“Be a lawyer, physician, or failure.” These had been the three decisions Cassey Ho’s father gave to his then-18-year-old daughter after she expressed her intent to pursue a profession in style design.
“After I advised him I needed to be a designer, he was like, ‘Completely not,’ and just about crushed my goals,” the Blogilates founder and Popflex CEO advised Fortune in a current interview.
Ho says her father and mom—an engineer and cake decorator, respectively—immigrated from Vietnam to the United Acknowledged within the mid 1970’s and labored tirelessly to create stability for his or her two daughters.
“Being raised by Asian immigrant mother and father actually instilled this sense of working actually arduous, tirelessly, and type of simply being actually resilient it doesn’t matter what occurs to you,” Ho stated.
Cash was tight, so Ho and her sister had been raised to be very aware about cash and spending.
“I keep in mind that going to McDonald’s was a luxurious,” Ho stated. “I used to be solely procuring on clearance; we by no means purchased something full-price.”
As a young person, Ho begrudgingly accepted her father’s profession recommendation, heading off to Whittier Faculty in Southern California on a full-ride scholarship to pursue a biology main in preparation for medical faculty. However midway via her rigorous research, Ho knew her medical profession could be short-lived. The “studious and obedient daughter” needed to insurgent.
“I’m somebody who actually lives by following my coronary heart, and my coronary heart simply began feeling so hole,” she stated.
Her outlet to deal with stress from faculty got here within the type of instructing “POP Pilates” courses at her native 24 Hour Health—a ardour she found in highschool, and an after-school exercise her mother and father didn’t approve of.
“I began instructing after courses and so they had been like, ‘you should cease that, that could be a waste of time, you should spend extra time learning for physics,” she recalled.
However that part-time gig she discovered on Craigslist served because the springboard for her multi-million greenback success, and constructed the muse for her viral YouTube following.
How Blogilates began
When Ho uploaded her first video to YouTube in 2009 at simply 22 years previous, she by no means anticipated the 10-minute exercise to succeed in greater than the 40 college students from her native POP Pilates class, not to mention hundreds of customers.
“I received hundreds of views and a whole lot of feedback from folks from all around the world asking for extra,” she stated.
However there was no grasp plan. Ho stated her uploads had been merely a solution to keep linked together with her college students after she moved cross-country to the East Coast for a style merchandising job. However as her neighborhood grew, followers began requesting branded merchandise.
“I purchased some clean shirts from Ceaselessly 21, screen-printed them regionally, and put them up on Fb, and so they bought out inside minutes,” she stated. “It was in that second once I realized, oh, okay, Blogilates is just not a display title, it’s a model.”
Fourteen years after that fateful YouTube add, Blogilates has reached 10.1 million followers as an eight-figure enterprise, however the model has remained solely bootstrapped by Ho: “All my very own cash, no buyers.”
Blogilates launched in Goal in December 2020. However for Ho, it wasn’t nearly serving to her merchandise attain new audiences, it was about offering illustration, even when she was “actually scared” to take action.
“The reality is, I didn’t need my picture plastered all around the packaging as a result of I used to be afraid my Vietnamese-Chinese language face and pores and skin colour would flip off prospects who weren’t used to seeing somebody who regarded like me of their shops,” she wrote in a 2020 weblog publish. “I assumed it will damage gross sales.”
Now, her clothes and persona could be present in Goal shops all throughout the U.S.
“I don’t need different little Asian American women strolling into the health part on the mall and never seeing anybody who seems to be like them,” Ho wrote.” This Goal drop is not only about product. It’s about illustration.”
Taking up the style empire
Earlier than beginning Blogilates, Ho ran right into a bump whereas instructing POP Pilates: She didn’t have something that was cute and practical to carry all of her stuff on the best way to class. And every part she noticed whereas procuring didn’t fairly serve her wants: “Heavy luggage, ugly colours, simply not my fashion.”
She took issues into her personal arms, venturing into L.A.’s style district for some vegan leather-based and gold chains, earlier than stitching collectively her first bag. Ho’s college students fell in love with the design, and needed to know the place they might purchase one, too.
Years later, her childhood goals of changing into a clothier grew to become a actuality.
Launched in 2016, her athletic-wear model Popflex is an eight-figure enterprise and can be present in Goal shops. Plus, the model has a really well-known fan. Throughout promotion for her “The Tortured Poets Division” album launch, Taylor Swift shared a YouTube Brief by which she was sporting Popflex’s patented lavender pirouette skort. Inside minutes, the lavender skort bought out. Then the pirouette skort bought out in each single colour.
“When [Taylor Swift] is sporting one thing, even when she’s sporting one thing for 0.3 seconds, folks need that as a result of they need to be a part of her journey and her life, too,” Ho stated.
It was one of the best gross sales day of this yr and the corporate’s second-highest gross sales date ever.
Between sell-out designs, her weblog, and working two eight-figure companies, Ho nonetheless takes time to mirror on her journey and what introduced her success immediately.
“My secret to success is really following my coronary heart. I do know that sounds so cliche, however I don’t assume it has ever led me within the improper path.”
