February 15, 2016, is the day I posted my first Youtube video. The title is, “EASY GRUNGE & ALTERNATIVE INSPIRED HAIRSTYLES + SPACE BUNS”. I’m smiling now thinking of how nervous and excited I was to post that very first video. I had help from a friend and we shot the video in her basement with a bed sheet as the backdrop, a set of cheap box lights from eBay, and her camera. At the time I was religiously watching YouTube vloggers every single day after school and always thought to myself “I can do what they’re doing, why am I not doing what they’re doing?!” The biggest thing holding me back from posting on YouTube at that time was being scared & my parents… HAHA!
In February 2016, I was 16 turning 17 the next month, but still, I was a baby in my parents’ eyes, and truly a baby in my own eyes… (I still think it’s absolutely CRAZY how fast kids grow up these days, but back when I was growing up, we had an ugly stage… and it was reaaaalll ugly. . Now, it’s cool to be young and create content on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Twitter. It’s normal to pursue a career on social media in 2022, but it was a whole different story half a decade earlier.
Long story short, I ended up posting YouTube videos consistently and started a series called ‘Fakeup’. I would order fake products on Aliexpress and test them against the real thing. The series went viral and that was the start of my social media career at 17! I then branched out into reviews, and of course, I had a series title for that as well, which was called “Brutally Honest Reviews”. I was posting content regularly for 4 years and accumulated over 44 million views to my channel which was a huge accomplishment. I had moved to California after graduating high school to go to college at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising and got an A.A. in Beauty Industry Merchandising & Marketing and then a B.S. in Business Management. 3 years into college I was still full speed ahead with YouTube and realized that I was completely burnt out. So I quit YouTube and enjoyed my last year of college as a ‘normal kid’. And to be completely honest, that year was incredible and exactly what I needed at the time.
During that last year of college, the global pandemic broke out, and because I was finishing school at home I was BORED and had a ton of free time. I decided to DM an up-and-coming brand I was interested in called Glamnetic and asked to whom I could send my resume because I wanted to be an intern. I’ve always been very straightforward like that… Like I literally cold DM’d the brand asking for exactly what I wanted, and guess what! I started 2 weeks later! At first, I was a video editor for advertisements, and then I went full time after 3 months and was the Paid Ads Coordinator doing pretty much the same thing, then I applied for a promotion to be the Creative Content Coordinator and got the position after presenting a huge deck of creative ideas to the CEO/Founder and the rest of my team. I realized after working for Glamnetic (1+ years now!) that I was born to create content whether it's for myself or for a brand, it’s just what I’m good at and I love it. I took the leap to leave my 9-5 and start my own social media management company, and that’s my story so far. I still have so much life to live and so much creativity to put out into the world and I can’t wait to continue putting myself out there and be 100% unapologetically myself wherever life takes me!
xoxo, Jordan
