Safiya Nygaard is a very successful American Youtuber from Chicago, Illinois. She attended Standford University, studying English and Drama. She quickly noticed her love for production and began working for BuzzFeed in 2015. She started her career at BuzzFeed creating the popular show called Ladylike with a few others. After she left BuzzFeed she was able to put more effort into her own YouTube channel. She has gained over 10 million subscribers since she started posting on her channel in 2017.
Collabs, New Brand, and Other Opportunities:
YouTubers certainly are entrepreneurs but not what some people would think. YouTubers advertise content and as they come into their “voice” that then turns into a brand and this has been successful for many YouTubers including Safiya. Safiya has been able to be a part of many great projects and opportunities. Some of these projects include creating a lipstick collection with popular makeup brand: ColourPop. Aswell as collaborating with fellow YouTuber Cristine Rotenberg AKA Simplynailogical with a limited-edition collection of nail polish from Cristine’s brand Holo Taco. Safiya also owns her own apparel brand called Fiendish Behavior which is a perfect embodiment of who she is. She has added her makeup experiments to her hoodies, t-shirts, stickers, tote bags, blankets, and sweats. Safiya would call her clothing style as “comfortable vampire” which means wearing all black in comfortable styles and textures.
She is known for her series called “Bad Beauty Science” which essentially means mixing large amounts of a single type of products and creating a “Franken” etc (She has mixed almost every type of makeup product together). This has iterated into many off shoots of channel topics. She loves testing “Weird Fashion” such as Platform Crocs, 9-foot-long jeans and many many more. Recently she has moved into showcasing her cool travel opportunities with her husband also fellow YouTuber Tyler Williams. They have visited an underwater hotel, slept in an Igloo, slept in a Japanese Capsule Hotel, and again many other places. As a fellow viewer and subscriber, I like to say she is an investigative channel of weird things but weird is a good thing because that makes the content very interesting. I found her channel in 2018 so I have been a loyal lover of her content for 7 years and still enjoy every aspect of her videos. One other detail I would like to mention is when she has a video idea she will do whatever it takes to complete it just because she is that interested in the topic. Some of my favorite longer more deep dive type videos include, “I Stayed At Every Hotel On The Vegas Strip”, “I Ate At Every Celebrity Chef’s Restaurant On The Vegas Strip”, and “I Got An 18th Century Makeover” just to name a few. In her 18th Century Makeover video she got the opportunity to live out her childhood dreams and visit Colonial Williamsburg and get to wear 18th century attire and get to participate in activities there. In her earlier videos she would mention how she wanted to go to Colonial Williamsburg and now she finally got to go. It was really cool for me as a fan to see her get to visit a place she always talks about, and I was very invested in videos like these.
Conclusion:
These videos take a lot of time, planning, and funding. I am amazed at the work that is put into these videos from Safiya, Tyler and their team. Both of them are also relatively young being 32 and 33 years old. They all have been working very hard on this channel and brand since they graduated college. As a long story short I really wanted to showcase at least one YouTuber in the blog post agenda and I think it is a very interesting type on Entrepreneur to research.
Here is Safiya’s YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbAwSkqJ1W_Eg7wr3cp5BUA
(I tried every method but I was unable to add any pictures, her thumbnails are really eye catching)
The YouTube entrepreneur phenomenon is really interesting because the first wave of super successful YouTubers did it mostly by luck. There was no strategy for SEO or content marketing or anything that they could follow when the platform was starting to blow up, even though influencers today typically have to work for their followers. I agree that it’s a super fascinating type of entrepreneur to research.