1.8 million.
1.8 million is the amount of times people have watched YouTube baking sensation junior Rachel Fong make a chocolate bar cake. From filming in her bedroom to filming in her self-created baking studio, Rachel has come a long way in less than four years time.
Rachel created her channel, which now has over 265,000 subscribers, on December 24, 2010. She chose the name KawaiiSweetWorld because kawaii means cute in Japanese pop culture and everything is cute and sweet on her channel.
When Rachel began her channel, she initially posted tutorials on how to make polymer clay charms, small clay figurines often attached to necklaces and phones. While still posting charm updates, she then began to post Easy-Bake Oven tutorials.
About a year and a half after first creating her channel, she decided to post a video on how to make banana crumb muffins.
“I got so much positive response from that and the Easy-Bake Oven videos that I started making more baking videos,” Rachel said. “I found that I was really enjoying the baking, even more than the polymer clay, so then I switched over.”
Her mother, Connie Fong, said Rachel began baking when she was 8 years old. Their family grew up eating dessert every night. Rachel would often help her bake and want to do it on her own.
“We would pretend that we were on a baking show,” Connie said.
Because the audience for baking is much larger than that for polymer clay charms, that is when her channel really took off. About two years ago, a digital media company and production studio revolved around the YouTube food community called Tastemade reached out to Rachel.
“We discovered Rachel’s channel after stumbling upon one of her old Easy Bake Oven Baking videos on YouTube two years ago,” Tastemade Talent Manager Steven Simonitch said. “We thought, ‘This is brilliant! Why isn’t anyone else doing this?’ and we promptly reached out to her to see if she would be interested in working with us.”
Her channel hit 100,000 subscribers this January, 200,000 in July, and now has over 265,000 subscribers.
Rachel gets paid per video view, as well as for doing sponsored videos. She makes a four-figure value per month, donating $1000 to the American Red Cross each year. She saves approximately 70 percent and spends 30 percent of her remaining money.
As Rachel’s manager, Simonitch works to help her develop her YouTube audience, arrange collaborations with other YouTubers, and manage sponsorship and distribution opportunities.
“Working with Rachel is nothing less than inspirational,” Simonitch said. “She is focused, intelligent and always receptive to advice and feedback.”
Rachel films, edits and does voiceovers for her videos all by herself. Coming up with an idea can take about an hour and she often likes to test her recipes before filming, which takes up additional time. Filming takes six to seven hours, editing takes three to four hours, and promotion through social media, Facebook and Instagram takes another hour.
“I don’t sleep,” she said. “I don’t have a lot of free time, but it’s definitely worth it.”
Rachel posts videos about once a week. She initially filmed in her bedroom, then moved to the kitchen table, but found that she did not have enough room and could not get all the shots she wanted. Just this August, she had the idea of renovating her basement, transforming it into her new kitchen workspace.
“Once I had that idea, it really happened within a couple of weeks,” Rachel said. “I painted the walls by myself, then I picked out all the furniture. My family members helped me assemble some of the furniture but a lot of it was what my vision was.”
Rachel finds inspiration for her videos by relating her creations to tent-pole events or holidays known to generate a lot of interest.
“Other times, I literally think of a list of characters and a list of desserts and it’ll be like, Totoro cupcake or Hello Kitty doughnut or something like that, and that’s how I come up with ideas,” she said.
Simonitch said on the surface, people are drawn to her channel because she is a talented baker who works hard to make beautiful videos.
“More significantly, however, is that Rachel has a great, down-to-earth personality that translates well on camera,” Simonitch said. “She is comfortable being herself in her videos and, as a result, her viewers feel a personal connection that keeps them coming back each week.”
Rachel said one of the biggest advantages of working with Tastemade is being able to collaborate with other YouTubers and Tastemakers. She has collaborated with baking channels such as Mosogourmet, MyCupcakeAddiction and SimplyBakings.
“When you’re doing a collaboration, you do have to meet a certain deadline just so they can get the collaboration together and everything goes up at the same time,” Rachel said. “Other than that though, they’re really open. They say having a schedule is best, but they really say do whatever you’re comfortable with.”
This past summer, she collaborated with Wong Fu Productions, which has over 2 million subscribers. The manager had been a fan of Rachel’s channel for a while,, leading her to reach out to Rachel and ask if she would like to create a web series for them.
“When I read the email at first, I thought it was a spam email, that it was fake or something,” Rachel said. “I couldn’t believe it but I was really excited. My whole family was really excited for me.”
She traveled to Los Angeles to film the six-episode web baking series.
“It was really crazy because it was seven to eight hour days and we filmed two videos a day for three days,” she said. “There were eight to nine production assistants, three cameramen, three to four people just to help measure out ingredients and things and then other people just to be around in case I needed something. It was really hectic, but it was really fun overall.”
Initially, only one or two of her friends knew about her channel. Junior Jasmine Qi discovered Rachel’s channel freshman year.
“I was subscribed to someone who did arts and crafts, and in the related videos section I saw one which was like ‘Easy Bake Oven S’mores!’ and it turned out to be Rachel’s channel,” Qi said. “I screamed because it was her voice and she had so many views. At that time she had like 100,000 subscribers.”
Once she hit around 200,000 or 250,000 subscribers, Rachel realized it would be strange to continue keeping her channel a secret.
“It’s obviously not a secret anymore, so I decided to just share it and be proud of it,” she said.
She does not know what is in store for her channel when she goes to college, but wants to continue releasing videos in the future. She said she may pre-film videos for later release and would like to keep her focus on baking for now.
“I think it adds a nice clear focus to my channel and people know what they’re coming for,” Rachel said. “But in the future, it’d be kind of nice to do lifestyle things because I like DIYs and I’m into fashion.”
If school is her biggest priority, YouTube is her second, Rachel said.
“I really love posting videos and I think that’s what’s helped me propel my channel forward,” she said. “Because if you have a passion for something, you naturally are going to try to get better at it and you’re going to continue working at it. I’m trying to keep it cute, kawaii and light.”
