Cassey Ho started her YouTube channel so she could still instruct her Pilates class on the U.S. west coast after moving to the east coast. She thought the video she posted would be viewed by her 40 students, but instead she got thousands.
Sixteen years later, Ho runs the direct-to-consumer brand Pop Flex, has a clothing brand in Target stores, and boasts 10.8 million subscribers on her YouTube channel, Blogilates. So how did she leverage a successful YouTube career into a successful YouTube career and being the head of two companies? She listened to her audience.
“ People were asking, ‘Cassie, I wanna wear a shirt with Blogilates on it,’ and I was like, ‘Why do you wanna wear a shirt with my screen name on it? That’s so weird,'” Ho said during her fireside chat at VidCon 2025.
Still, after a visit to her screen printer, she provided. It’s an ethos she still follows to this day — it isn’t uncommon to find a YouTube Short and TikTok from Ho where she shows a design that she made in response to comments asking her to fill a gap in the fitness wear space.
She encourages commenters to tell her what they want to see out of their active wear. During her chat, she even encouraged the VidCon audience to come up to her after and tell her what issues they encountered with clothes.
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“ What inspires me are problems…because I’m not gonna design something that’s already out there — what a waste of time,” she said. “So when I am picking what fabric, [wondering] is it gonna have a pocket, is it gonna have this seam — all those kind of things. When I actually do that, I’m thinking about that video I’m about to make two years later, so that I have my talking points already.”
The jump from content creation to clothing creation felt like a natural progression for Ho. For one, she dreamed of being a designer when she grew up. But as her channel grew and she took on more brand deals, she found herself agreeing with commenters that called her a sell out.
“I got really sick of doing brand deals because people are telling you how to sell, what to say, and oftentimes it can feel very inauthentic,” she said. “ Talking about my own brand was almost like an internal brand deal and that actually was good content too.”
Cassie’s found that with her success, brands from Shein to Nordstrom are copying her designs. Most notably, Shein duped the design for a Pop Flex skirt after Taylor Swift posted herself wearing it on Instagram. The Shein dupe inspired Cassie to apply for a patent. Now that her design is patented, she says she’s fought 2,065 dupe listings of the skirt.
“ I’m a little David and I’m fighting several different Goliaths,” Ho said. “ Some people tell me, ‘Cassie, stop focusing on that. Put your energy towards design.’ Like yes, but the reason why I fight is because I’m not just doing it for me. Thank God I have a platform that I can speak from. A lot of small independent designers do not, and so if I can win this for me, I’m winning it for all the other independent artists out there.”
