Content creator and creative consultant Rachel Nguyen has been making online content for over 15 years, since she started a fashion blog in high school. In 2014 she transitioned to YouTube and started making content that attracted the type of aesthetes who stockpiled Glossier and fashioned their lives after Wes Anderson films. Rachel’s keen eye and insouciant personality has led to partnerships with brands like AG Jeans, Supergoop! and Glossier. 

Rachel is what some might call a niche influencer—while her audience numbers are more in the hundreds of thousands than in the millions (her YouTube channel currently has 198,000 subscribers), her impact transcends numbers. Rachel’s dreamy, story-driven montage style, unique to the platform when she started making videos, has become the de-facto style for many Gen-Z creators, mostly young women who’ve been watching Nguyen’s videos since they were teenagers. 

Apart from the moodboard-worthy aesthetics of her videos, her appeal has always been her openness and her willingness to share the less glamorous parts of her life. For many of her viewers, she’s a big sister, guiding them through teendom and identity crises. The connection between Rachel and her viewers naturally grew into a community, one that often congregated in the comments section of her videos. But even the most welcoming comments section can quickly become toxic as everyone vies to be the loudest voice. 

In an effort to cultivate a different kind of space that encourages productive, open-minded conversation instead of competitive grandstanding, Rachel started Warde, a Slack-based community portal. Launched a year before the pandemic, Warde is a place for Rachel’s viewers to connect both with her and one another about everything, from the best vacation spots to heartbreak. Although Rachel may be the initial draw for many users, she’s not at the center of Warde—she co-runs the platform with several moderators who help set the tone. These days, Warde has over 6,000 regular users. Recently Rachel and I chatted over Zoom about creating with intention, making mistakes, and owning your content.

Akosua Adasi: How important was story and narrative for you when you [were] first making videos?

Rachel Nguyen: Back then, I made things based on what I wanted to watch. There is so much thought that goes into these videos because it's like, now that I have space from whatever experience I had, I have to take a step back and [ask], what's the through line? That’s this fleeting nugget [of human experience] that I'm trying to capture. Anything that's interesting to watch has a storyline to it. 

Akosua: How present is your audience whenever you make anything? 

Rachel: I'm my own audience, my hardest critic and my biggest fan, so it's like, can I watch this? Can I enjoy this? Because if I can't enjoy it, then who else would?

Akosua: What would you say is your central driving question, no matter what kind of work you're doing? 

Rachel: I think about things as internal and external. So the internal question is, what do I want to feel? And then the external question is, what's missing? When people operate off of, “‘I just want a pretty backdrop,”’ that only caters to how they feel. I like to dig a little bit more than that.

Akosua: You teach a course on the creative process of making videos. When you were putting together the course, was an internal-first approach always the goal or did it come out of interacting with your students? 

Rachel: I started the course with my friend Puno [Dostres] who has ilovecreatives, which is this all-encompassing platform. Puno was like, “How do you make your videos?” I literally was just telling her, “I ask myself these questions and I go off of these answers. So there's no formula. However, there's intention.” Puno made the course and all of this was reflected back [to] me. She took all that information and strategy and questioning that I have within myself and turned it into a tangible thing. 

Akosua: Has teaching taught you about yourself as a creative or helped you grow with your own processes? 

Rachel: I recently got my Human Design read and one of the things that [it] says is that I can be a shepherd of collective feelings. I think when people connect to my work, it's because I'm having this experience that everyone else can see themselves having. It becomes [a] visual articulation of a collective feeling. I think teaching this course and this process has helped me become more spiritual.   

Akosua: What does community mean to you? 

Rachel: The word community is so blown out, it's so overused. And it doesn't ever feel like real community. To me, community is a place that you can go and improve yourself in. With Warde, it's like, “I need to figure out my relationships right now, there's going to be an answer for me in this place and people will help me out, and I will help everyone else out too.” It's putting attention and energy into a space as much as you're willing to take out of it. A lot of times, brands talk about community but they're just taking from people, they're not actually giving things back. 

Akosua: The last video you put out was titled, I want to own my content. What motivated you to make that video? 

Rachel: It feels as though right now the internet is owned by brands. [Influencing has] become very soulless because influencers are no longer trying to connect to an audience—they're first and foremost trying to connect to brands. I was so turned off by that because I like to make things for an audience of one. When I got lost from that and was making content that pandered to brands, I lost that relationship with myself. I no longer owned my content because brands owned my content. 

Akosua: [In] 2021, you made a Carbon Zero Diary in partnership with Hyundai. There was a very negative reaction from your audience towards that video. How much did the response play into the feeling that you had strayed from your original intentions? 

Rachel: I felt compromised as a creator, trying to negotiate what I want to do and what this brand wants from me. As a creator, through taking on a branded partnership, [I] become this liaison between a brand and the audience. I'm a data point, not owning my content because it belongs to Hyundai. I tried to make the best of what I could. They paid me a lot of money to make that video, and it was like because I've taken this money, I'm in debt to their talking points and their asks. Would I make that mistake again? I don't know. Sometimes when there's a fancy check in front of you, it's hard to say no. But now I know how to [protect] the content a little bit more. Say[ing] no to things and being able to explain [why]. With Hyundai, I don't think I had the language to have that boundary and now I do.