Hello! Right now you’re reading “The Creator Confidential”, a blog where famous YouTubers share their stories and tips they have for growing a YouTube channel. Over the past week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Lucrezia, and here is the finished result. Enjoy!
Lucrezia Chloe started creating YouTube videos just 2 years ago, and her channel has successfully grown to over 46,000 subscribers and 2.8 million views. In addition to her success on YouTube, she has created a website selling a sustainable clothing line (TATO), wrote an ebook compiling easy-to-make vegan recipes, and manages an Instagram account with over 25,000 followers. In this post, she shares time management tips, her process for finding manufacturers and creating TATO, and much much more!
What inspired you to create your channel?
First of all, I just wanna say that I’m really excited to be doing this interview! I have been watching and enjoying YouTube videos for the majority of my childhood; I remember watching YouTubers like MyLifeAsEva, Alicia Marie and all those infamous teen YouTubers from a very young age. Even YouTubers such as Marcus Butler and Zoella were my absolute favourite in 2013 and 2014, so YouTube really has been a large part of my life for years and it was my favourite source of entertainment as a child.
When I got to about 10 or 11 years old I started making VideoStars with my friends - which were basically fun music videos which involved a lot of dancing and editing with cool effects. With practise, I got very good at making them because I enjoyed it so much, but I never had the courage to upload them to YouTube. However, at the start of 2019, I decided to properly start my channel and start taking it seriously. To be honest, I’ve always been confused about what exactly my channel is about but I use it as a space to talk about various parts of my life which are interesting to me. I love that I’ve been able to build a community by sharing my life and what I love!
Do you think your family or background/where you grew up influenced your content? Can you talk about how your parents affected your YouTube channel?
This is a really interesting question, which I don’t think I’ve been asked before! Now that I think about it, I think my family definitely gave me a huge amount of support when I started my channel. My parents were obviously scared when I first told them that I wanted to upload random videos of me onto the Internet - as every parent would be - but after telling them that I would be careful and that it is something lots of teenagers do, they were able to understand it was something I was truly passionate about. Overall, I don’t think my parents fully understand what I do on YouTube and they rarely watch or take part in my videos, but they are there to help me if I need any particular advice or guidance.
How long does it take to edit one of your videos?
It varies completely - for example, I recently filmed a “trying on everything in my wardrobe” video which took me four days to film and a further two days to edit! However, other types of videos such as my Q&A videos take me just an hour or so to film and then between 2-3 hours to edit. Having said this, things like making thumbnails for videos and adding the tags once you’ve uploaded the video to YouTube also take a large chunk of time, and I think these parts of the editing process are often overlooked.
Top 3 tips you would give to small YouTubers trying to start a successful YouTube channel?
I hate to sound cliche, but it’s really important to be yourself from the start when starting a YouTube channel. If you start posting videos about things that you are not passionate about, then you risk building an audience based on something that you don’t enjoy or based on a persona you don’t feel reflects your true personality and interests. Therefore, I would say:
Be yourself.
Be consistent, because it is absolutely essential!
Don’t give up no matter what people around you may say.
I really admire how you wrote an ebook! What inspired you to write it? Can you talk about the process of creating it?
Thank you so much! I wrote my e-book about a year and a half ago, and the idea really stemmed from the fact that I had been vegan for about a year by that point, and I really struggled to find easy meals which one could cook within 20 minutes. All the recipes I was finding online often took hours to make, their ingredients list had over 30 ingredients and it did not seem like the type of meal I wanted to create on a daily basis. Therefore, I wanted to share my easy and delicious meal ideas with people around the world who are looking for a convenient and stress-free way to adopt a plant-based diet. One of the main features of the e-book which makes it different from other e-books on the market is that all the recipes can be created with five ingredients or less - which makes it extremely easy for anyone to follow, including students on a budget. Thankfully, the e-book was received extremely well and thousands of people have benefited from its recipes. To this day, I see people recreating the recipes and sending me pictures, which brings me so much joy!
How did you create TATO?
For those of you who don’t know, in May 2019 I started a vegan and climate neutral clothing brand called TATO. This was a passion project for me, which I got the idea for towards the start of 2018 once I started to find out more about the fast fashion industry and its lasting effects on the climate. I found out that the clothing industry is the second most polluting industry in the world, and I decided to seriously cut down on the amount of fast fashion I was consuming to instead look for more sustainable options. I wanted to make it easier for teenagers like me to find garments which are affordable, trendy and good for the environment - which is why I launched TATO!
It was a long and gruelling process to find manufacturers which were truly ethical, and there were lots of things I encountered whilst starting the brand that definitely challenged me. For example, I chose to manufacture the T-shirt in London, which was local to me, in order to avoid transporting the garments for long distances from somewhere like China or Taiwan. I also made sure that the thread that was being used to embroider the T-shirt was dyed with vegan inks, and literally everything from the packaging to the factory to the labels were made with the climate and sustainability in mind.
I have huge plans to bring more of our products in the future, due to how successful our initial launches were, and I’m simply waiting to move back to the United Kingdom in order to restart the process and hopefully expand our product line. My aim, as I said, is to make sustainable fashion accessible affordable - and most importantly desirable - in order to compete with the large-scale fast fashion brands which are damaging our planet and increasing our global carbon footprint.
Is it personally hard for you to juggle school/life with your channel? How do you find a balance?
It definitely is! I think time management is something we all struggle with as teenagers, and each one of us has our hobbies which we try and find time for along with school work, family time and our social life. However, I never feel like doing YouTube is a chore because I enjoy it so much. I somehow always seem to find time within my week to film a video and interact with my supporters on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. If anything - doing social media has helped me improve my time management skills, which I think will help me throughout my life.
How do you find new opportunities with brands? Do you reach out to them or do they just email you? What is one of the best opportunities you’ve gotten from your YouTube channel?
When I first started my channel, I never knew I would have the opportunity to work with amazing brands and create exciting partnerships with some of the companies I’ve used and loved for years. It’s definitely one of the biggest perks I’ve experienced from being a content creator. In general, brands contact me via email but I turn down the majority of opportunities which are presented to me. This is because I’m always sure to work with brands which truly fit my message and ethos; I always prioritise integrity and honesty over a simple pay cheque and this will never change! I want my followers to know that any brand which I promote on any social media is truly something I use and believe in, because their trust in me and what I share with them is the most important thing to me as an influencer.
Finally, what is your experience with hate (either in school or online) and do you have any advice on how to deal with it?
Thankfully, my friends have always been very supportive of my YouTube channel and I’m grateful to say that bullying is never something I’ve experienced as a result of my channel. It’s really heartbreaking for me when I receive comments or messages from subscribers telling me that they wish they could start a channel, but that they’re scared of how their friends or classmates will react, because you should never be held back from doing what you enjoy or pursuing your passion just because other people look down on it. Of course I understand where they’re coming from; when I joined a new school for six form it was difficult to have people talk about my channel behind my back and make nasty remarks about it, but in order to deal with this I surrounded myself with people who support me and my channel because it is a part of who I am. I also think that if you own your decision and show that you are confident in whatever content you are creating online, people will talk about it less because of how unbothered you will seem!
Thanks for reading! A huge thanks to Lucrezia for taking the time to answer all the questions. Here are the links to all her socials:
Instagram: @lucreziachloe https://www.instagram.com/lucreziachloe/?hl=en
Twitter: @lucreziachloe https://twitter.com/lucreziachloe
YouTube: Lucrezia Chloe https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmNumAL7rbXCD_VfYjeDocA/featured
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