“Be a lawyer, a doctor, or a failure.” These were the three options Cassey Ho’s father gave his then 18-year-old daughter after she expressed her intention to pursue a profession as a dressmaker.
“When I told him I wanted to be a designer, he said, ‘No way,’ and pretty much destroyed my dreams,” said the founding father of Blogilates and CEO of Popflex Assets in a recent interview.
Ho says her father and mother, an engineer and a pastry chef, emigrated to the United States from Vietnam within the mid-Nineteen Seventies and worked tirelessly to supply stability for his or her two daughters.
“Being raised by Asian immigrant parents gave me a sense of working really hard and tirelessly and just really persevering no matter what happens to you,” Ho said.
Since money was tight, Ho and her sister were raised to be very conscious about money and spending.
“I remember going to McDonald’s was a luxury,” Ho said. “I only shopped on sale; we never bought anything at full price.”
As a youngster, Ho reluctantly took her father’s profession advice and went to Whittier College in Southern California on a full scholarship to check biology and prepare for medical school. But within the midst of her demanding studies, Ho knew her medical profession could be short-lived. The “hardworking and obedient daughter” desired to rebel.
“I’m someone who really lives by following my heart, and my heart just started to feel so empty,” she said.
Her outlet for coping with the stress of college was teaching “POP Pilates” classes at her local 24 Hour Fitness studio—a passion she discovered in highschool and an extracurricular activity her parents disapproved of.
“I started teaching after school and they said, ‘You have to give this up, this is a waste of time, you need to spend more time studying physics,'” she recalls.
But that part-time job she found on Craigslist served as a springboard to her multimillion-dollar success and laid the muse for her viral following on YouTube.
How Blogilates began
When Ho uploaded it first video When she posted her first session on YouTube in 2009 at just 22 years old, she never expected her 10-minute workout to succeed in greater than the 40 students at her local POP Pilates class, let alone hundreds of users.
“I’ve had thousands of views and hundreds of comments from people all over the world asking for more,” she said.
But there was no master plan. Ho said her uploads were simply a solution to stay in contact along with her students after she moved across the country to the East Coast for a job in fashion merchandising. But as her community grew, fans began asking for branded merchandise.
“I bought some blank t-shirts from Forever 21, screen printed them on-site and uploaded them to Facebook. They sold out within minutes,” she said. “That’s when I realized Blogilates isn’t a username, it’s a brand.”
Fourteen years after that fateful YouTube upload, Blogilates 10.1 million followers as an eight-figure business, however the brand was financed entirely by Ho’s own resources: “All my own money, no investors.”
Blogilates launched at Target in December 2020. But for Ho, it wasn’t nearly helping her products reach latest audiences, it was also about ensuring representation, despite the fact that she was “really scared” to accomplish that.
“The truth is, I didn’t want my picture to be all over the packaging because I was afraid that my Vietnamese-Chinese face and skin color would scare away customers who aren’t used to seeing someone who looks like me in their stores,” she wrote in a blog post from 2020. “I thought it would hurt sales.”
Now her clothes and personality might be present in Target stores across the US
“I don’t want other little Asian American girls to walk into the gym section at the mall and not see anyone who looks like them,” Ho wrote. “This drop at Target isn’t just about product. It’s about representation.”
Taking over the style empire
Before starting Blogilates, Ho encountered an obstacle when teaching POP Pilates: She didn’t have anything that was cute and functional to store all her things on the solution to class. And every thing she saw while shopping didn’t quite meet her needs: “Heavy bags, ugly colors, just not my style.”
She took matters into her own hands and ventured to LA’s fashion district to purchase vegan leather and gold chains before sewing her first bag together. Ho’s students fell in love with the design and desired to know where they might buy one too.
Years later, her childhood dream of becoming a dressmaker became a reality.
Her sportswear brand Popflex, founded in 2016, has eight-figure sales and may also be present in Target stores. The brand also has a really famous fan. During the promotion for the discharge of her album “The Tortured Poets Department” Taylor Swift shared a YouTube short film wearing Popflex’s patented lavender Pirouette Skort. Within minutes, the lavender skort sold out. Then the Pirouette Skort sold out in each color.
“When [Taylor Swift] wears something, even if she only wears it for 0.3 seconds, people want that because they also want to be part of her journey and her life,” Ho said.
It was the highest-revenue day of the yr and the second highest-revenue day ever for the corporate.
Between selling out designs, her blog, and running two eight-figure businesses, Ho still takes time to reflect on her profession and the things which have brought her to the success she is today.
“My secret to success is to truly follow my heart. I know that sounds so trite, but I don’t think it has ever led me in the wrong direction.”
