Cassey Ho: I Built a Multi-Million Dollar Brand With Zero Ad Spend | @Blogilates

0:00Hey Chicago, class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look. Try it. Style it. Make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up. It shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest Crocs store today. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

0:47Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Every day there's a new fire, a new problem. Problems on problems. And like, you think you're going to explode. But it looks like you were dealing with a lot of online hate. People just shaming you, etc. People sent me the video of her wearing the pure wet skort. I went numb. I couldn't even feel anything. Swifties just started coming over. They found it. And then we get like 16 ,000 pre-orders for that one skort in that color.

1:24I absolutely hate AI. There have been instances where my videos are just stolen off of my page. They've used AI to actually change my face. I'm going to keep fighting because it's not right. I can't work for free for somebody else. As a principal, I will never stop fighting. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. I have Blogilates today. I am so happy that you're here. We met in 2022, I think, the creator summit. Right? I remember. Yeah. And you were doing this Pilates thing in the morning, which is amazing. And I still have your mat. Oh, good. Which is a huge business for you. So I'm excited to chat about AI.

2:04Yep. Taking over everything. And I'd love your take on what it's like to run a business in 2025 as a creator and also a woman. So welcome. Welcome to Silicon Valley, girl. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Can you tell me what's going on with your business right now? So there's two brands. there's blogilates which is the retail exclusive to target brand and just at the top of this year we launched apparel at target for the very first time it was all at all 1800 stores in the very front gateway which was so cool because it really felt like winning the retail super bowl like you just don't get those opportunities so that was fully manufactured by our team we're the vendor That was such a crazy thing to pull off because in under a year, we had to figure out how to produce 1.1 million units.

2:57Yeah, and we had never done anything like that before. The Popflex brand is my D2C brand that we mostly sell online. And that one is at a higher price point and really focused on innovation and performance and also just like testing all sorts of things. I would say the target one is more active wear, whereas Popflex started out with active wear and then has now evolved into swimwear and underwear and like casual dresses and stuff. So I'm having a lot of fun playing around with innovation over there. That's amazing that you have kind of just similar, but at the same time, different brands. How does it work when you think about launching a new product?

3:38Which brand does it go to? Popflex is where the innovation begins, where I get to have fun. Nobody tells me what I have to do or can't do. Well, actually, no, the customers tell me what I have to do. And so I love going into the comments and figuring out, hey, what are they looking for? What problems do they need solving with? But with PopFlex, we innovate, we product develop, we try it out. And then with Target, pretty much the playbook right now is that we take what works really well with PopFlex and I redesign it so that it can hit a lower price point for the Target audience, which has been really great because one of the biggest complaints we get about PopFlex is it's too expensive.

4:16I can't afford it. And like specifically, please launch at Target. And so when that happened this past January, it was, it worked. And I was afraid though, because here's the thing, you launch with a brand at a higher price point. And then my next question was, is launching a brand at half the price point going to cannibalize my original brand? Right. And this was really just up in the air. We didn't know. But the weird thing is when we launched at Target for Blogilates, it actually helped increase revenue for PopFlex, which is crazy. But if you think about it, it was like marketing. Being in front of the store, everyone got to see it.

4:55Things sold out so quick. There were like three specific styles that 90 % of the inventory sold out within three days. It was insane. Fascinating. It's crazy. But then on the tag, on the tag, it tells a little bit of a story about me and it says CEO and head designer of Popplex and Blogilates. And so people can go and figure out, oh, maybe there's more if I can't get it here. So I think it was really, really great for legitimacy as a brand and as a designer. How do the margins work? So with Target, you get a licensing fee or you get like, how does it work in general? Okay, that's a really good question.

5:28So with the apparel, it wasn't licensing. That was fully like we are the vendor. So essentially we are selling wholesale to target and then they mark up how they decide to mark up in the front however there is a fitness section where you see the yoga mats and the dumbbells and things that is a a licensing deal and so i get paid a percent royalty on on that but the apparel is all manufactured by us got it in terms of revenue split what does your business look like these days okay so this is a really interesting question because us both coming from the creator space from the YouTube space, it is not what most people would think it is.

