Within a month, it had been watched nearly 5,000 times. Definitely impressive, but Alexsis is a big fish on the small screen – some of her top videos have been watched more than 600k times. In total, her videos have been watched 27.5 million times.
Alexsis joined YouTube back in 2009, when the social channel was still pretty new, but she didn’t launch herself properly until around 2012. She had just moved back to California from Alabama, where her family had lived while she was growing up. She needed to find ways to build her business back up. YouTube allowed her to reach like-minded clients who were looking for a new stylist.
‘It was scary going in front of a camera, but I so quickly found that the community out there is so incredibly supportive,’ says Alexsis. ‘You are putting yourself out there, but people love to share and that’s what social media is about.’
All her hair videos star her own clients, but recently, she’s been putting herself in front of the camera more, vlogging about motherhood and pregnancy.
‘A lot of my YouTube subscribers are my age and going through similar experiences, so they’d ask about how I was doing pregnancy and motherhood. I started sharing,’ explains Alexsis, who is expecting her second child. ‘It’s gone from there, but the main focus is still and always will be hair or beauty.’
Many of Alexsis’s subscribers are other hairdressers, so she has become an expert at walking that fine line between instructions that are simple enough to not bamboozle amateur hair fans but technical enough to please the blasé professionals tuning in. Only by appreciating those subtleties has she been able to build a loyal clientele while gaining the respect of the industry. Her advice for any budding YouTubers or Instagrammers is to keep it real and honest, and to keep at it. Her hard work in producing 391 videos over the past seven years, while working as a professional and being mum to a small child, has paid off. With 160k subscribers, Alexsis is able to earn advertising from her channel, plus she is called upon to deliver education on behalf of manufacturers.
However, her heart is in the salon, her own brand-new salon. She has it up and running, as you can see from her films, opening three days a week and with a huge waiting list. She takes all her appointments direct via Instagram or by phone, and despite putting herself so much in the public view, she has managed to create a sense of intimacy and personality with her salon. Part of the appeal, especially in California, is the consideration given to our environment, which Alexsis values and which is why she has always been such a huge fan of ECOHEADS.
