Balmain jacquard collared shirt, Vuori chinos, an Hermès belt, a Porsche hat, and a massive class ring. She’s in Citizens of Humanity jean shorts and a Miaou latex top that she’s covered in body oil to maximize shine. The three of us are sweating profusely. Jett stops mid-sentence, waiting patiently as the cars zoom past us going roughly 200 miles per hour, then continues to rave about the love of his life. Just another day as a professional wife guy.
Last winter, Pookie had built up a modest TikTok following with shopping hauls and nail vlogs when she started bringing Jett into her videos more consistently. The Atlanta-based couple posted their looks before football games (he’s a die-hard Georgia Bulldogs fan), date nights at Polo Bar in New York City, and romantic outings in Paris. The internet wasn’t quite sure if their relationship was real or satirical. Pookie is sweet, soft-spoken, and always dressed to the nines; Jett speaks in a southern-accented monotone and is completely in awe of his wife. There is nothing revolutionary about the couple’s looks or the way in which they post them — they follow the same formula as thousands of other fashion influencers on the internet — but together, they are algorithm gold.
Even my mom, who’s never scrolled through TikTok a day in her life, was excited to hear I was meeting the man who coined the phrase “Pookie is looking absolutely fire tonight.” Their corny yet endearing videos have been quoted by celebrities including Meghan Trainor, Jimmy Fallon, and Sylvester Stallone. On the SAG Awards red carpet earlier this year, Reese Witherspoon described her Elie Saab Couture dress as “giving Pookie looks fire.”
Our F1 meetup comes at the tail end of an incredibly busy month for the internet’s favorite couple. Before flying to Miami for a brand trip with luxury fragrance and body-care line Ellis Brooklyn to celebrate the launch of Miami Nectar, Pookie and Jett were in California for both Stagecoach and Coachella, Austin for the CMT Awards, and New York City for a Rare Beauty event, where Jett told Selena Gomez that she looked “absolutely fire.”
“A couple of weeks ago, we woke up and we were like, ‘Holy shit, we’ve been in five different cities in five days,’” Jett tells me. “I don’t even know what we’re doing anymore. I just show up. We have this whole team of people who are constantly emailing and texting us. I can’t keep up.”
@campbellhuntpuckett Ready for stagecoach🤠🍒 @Poppi #sodasback #poppipartner #stagecoach
♬ original sound - Campbell Puckett
The two have an unsurprisingly romantic origin story. “I walked up to the prettiest girl in the bar and introduced myself. I bought the ring six months later,” Jett says. “It really was love at first sight. We both knew that right away.” They were living in Philadelphia at the time, where Pookie was a flight attendant and Jett was pursuing a joint M.B.A. from the Wharton School and J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Pookie always dreamed of being an influencer and has been posting consistently on Instagram since 2017.
When COVID hit, she had more free time to hone her skills. One of the couple’s longtime influencer friends knew Pookie had what it takes. “Our friend said, ‘That girl should be a star,’” Jett says. “So she shows up to our house one night and we end up talking to her until 2 a.m. She convinced me that night to let Campbell quit her job and become an influencer.” And instantly, he says, she was making way more money than she was before. “Eventually, a few years later, it totally exploded.”
When it finally happened, Pookie and Jett knew they needed to act fast. “By early January, every agency in the country, every manager in the country, and all the lawyers in Beverly Hills were all calling us, circling us like vultures,” Jett says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re building a social-media company or a fucking spaceship, your team is everything. That’s something I’ve learned from my business,” adds Jett, who’s a partner at a mergers and acquisitions company and used to be an investment banker. They set up meetings with agents, managers, and lawyers. “It was two weeks straight of interviews until I could figure out who the right team was for us, building it brick by brick.”
Jett is direct, articulate, and quick to answer all of my questions about the business side. When the conversation shifts to their long-term goals and the reason for their success, Pookie jumps in. “If there’s one thing I can say, it’s that being yourself is truly the biggest asset,” she says. “If you’re true to yourself, you’re always going to come out on top.”
Before she can finish her thought, a woman who works celebrity partnerships at F1 comes up to introduce herself. She thanks Pookie and Jett for attending and tells them that she, too, is from Atlanta and also loves Hal’s Steakhouse, a local restaurant that Pookie and Jett often post about. She introduces them to someone else from the team who’s eager to tell Jett that one of her colleagues is his much-younger fraternity brother. “Cool, that’s awesome,” he responds politely, though he doesn’t seem to recognize the name.
They wave good-bye as Pookie and Jett turn their attention back to our conversation. Amid the commotion of F1 partygoers, the pounding music, and noise of the cars, Jett steers his much more introverted wife back on track: “That was good, babe. Finish that sentence.”
She smiles. “Yeah, I mean, we’re being vulnerable. We’re putting ourselves out there and that can be really scary. We never imagined that all of this would come out of us being our true, authentic selves. If you radiate positivity and put that out into the world, you’ll receive it back.”
Part of Pookie and Jett’s plan for the future is to expand into doing more vlog-style videos that showcase their lifestyle and personality. “People are attracted to our authentic love,” Jett says. “We don’t act. I’m obsessed with my wife and I’ve been calling her Pookie for years.” They believe this is the main reason for their success (of course, the outfits that cost a few months’ worth of rent, romantic gestures that involve flowers and breakfast in bed, and extravagant date nights that single men these days don’t have the brain capacity nor desire to plan probably don’t hurt either). As Jett says, “None of this happens by accident.”