6:03Not like Google AdSense. Yeah. I had just talked to my husband, who's also the CEO of the company. I was like, oh wait, let's like look at these numbers again. It's actually less than 1 % of our revenue comes from anything related to like ads or pre-rolls or anything like that or brand deals because I do not do brand deals anymore. And let me tell you, I'm so happy about that because honestly, any tension that came between me and my husband were like about stick to the brand deal guidelines and they told you to do this but I'm like but I did do that and he's like but legal says and it was like so much like I hate that so yeah um over 99 % of our revenue comes from the apparel businesses in terms of marketing what works these days for marketing it's organic which is also very different than a traditional d2c online brand who from what I hear they rely heavily on you know meta ads and things like that.

6:55So luckily for me, because I do come from a content creator background, I really enjoy making content. And so you probably have seen some of these videos where I'm talking about the design, the why, where it came from, what problem we're solving. I show them the actual sketch throughout the development, some samples, things that didn't work out. And taking people on the journey behind a product is really interesting. And I didn't think it would be, but people are really interested. And what's crazy is that what is a fun piece of content for me to film, edit, voiceover. And by the way, I still do all of that myself, which is kind of crazy.

7:31Wow. I know. I know. I know it's like really unconventional. It's really hard. It's too much going on at once. But like one 60 second video takes about nine hours to make. And I am literally the one editing in CapCut and InShot on my phone. But I choose to do this. Everyone's like, Cassie, you need to get an editor. And I had that life before I had the life of horizontal content, long form fitness videos. We had an editor, we'd come back, you know, you go in, um, I forget what that program is, but you know, put the notes and everything that that I lost the joy in all that. And being able to talk about the product and the design, cause each design feels like my baby has brought the joy back into editing for me.

8:10How many videos a week? Um, I'm averaging one right now, but sometimes I feel like it, I can do like two, but it's a lot because it's like I'm part content creator, part CEO and head designer. And so like during the normal workday, I have the normal meetings and product development calls and fittings and things like that. It's only after hours when I can like sit in the corner of the couch and like I'm just editing for like seven hours straight until my hands cramp. But anyway, what I was trying to say is that the organic videos, they work and they sell. Like sometimes a video goes viral, the thing can sell out within a few hours, which is insane.

8:47So that's working for us, which is very atypical of a D to C business. Now that's the blogilates. And this is where it gets confusing. So I started out on YouTube with the screen name blogilates. So essentially these days, I think if people started out, it'd be like at Cassie Ho or something. So anyway, blogilates is my channels across the board. So I make my content for my pages. Nobody touches that. However, I will say that there is a Popflex IG and YouTube and TikTok, and that is a separate marketing team. So we have videos go over there too. And I will say both organic videos on both sides really do sell really, really well.

9:23And one type of organic video that sells well on the Popflex side is what we produce at what we call a content house. And so we reach out to women in our community, sizes extra, extra small, all the way to 3X. So that's nine different sizes. and we put the girls in like the same baby doll dress or something. And they all get to walk out, model, and now people get to see, oh, this is what someone like me might look like. Okay, that's a medium. That's a 1X. That's a size small. And it's really fun to like create with our community. So that also sells really well. Hey, Chicago. Class it up with Crocs.

10:01You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local croc store and step into your new look. Try it. Style it. Make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up. It shows off. First day fits handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest croc store today. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

10:44Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. How does it work? So you just DM your customers like, hey, do you want to be in the video or? So we do an open casting call. We do an open casting call. People have to send in videos because honestly, it's not just even about like the modeling. It's about the personality. That's charisma. Like what shows through the screen, right? And also the girls having a good time with each other because they're all nice and kind.

11:16And so luckily the ones that we have put on, everyone is just so excited to be there. Of course they get compensated through pay, but also they get to keep all the clothes that they get that day that haven't been released. So that's super exciting for them too. Yeah. So on the organic side, that is what's working for Blogilates and then for Popflex. But I will say something really interesting we should talk about is TikTok lives. Oh, that's a huge thing these days, right? Huge. Oh my God. Okay. So this was wild. Sam and I were on a little weekend trip and we're just checking like Shopify sales and we're like, whoa, did someone just mention something?

