The Search for Authentic Fragrances with Alexis Nikole aka The Black Forager

Alexis Nikole is taking the internet by storm with her unique blend of eco-friendly lifestyle content. The former social media manager turned full-time creator has amassed a huge following for her fun, educational videos showcasing her passion for foraging and cooking with wild ingredients.

From those humble beginnings, sharing photos of foraged greens and simple meals, Nikole's audience exploded when she started creating fun, educational videos on platforms like TikTok. Her secret sauce is blending education and entertainment.

After years of juggling her day job with her growing creator career, Alexis took the leap in 2022 to pursue content creation full-time.

And now she has ventured into products, with a collaboration with sustainable homecare brand Blueland. I spoke to Alexis about her journey and this new product launch.

The Business of Creators is a podcast for content creators and everyone interested in the Creator Economy. On this show Ian Shepherd speaks with the pioneers shaping the industry and digs deeper to get the scoop on new ways to create, distribute and monetize content.

Ian is co-founder of Electrify Video Partners, a company investing $m in established creators to accelerate their growth. Check out electrify.video.

Please go check it out and subscribe to the show for more interviews from industry leaders shaping the Creator Economy.

Transcript

Alexis Nicole  0:00  
A lot of what I talk about is environmental justice and helping people's food sourcing be more environmentally friendly, closer to home, having people take a bigger role in the way that they interact with the globe on a day to day basis, through the green spaces immediately around them, and because of that, a lot of brands don't necessarily make sense for me personally to want to work with, but with blue land, it was just like a no brainer.

Ian Shepherd  0:36  
Hello and welcome to the business of Creators Podcast, your essential guide to the heartbeat of the Creator economy. I'm your host, Ian shepherd, and I'm thrilled to take you behind the scenes and into the world of individuals and businesses who play a crucial role in supporting creators with their products and services. On today's episode, we're delighted to be joined by Alexis Nicole, the brilliant mind behind the black forager social media persona, Alexis is a passionate advocate for connecting with nature through foraging, and has amassed a dedicated following by sharing her adventures in finding and cooking with wild edibles. Her content is not only informative, but also infused with a delightful sense of fun and whimsy that keeps viewers engaged in this insightful conversation, Alexis opens up about the origins of her black forager persona, her transition from working in social media to becoming a full time creator, and the development of her distinctive content style. But we'll also dive into her exciting new collaboration with the eco friendly Home Essentials brand blue land, where she's helped curate a special collection of hand soap scents inspired by her love of foraging. Before we jump into the show, let me tell you about electrify video partners, a business I co founded that invest millions of dollars into creative businesses. We offer large, established creators a partner to help them scale the business to step back or to exit altogether, check us out an electrify dot video, or drop me a DM to find out more, right? Let's get on with the show. So today on the podcast, I'm joined by Alexis Nicole. Welcome to the show.

Alexis Nicole  2:13  
Hello, hello. Thank you so much for having me. Ian, I'm so happy to be here.

Ian Shepherd  2:18  
Great. Well, I'm really excited to learn about your collection. But before we dive into that, can you just give us a bit of background, like, what inspired you to create the black forager persona on social media?

Alexis Nicole  2:30  
Yeah, well, back when I was doing a whole lot of foraging, just after graduating from university, very broke, as most people recently out of university often are, and I was looking for ways to kind of make these really cheap, inexpensive meals, you know, ramen, what have you, feel a bit more elevated and feel a bit more healthy. And I had foraged a lot as a kid with my mom and cooked what we foraged in the kitchen with my dad. So I started going around and gathering all the edible wild greens in my urban neighborhood, and I wanted to document the things that I liked and the things that I didn't like. And so I started an Instagram page, and when I was choosing the handle for it, one thing that I realized and recognized out of all of all of the foragers that I was following at the time is that no one looked like me, and there's a very long and very storied history of black folks here in the US foraging and our relationship with wild spaces and wild food. So back before everything was vertical video and when a lot of things were just beautiful, still life photos, Instagram was still for pictures. I wanted people to know, regardless of whether they could see me in the photo or not, that it was coming from a woman of color. And so that's, that's why I chose the handle. And as for the persona, that's, that's just me. If I could be any other way, I promise you I would be. I've tried.

