Name: How Blogilates's 37-year-old CEO ignored her parents’ advice and built a pair of eight-figure empires
Uploaded: 2024-09-13
Duration: 8 min 48 s
Description: Cassey Ho’s father gave her three options for her career: “Be a lawyer, doctor, or failure.” Instead, she chose to do what made her happy and built two successful businesses with it.

Cassey Ho’s father gave her three options for her career: “Be a lawyer, doctor, or failure.” Instead, she chose to do what made her happy and built two successful businesses with it.

How Blogilates's 37-year-old CEO ignored her parents’ advice and built a pair of eight-figure empires

Cassey Ho built two eight-figure empires.

Features

Popflex's founder's father gave her three options: “Be a lawyer, doctor, or failure.” Instead, she chose to do what made her happy and built two successful businesses with it.

How Popflex and Blogilates’s founder built two eight-figure empires

 ‘Be a lawyer, doctor, or failure,’ instead this CEO built her success with a fashion empire 

I have been a Taylor Swift fan since 2006. I was in the salon getting my roots dyed and my phone is on do not disturb. So I actually like, have no clue that any of this is going on. I pick, I'm like, what I'm like getting my hair done and he's like, you need to go check your D MS, you need to go check flag. I'm like, what I check and everyone is blowing me up and they're like Taylor Swift is wearing your escort. Oh my God, go look, go look. And I was like, what, what? And so I checked, she posted a youtube short for her tortured poets like release and she's wearing my patented pure wet score in her video and it was literally for 0.3 seconds. OK? Just a moment. And that moment sold out like a few 100 of that literal digital lavender score in a matter of minutes. And then started selling out all the other pure wet scores in every single color that day ended up becoming our best sales day of the year and our second best highest sales day ever. Hi, I'm Kathy Ho I am 37 and I'm the founder CEO and head designer of Top Lex and Bug. Ladies. And these are my secrets to success. I grew up in Southern California and I have one sibling. My parents are both immigrants who came over from Vietnam in the mid seventies. My mom was a boat refugee and both of them really had to work hard to create some stability for us. Over here, my mom was a cake decorator and my dad was an engineer growing up financially, we didn't have a lot. I remember that going to mcdonald's was a luxury. I did start my first business in seventh grade without even knowing what a business was. I am a supertaster. I can't eat chocolate. However, I really love Halloween as a kid. We would go trick or treating all the time. It was so much fun. Then I would save all of my candy. And I remember one night I was just like mixing stuff together and like just creating this concoction out of chocolate. And then I rolled them into little balls and then brought them to school. And my friends were like, oh my gosh, this is so good. And I was like, ok, well, if you like it, then maybe you'll buy it, which then evolved into a full on business in high school where I then had five students under me selling some of my goods to other students at the campus until we got caught by the principal and um I was forced to not do that anymore. I went to Whittier College in Southern California, California. I actually won a full ride scholarship there and I went to study biology in preparation for medical school. I did not want to go to medical school. I didn't want to be a doctor. But my father said that really was the only choice that I had. It was either going to be lawyer doctor or failure. I had told him I wanted to be a fashion designer. This is something I knew in my bones that I always wanted to do. I'm a very creative, artistic person. But when I told him I wanted to be a designer, he was like, absolutely not. And I pretty much crushed my dreams. And so I said, ok, fine, I'll go to school to become a doctor. And then I'll figure it out later because I was a very studious and obedient daughter. Fast forward to college. I was still doing Pilates at this time in my dorm room. And then the other girls were like, what's that? Can you show me? Which then led me to think, oh, maybe I could teach this. So then I went on Craigslist and I saw that there was an opening for a Pilates instructor down the street at the local gym. The gym owner loved me and she's like, cool, let me see your certification. And of course, I'm not even certified. And she's like, oh, but then she's like, you know what, I'll pay for your certification. Um We'll do this together. And so that really was the beginning of my Pilates career and I didn't rebel until I was halfway through college and realized this is actually not what I want to do with the rest of my life. I decided to drop out of organic chemistry, which the last class I needed to take the MC A T and really just ruin my