11:50Like what's going on? We started seeing like all these pirouette skorts, which is the skort that Taylor Swift wore and my patented skort. just like for whatever reason it was just going like up and we're like what's going on we couldn't figure it out so we go on slack we're messaging everyone like hey did something happen did someone mention us and we find out there's this girl with 1900 followers on tiktok so she's not like really a big a big content creator at all or creator at all she has gone live for like five or six hours and she's just showing the score that she's wearing and answering questions and she brought a huge spike that day oh wow it was insane there's something about like i don't know like this is also another conversation but like i feel like as the influencer industry has evolved it's like consumers have lost trust in it because it's become almost like this fancy pedestal like thing whereas a normal girl with 900 followers she's gonna tell you the truth like or at least that's perception, right?

12:48And she sold some skirts. So that was crazy. Talk to me about Taylor. Oh my God. Okay. So I am a huge Taylor Swift fan. I've been listening to her music since 2008, teardrops on my guitar. And she's honestly like my favorite musician, singer, songwriter, and honestly businesswoman. So when on April 19th of last year, people sent me the video of her wearing the pure wet score I went numb I like couldn't even believe it I couldn't even feel anything because I was feeling everything do you know what I'm saying like I basically died and it was insane um one because that was like ultimate dream fulfilled like it out of any celebrity in the world if there was one person I wanted to wear pop flex it would be her and it happened which is so crazy did you send it to her no no no no no people ask me all the time oh did you send it to her like no like Taylor Swift was a billionaire she can buy whatever she wants right Right.

13:45And also she's very intentional with what she buys. So sometimes I wonder, I wonder, like, did she know all the stuff I was going through fighting for, you know, the rights to protect my design in the same way that she protects her music? Or did she just see it on TikTok and she liked it and she bought it? I will never know. What happened to sales? Oh, yeah. Okay. So that digital lavender pirouette skort sold out within one hour on the website. Like Swifties just started coming over. They found it. And when Taylor Swift styled the Instagram account, like confirmed it, that's when the sales started coming in like wild and then within two hours every single color of that score it started selling out um and then we're like okay well what do we do right because we're getting all this traffic we got to do something and we usually never do a pre-sale but we're like okay maybe it's time to do a pre-sale I don't know so immediately we put a pre-sale up that night um and then we get like 16 ,000 pre-orders for that one score in that color Wow.

14:45Yeah, which was insane. And then we had to work really hard to get that reorder up and going because, you know, we've got to weave the fabric, dye the fabric, cut and sew. Like it's a whole process. And people eventually got it a few months later and I'm just so happy. That's amazing. Such a cool moment. Okay, with all the crazy things that you're telling me, have you ever had thoughts like, let just Sam, your husband, handle everything and I will just enjoy life? You know what? Sam says that to me all the time. He is often tired. He's like, what if we just like chilled out for a second? What if all this growth was enough?

15:20You know, like what if we just sailed? But like, it's the way my parents raised me. I'm just like, nothing's ever good enough. And like, we must keep growing. And to be honest, like it's fun. But at the same time, I do feel, especially this year, you know, writing two different brands, I am exhausted. I'm exhausted mentally, often emotionally too, because not only am I dealing with bigger problems with the business as we grow our team, I'm now taking on the emotional toll of what my team's going through. So if they're tired, then I'm tired for them. And so, yeah, it's extremely exhausting. And I think what is not helpful, but maybe helpful, is that the way in which we hire is, I think it's different than how other businesses may hire.

16:07I hire slowly because I've been through toxic employee periods and I'm terrified. I'm terrified of that because that can crumble everything. And it almost did in like 2017, 2018 times. And so any fractures that we're seeing right now, they're stress fractures. And it's coming from our growth is outpacing the pace at which I'm hiring. And so that's something that I'm trying to deal with right now. Like, I know there are good people out there, but it's not just about the skill. It's about the culture fit. And what we have on the team right now is so good. And I'm just terrified of breaking what we have.

16:46How many people do you have? So we have 30 people right now. That's so cool. That's a really lean team. Very lean. Very lean for what we do. I think that's why we're all really tired. Yeah. What do you think is going to happen with AI? What is your take? Are you automating things? What apps are you using? So my husband is a very, he's a fan of chat GPT. But me coming from more of a designer artist background, I absolutely hate AI when it comes to stealing from original artwork because AI would not be able to do what it's doing without pulling from previous work. So in that aspect, I absolutely hate it.