Ian Shepherd  4:06  
I love it. I love it. And this sort of content style being very fun and informative. Like, how did you develop that?

Alexis Nicole  4:13  
So for a couple of years, I was managing social media for brands, and you get a really good handle on people's attention span, the type of content that people enjoy engaging with, the type of content people will stay to the end for. And got to take a lot of those learnings and take what honestly is usually the hardest part out of it, which is trying to sell people something. And even when I was doing branded content, I found that as long as there was some sort of educational aspect, usually something both educational and entertaining, that people would be really excited to consume that media, regardless of whether it was like, you know, also trying to sell them a bar box or. On it. And so I got to go and apply a lot of those learnings to my own content. At the at the time when Tiktok was like, really first starting to blow up, late 2019, early 2020, my boss at the time, who I love, was just like, I'm done figuring out new social medias. You're young. I was still in my 20s, then you figure out tick tock. And so I just started messing around, and, you know, trying to use everything that I had learned on the job for making videos. And I didn't want to test all of my concepts on the brands page, so I made my own just kind of showing people what I do in my day to day life, and one of those big things is foraging, and that happened to really strike a chord with a lot of people, which no one was more surprised about than me. Well, I love that story,

Ian Shepherd  5:53  
and it sounds like you certainly had a head start working in social media before you transitioned to be a creator. Can you talk a bit more about that journey, maybe any challenges you experienced, or lessons that you learned?

Alexis Nicole  6:05  
Oh, gosh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I just alluded to is, you know, trying to sell things can be difficult when you're not extraordinarily excited and or passionate about what it is that you are trying to sell, which when you're working in branded content, there's going to be some times when you are truly, really excited about something, and the concepts come easy. The filming is a fun process. You're really excited to get it out there. And then, you know, there are times when you're just like, Are you sure this needs to be the promo that I have to be talking to everybody about, I'll do it because I love health insurance, but I will, the smile on my face will be a little bit more forced than it was for some of the other things, you know, things that I think of in particular is when I was working for BART, Things like the 420 branded toys, which seemed very controversial when we first launched them, and then now in the last like five years, I'm like, Oh, this seems so tame now in the grand scheme of content marketing and branded posts. So it's always, oh my goodness. It's always really fun to also look back on how quickly content for brands and content for creators shifts, you know, how much people are messing with, you know, those kind of attention spans. I think for a while we saw this like hyper compression of content, where things were getting shorter and shorter and shorter, and now we're kind of seeing people wanting to stretch their legs a little more. Drop some video essays. You know, tiktoks trying to encourage people to post 10 minute long videos. I personally have not come across a 10 minute long video yet, except an entire episode of SpongeBob that somebody posted, which, in their defense, I did stop and watch the entirety.

Ian Shepherd  8:00  
I love it. I love it. And how's your content changed over that time, from when you started in 2019, to where you are now? Oh,

Alexis Nicole  8:07  
absolutely. Before I was leaning really heavy into video, you know, for me, it was a lot of those very high contrast like top down, artsy, editorial food shots, you know, with the crazy heavy like direct lighting. I, you know, going into like, growing up, reading things like Martha Stewart magazine with my mom, and consuming food media regularly at that time, that's what high end food media was looking like even on social media, it kind of just took everything that was editorial and just slapped it onto Instagram and called it a day. I honestly. I know I'm not, I know I'm probably not in the majority, but I loved this conversion from still frames still lives into a more dynamic storytelling as you can probably already tell, I love talking. If you give me something to talk about, I will talk about it for however long you tell me to, so to be able to talk to people in real time and to have people hear the genuine excitement in my voice when talking about a new plant or a new recipe or, I mean, in the case of what we're about to talk about this blue land collab, I think that has really helped my content. I think what maybe came across as sometimes like forced or even cheesy when I was trying to convey it in written text is so much more natural for me in video. Yeah, I