entire timeline because my parents were not listening to me, I was talking about wanting to transfer schools and like do something else and they were like, absolutely not, you will not do that. And so when I did that, it really ruined our relationship. However, um it really was my first big rebellion and it was me following my heart, all those decisions were made because my heart was telling me to do. So as I was teaching those Pilates classes, I noticed that I was fumbling with all of my stuff, my water bottles, my shoes, my mat, um my keys, my C DS, everything just kind of like this and like a little tote bag that wasn't working. So I tried looking for a cute yoga bag and everything was just so like, oh like just, you know, temp bags, ugly colors, like just not my style and I love everything to be super cute. I went to the downtown L A fashion district and bought some leftover fabric, put together a super glamorous looking yoga bag like you've never seen before, made out of vegan leather with huge bow gold chains. I mean, it was glamorous and it did all my stuff. I brought it to class and my students were like, what is that? I want one. And that was the beginning of solving a problem for myself that just so happened to solve problems for other people too. And that really is the basis of what I do with both blog Lotte and pop flex today. I'm always solving problems and making it cute. So, blog a Lati started as a youtube channel in 2009 where I really was just uploading workout videos for my students in real life. I was moving from L A to the east coast for my first job in fashion. And all my students at my local 24 hour fitness in L A were like, well, who's going to teach us pop Pilates. So that was what the format I was teaching at the time. My old format which was Pilates to pop music, more of like a dance on the mat version of Pilates. At that time, Pilates was very slow, either no music or classical music. And mine was just kind of like, y you know, very exciting. There was no to replace me. And so I recorded a 10 minute video and I uploaded it to a website called youtube. And I thought nothing more of it. I didn't even know how to edit. I just like, chopped off the beginning of the end on widows movie maker. And I was like, ok, well, here you go. You guys click on this link. If you ever miss me little. Did I know that I was gonna get more than the views of the students in that class, which is like 40 I got thousands of views and hundreds of comments from people from all over the world asking for more. They were like, oh cool. Do you have an app version of this? An arm? The but version and that is what grew the blog a lot channel. It wasn't until around 2010, 2011 when I was making a Facebook post and they were asking, hey, can we get some blog a lot t-shirts? And I was like, why would you want a t-shirt with my screen name on it? Like that's a little bit weird. They were like, no, like that's what we want. And so we had a design contest and as a community, we chose the the wedding design and I bought some blank shirts from Forever 21 screen printed them locally and put them up on Facebook and they sold out within minutes. And it was in that moment when I realized oh OK. V las is not a screen name. It is a brand. It is something people are proud to wear and a journey that they want to be a part of pop is my performance activewear brand that honestly is now launching into more than just active wear. It's women's apparel and it fulfills that that original childhood dream of wanting to become a fashion designer. So remember how we talked about in college when I was feeling that whole, that emptiness that is fully filled with like flowers growing out of the hole. Like I just feel so happy to be doing what I'm doing right now. Both blog ladies and Pople as their own brands are their own eight bigger businesses. It's all been bootstrapped all my own money. No investors. Well, in the beginning, I didn't even ask. So I, I didn't get investors but these days I don't want that because I do not want to serve the wrong audience. I don't want to serve the people who are throwing money at me so that they can get money back. I want to serve the women who are purchasing the clothes and the accessories, who are funding the business through their belief in um the designs and the creation. So yeah, to this day, no investors all bootstrapped in the very beginning. We have 26 full time employees right now and we work with around 40 or so contractors on the daily. My secret to success is truly following my heart. I know that sounds so cliche, but I don't think it has ever led me in the wrong direction. I will also say that not being afraid of problems is also another secret to my success. I invite it, give me the criticism, give me the problems, let me get creative and let me solve it. And I think that really has made me stronger and more flexible. You have to be able to bend in the wind or you're gonna break.