17:30I think there needs to be some type of royalty built in or something so that if you are taking inspiration from, you know, whoever artist and you have to type in that person's name to get that look, then just based on that alone, okay, 5 % needs to go back to original artists or 10 % or whatever. I think that needs to be in place. And I think people would be less mad. But right now it's like totally wild west with AI. That's how I feel on that front. but in terms of like you know travel plans and like fun little searches here and there it's helpful I'm warming up to it but like on the artist side I absolutely hate it but do you see it helping you stay lean with your team like because you're utilizing more AI tools or it's not there yet no I right now I don't really see at least with on the apparel and the apparel and product development side, I don't, I really don't see how it can help us right now.

18:25I think we've dabbled in a little bit of it with the copy on our website. There probably are different eras we could start using it. I think there could be, because what I'm seeing right now as we're growing our design and development team, there seems to be like this lack of new young people in the technical designer space. Because I think everyone wants to be a fashion designer, a graphic designer, but like technical design is really like architecture of clothing. It's very mathematical, very science. And I just wonder, that's probably a good area for AI to like begin helping, especially if the young people don't want to get into that field.

19:03Like I'm actually having a lot of trouble hiring in that specific role. Yeah. So maybe, maybe someone will come up with something to help with pattern making. Yeah. Yeah. That makes it easier. And I know that's probably different than how more of the techie people feel about it, but it's just because I've been so burned and taken advantage of just even without AI or no, actually with AI in just my patented products too. And like, you know, they've been duped by the Sheeans, multiple vendors on Amazon, TikTok shop. And these days, the big American retailers have gotten in on the game, which is insane.

19:39Right now, I'm dealing with Nordstrom Rack, TJ Maxx, Kohl's, JCPenney, just recently VS Pink as in Victoria's Secret. and these are patented products. And what I'm dealing with right now is that, you know, I pay thousands of dollars to get my design patent approved. And obviously it doesn't automatically get approved. You have to prove a lot of different things. Anyway, pay thousands of dollars. The USPTO issues me a design patent. You would think that's enforceable. And for the most part, it kind of is. But when you get to the stage of having to deal with big billion dollar corporations, it's now a money game because do I have any type of police helping me enforce this patent?

20:25No, actually it's me paying thousands of dollars an hour for my lawyers to talk to their lawyers. And this is kind of where I am right now. And it's extremely frustrating because, you know, it's my artwork, my work for free, them capitalizing off of work that they've stolen from me. So that's how I feel about that. And in terms of AI, there have been instances where my videos are just stolen off of my page. They've used AI to actually change my face. Oh yeah, it happens to me all the time. Oh my God. And you promote a scam with your face. Yeah, oh my God. No, it's crazy. And they can't do anything.

21:05The platforms, because they just start new accounts. Yeah. So what happens when bigger companies, they steal your pad and you try to sue them or talk to them? Have you ever been able to win something or it just goes like that? Well, right now my immediate goal is get it off the website or get it off the platform. And it's completely a game of whack-a-mole. And what the problem is that the platform puts it on the small business, the creator, whatever, because they're hands off. So you fill out this form. It's such a long form, but you fill it out like multiple times a day. Like just for example, the other week, just on that pirouette skort that I was talking about, the one that Taylor wore.

21:44I think there were, what was it? Like 233 or 433. I should look again. Dupes, separate dupe listings of that one score on TikTok shop alone. I'm not even talking about Amazon. Okay. I'm not talking about Teemu. I'm not talking about AliExpress. That was just TikTok shop. And my frustration with it is, okay, sure, we could be losing money from whatever that we could have made from the real thing. However, my bigger fear is that it cheapens the design. You see it now everywhere. It's no longer special. And then confusion. I mean, I've even had fans DM me and be like, oh, do you also run this sub brand?

22:29Because they've not only copied the designs, they copy my marketing too. Even the angles of where I film, hiring a model with my body type and my skin color. Like it gets so deep and so confusing that it ends up hurting the brand reputation. And I've actually had people, what I think bought from one of these fake videos, right? It links over to their stupid drop ship website. They buy it. And the pictures are my model pictures, my description, whatever. So they're completely duped. Then they'll receive the product and then come back to my page and blame me for complain yeah slow shipping bad quality like things they call it that like is not even on the real product like that's the level of confusion that is so dangerous and tarnishing to our brand but it feels like at this point it became part of the culture and there's i don't know if you can do anything like louis vuitton bags fake ones are everywhere and you're like just accept it have you ever thought of like you just no no I can't accept it I'm gonna keep fighting I'm gonna keep fighting because it's not right I can't work for free for somebody else um I just I as a principal I will never stop fighting I can't yeah and then when I see about that because yeah you also uh you stopped posting right the long form and I've from what I've read it looks like you were dealing with a lot of online hate uh-huh And like people just shaming you, etc.