Ian Shepherd  9:51  
can definitely see that for sure. And I think across this journey you went from working and being a creator. To then leaving and becoming a full time creator. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Alexis Nicole  10:04  
Oh, it was very scary, and I dragged my heels about it for a good long time. My my partner started telling me a year before I finally put in my notice that, essentially, hey, you're working two full time, 40 plus an hour a week. Jobs were barely like hanging out with each other, because you wake up early in the morning to go shoot your own content. Then you log in on your computer at nine o'clock, and then you work until six o'clock, and then you log off and edit the stuff that you shot for yourself in the morning. And then you're monitoring comments for an hour or two after hanging out chatting with everybody, and that's your entire day. And that's bad, but I mean social media changes so rapidly, and you see people have meteoric rises and equally as meteoric falls like into people's homes and then into obscurity. And I was very nervous about that happening to me, so I figured, why not still have my nice, stable job with my wonderful coworkers and my stable paycheck and my health insurance. But about a year after, trying to really balance the two full time, and by that time, I was traveling for both jobs, I was giving talks for both jobs, and it kind of felt like I was splitting my brain into I finally did go ahead and put in my mom's notice, because I wanted to help with hiring my replacement. And when I tell you the day after I put in my notice, I signed my cookbook deal, and my parents said they would have loved it if I had done the reverse, that it would have made them feel much more secure if I had signed book deal first then left stable job. But it all ended up working out in the end. Thank goodness I look where

Ian Shepherd  12:10  
you are now exactly.

So I'm really excited to talk to you about this new blue land collection. Can you tell us more about it?

Alexis Nicole  12:19  
Okay, so blue land is this super cool company that is focused on household essentials, your hand soaps, your cleaning detergents, but taking one a lot of the water out of the shipping process for things like soaps, water is probably the most heavy part of that shipping process. That's something that we end up paying for, and it ends up being worse for the environment, having to, you know, cart your adorable little bottles of liquid hand soap, 1000s of miles in either direction. So it's also really nice in saving for things like fuel. They're very environmentally focused, which, when I first found out about them, I think is what drew me to the company. I also being a woman of color, love that they are a woman of color LED company that's really making a splash like a legitimate splash, not a green washed one within the realm of making these essentials that everyone kind of needs for their house more friendly to the environment. You know, you get a reusable glass bottle for the hand soaps, and then they're just delivered to you as tiny little tablets, and you just add in this, add in the water, add in the tablets, you also get the very satisfying, almost like a bath bomb, fizzy experience of dropping the tablets in, something that we have weirdly grown to be very excited about when it's time to choose a new hand soap scent in this house. I don't even know who I am anymore. I'm like, Is this me in my 30s, being really delightfully excited about my hand soap choices. And I guess it is so when they reached out and said that they were also fans of my content and were wondering if there was some way that we could collaborate. I was I was so excited, I probably much to my my parents and my management chagrin. Am very choosy about the brands that I work with. A lot of what I talk about is environmental justice and helping people's food sourcing be more environmentally more environmentally friendly, closer to home, having people take a bigger role in the way that they interact with the globe on a day to day basis, through the green spaces immediately around them. And because of that, a lot of brands don't necessarily make sense. Yes, for me personally, to want to work with, but with blue land, it was just like a no brainer. I am so proud of this collection,

Ian Shepherd  15:11  
it sounds like the perfect fit. Really. Was the creative process like, how were you involved in that? And what about the scents that have been chosen.

Alexis Nicole  15:23  
I was elated at how hands on I got to be during the creative process, maybe even too much so I suggested so many different scents, just things that really stand out to me as a forager and as a lover of plants throughout the season that I think people would recognize if they smelled them, but maybe have never taken the time to kind of chase down where those smells are coming from. So the sense that we ended up going with are beach rose which are these insanely fragrant roses that love to grow along our sea shores, even along the Great Lakes, you'll find them a lot. And if you think of the most wonderful rose you've ever smelled, it's kind of like that, but dialed up to 11, wow. And you also get that, that brininess of being really close to the ocean that mixes and mingles with it too. And so when I said that I wanted to have those little notes in there, their chemistry team was like, Oh, amazing. We love doing exciting things and getting to kind of titrate in these little secondary scents to help set an atmosphere with these. And I loved that they weren't just like, Okay, give us three things that smell good, that you can forage and then calling it a day, we had entire meetings where we were just sniffing these tablets, going back and forth between two alternate scents for an hour, zeroing in on what we thought told the best story what we thought would be the most comforting to bring into somebody's home. So beach rose, lilac, clove. I My mother loved growing lilacs when I was growing up. They're a very quintessential garden plant worldwide. I think people smell them, and they don't necessarily know where it's coming from. It could be their own yard, a neighbor's yard. So I'm hoping that that kind of takes people back to spring days childhood, the sun deciding to grace us with her presence after a long winter. And then the last one, which is very near and dear to my heart is June berry basil. June berries, also called service berries, or if anyone's listening in Canada, Saskatoon berries. And you know, when a food has a lot of names that it's delicious and important to a lot of people, and you normally see them as landscaping trees across North America and even now in a lot of parts of Europe, but they have the most delicious fruit hiding on them. They taste like apples and blueberries with a little bit of almond and so getting to design that scent based around one of my favorite wild foods, getting to be like, Oh no, I think this needs a little bit more, you know, frangipani to like up the almondiness and, oh, I think it needs a little bit more tartness from the apple. Was such a cool experience. And it also really was fantastic for the science nerd within me as well, to get to be so hands on with that design process. It's amazing.

Ian Shepherd  18:41  
It certainly sounds like there's been so much care and attention given to this first range. And what are your long term goals for the black forager and the impact that you want to have?

Alexis Nicole  18:51  
I I mean, one of the things that I was hoping to do, which it's wild to me, seeing people telling me that that's happening is just having people being more excited about the screen spaces around them, regardless of whether you live in a city. I mean, I live in downtown Columbus, Ohio, and there I still have access to so many cool plants around me, or if you live in the woods, or if you live in suburbia, like there are special things about everyone's surroundings. If you just pause for a second and look a little bit harder than we've all kind of been conditioned to do, you know, a lot of times you just see the little grassy knoll between the street and the sidewalk, and you're like, Okay, little grass patch. And then you look close and you're like, Oh no, there's clovers, there's wood sorrel, there's different grasses. I really just wanted to set out to have people care more about these spaces, regardless of. Whether they were going to be eating from them or not, to just kind of switch the plant blindness switch from on to off for a couple of people, was my biggest goal. So it's wild to me that that has happened. I also, of course, love cooking, love recipes, working on a cookbook right now. So that is very much in the future. I don't know. Maybe someday it'll be like a very quirky cooking show, a la Alton Brown samine, no sweat. But maybe with a dash of maybe with a dash of kids show like The Magic School Bus thrown in. Gotta have a little whimsy.

Ian Shepherd  20:42  
What a combination. Well, thank you so much for sharing your journey today and details about the collection before we wrap up. Can you just share any advice you have for aspiring creators and that you've picked up on your way as a creator? Yourself?

Alexis Nicole  20:59  
Absolutely I know that it can often seem trite, but chase the things that are chase the things that are bringing you the most giddy joy. If you find yourself like giggling to yourself or smiling to yourself while you are working on a piece of content, or while you're working on a script, or while you're working on a piece of art, that's that's what we have to be chasing people feel that when they interact with that content, once you let it out into the world, if things are feeling hard, if things are feeling heavy, if you feel like you are hitting A wall, it might be time to take a pivot and take a step back and chase the things that you have fun doing for a little bit and folding that into your content. I was going through a little bit of burnout, and then I, like, tripped and fell into loving birding. So now I've also been like folding that into my content as well with like, silly bird pics and my Instagram Stories, which I did not expect to resonate with anyone, that was very much something I was doing for me, and now so many people are just like, Oh, I love when you post your ridiculous bird pictures that you saw while you Were out foraging. So Chase the happy. And when you feel like you're hitting a wall, turn away from the wall. You you might have hit a dead end in that maze, and you just gotta make a little 90 degree turn in either direction and try something else.

Ian Shepherd  22:36  
Very wise words there. Well, thank you so much. Alexis, I can't wait to see the new collection and what comes next? Oh

Alexis Nicole  22:41  
my gosh. Thank you so much, Ian, this has been a joy. What a beautiful way to start the day.

Ian Shepherd  22:47  
Thank you. Great to speak to you.

Alexis Nicole  22:49  
Great to speak to you too.

Ian Shepherd  22:50  
That was the business of creators. Thank you for listening and making it this far. I have some exciting guests lined up in the next few episodes, so please hit subscribe and watch out for the next show. Ian.