23:49Yeah. Do you think you stopped because of that? Or was there any other reason? That was a big part of it. So I've never really talked about this officially. So I'm glad you brought it up. So I used to make long form fitness videos since 2009 as a Pilates instructor. That is crazy though. Yeah. 2009. Isn't that insane? Yeah. So I did that because I wanted to stay connected with my real life students. And it was meant for 40 people. I put up a video for them because I was moving from LA to Boston for my first job. And that's it. I wasn't planning to start a YouTube channel. I wasn't starting a brand, nothing like that.

24:24You couldn't even make money on YouTube back then. And then that video ended up getting thousands of views and hundreds of comments. And Vloglotties became like this fitness channel and community. And what I didn't expect, because this never happens in real life, was for people to say something negative about my body. Because if anything, I'll tell you, I was afraid to be like, oh, she's not pointing her toes enough. Her legs aren't straight enough. Oh, like her form is bad. Never got any of those comments. The first mean comments I got were, oh, why is she so fat? Why is her butt so flat? Oh, why does she look like that?

25:00And having grown up chubby and having to deal with my own like body insecurities, that just hit me so deep in a place that I wasn't ready to like, I was barely even healing from it inside and now I'm having to heal or not even heal, but just deal with it head on in front of millions of people. That was just a constant thing that was happening in the background, but that wasn't why I stopped everything, if I'm being completely honest. I was no longer feeling emotionally and mentally challenged with my content. Just as the person that I am and content being an extension of who I am, not just something that I do, I want to find the joy in it and towards the end of when I posted my last long-form video which is probably like 2021 I wanted to show people more of the other things I was doing like yes I was doing uh the fitness videos that you saw but in the background I was running an apparel business and I wanted to show people that side of me and so my first short-form video was just showing people like oh the science behind camel toe like why does that happen and I was honestly really surprised that it did well.

26:07And I was like, oh, maybe I can try to make more of these. And they ended up working. They ended up selling the product and they ended up helping me show a different side of myself. And like I said at the top of this interview, it brought the joy back into the editing for me. And so I also I switched my content for me so that I could feel happy with what I was producing and and also challenged with what I was producing. But have you ever feared that going back will not generate as much views as it used to? Or you're never going back to one form? Well, here's the thing. I've never made an official announcement because who knows?

26:45Like maybe I will one day want to be like, oh, let's just like do a squat challenge or something. Like that's still there. In this moment right now, I'm just so in love with product development design that that's the content that I want to make. And should I go back? Like, let's see, I think the other day, not the other day, the other month when I was launching the Blogilates for Target brand, I taught a fitness class in front of a group of people, which I haven't done in a long time. And it was super fun. Like that part of me will always be here because I've been teaching since like 2006. So that group fitness instructor, Cassie, will never go away.

27:23I love fitness. I work out every single morning. That's part of my routine. I just really needed a break from that. But I will say, too, the moment that I switched from fitness content to fashion content, not one person has said one negative thing about my body. Which made me realize, oh, man, I was dealing with a lot of toxic negativity for a long time, feeling so bad about my body for a long time. And it was like I was in the wrong industry. Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't look like the other girls. You probably get negative comments still, right? Probably now about your business. Yeah. Here's the thing.

28:04They don't attack my body, which is like – They just switched to different topics. But they might attack like, oh, your skorts are too short. Okay. I can deal with that. What I can't deal with, though, is – this is the worst one. I remember they attacked – this is back in the fitness days. One of the comments was, oh, if you cared more about your career, you would lose some weight. and that one hurt so much because not only did it attack my body it attacked my work ethic and nobody attacks my work ethic because I work so hard and so if any comment today um you know say what you want about the peril everyone is subjective and it has their own you know likes and stuff but say anything about my my my work ethic and that that really hurts because it's just untrue um but you know with the negative comments from back in the day there was a video that I made, I forget when it was, like probably 2015 or 2016, where I honestly could not take it anymore because it was coming from every angle.