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These Founders Challenged Fashion’s Inclusivity Issue By Starting Their Own Agency


Shelcy and Christy Joseph are the sisters and business partners behind the influencer account NYCXCLOTHES. Their love of fashion and style helped propel them to YouTube and Instagram fame in 2018. Two years later, they quit their full time jobs as their business was starting to take off, and then everything went on pause due to the pandemic. They used the time to reflect, pivot, and eventually expand with a newly launched venture, NYCXSTUDIO, a consulting agency that advises brands on inclusive storytelling. 

Amy Shoenthal: Take me back to the origin of why you started NYCXCLOTHES.

Christy Joseph: We moved from Haiti to New York in 2010 after the earthquake. We were 13 and 16 years old at the time, and it was the middle of winter, so that experience was quite brutal. But we loved New York and we loved fashion. 

When we were in Haiti, we didn’t have as much of a creative outlet to really express our interest in fashion. We were never really encouraged to pursue that because the means are really limited as far as making a career there. But when we moved to New York that all changed. 

We started making videos on YouTube but didn’t think it was anything significant. People knew we were Haitian and talked about seeing themselves in our videos or having similar backgrounds. We had a predominantly immigrant audience. This response we were getting showed us that we were onto something, and if we continued, this could become bigger. In truth it became bigger than we could have imagined. 

2018 was really that pivotal year where it turned into the possibility of a career. It was definitely an organic process. 

About a year into it, a brand known as Rocksbox, which is a subscription jewelry company reached out to us and offered to give us a six month subscription in exchange for posting about it and we thought, wow. We didn’t imagine that this was something we could do. And so we accepted. Which made us realize there was a big opportunity with brands who were tapping into creators to place their products in front of audiences. We never knew that it would turn into brand partnerships or having our own agency. 

Shoenthal: So you’re just starting to see success, and 2020 rolls around which is the year you both invested in doing this full time. Tell me about that. 

Shelcy Joseph: I left my unfulfilling agency job in early April, and invested all my time in writing, creating still and video content for NYCXCLOTHES, and laying the foundation for our new brand consulting agency.  

Christy: I quit my corporate job in mid-March of last year because I was ready for my next professional chapter. But I didn’t anticipate the effects of the pandemic, especially on the job market and our business opportunities. It was, now I can say, a blessing in disguise. I worked the hardest in the weeks following.

Shoenthal: Was there anything you were looking forward to that was put on hold as the pandemic hit?

Shelcy: We were contracted to do a big digital campaign with Kate Spade, which was one of the biggest deals we’d landed that month. It wasn’t until they canceled days before we officially went into lockdown that we realized something serious was happening. We were also due to go on a press trip around that same period of time, and when that was canceled as well, we started bracing ourselves.

We both had more time in April after quitting our full-time jobs, so we focused on our content and engaging with our community online. We hosted this live chat series where we were checking on other creatives and seeing how they were doing. We thought of it because we hadn’t seen these people in so long and just wanted to know how they were doing. So we decided to do that, but publicly. We reached out to Nana Agyemang, Hannah Bronfman, Monroe Steele, people who were our friends for the most part, but they were also influencers so we knew others would be curious to hear from them. 

Christy: We also did dances, some random choreography, we went through my experience in online dating, we just started doing things for entertainment. Of course we were careful of our 

messaging to try to be sensitive to people, so when we did things like dressing up we positioned it as a form of joy. At this point, 50% of our partnerships were postponed or cancelled, so we took the moment to pivot. And of course this was right after we both left our full time jobs. We tried to think of what people wanted to see, and helped that guide us into what we should do next.  

Shoenthal: That’s really intense. What were you most afraid of during this period of time?  

Shelcy: It wasn’t too soon after the pandemic started when George Floyd happened and the racial reckoning started to take place. We were at the center of conversations with our different brand partners, asking hard questions and figuring out how we could help. Our goal was always to offer services to brands behind-the-scenes, but this situation was the impetus for launching our agency. So we combined our joint experiences both as creators and former brand managers, to determine our services and start engaging our close clients first.

Then there were other brands. One of them reached out and offered us, I’m not joking, $1000 for 100 pieces of content. They also wanted us to refer them to other Black creators to do the same thing. 

Christy: We sent a very carefully worded email to that company. 

We were worried about performance activists, and afraid that all the diversity conversations were reactive, and would end as soon as the BLM momentum was lost. But we focused on what we could control: the work that we were doing, the brands that seemed committed to doing the work, and using our platform to highlight issues and be a resource. Most of our partnerships come through relationships we already have. 

We went to many of the brands that we work with, and we first asked them, why are you doing this? Is this a reactive campaign to prove that you are about diversity? Or does it mean something? We counseled them in a way that showed how we felt. And we felt it would be best if they really let the creators tell their own story, instead of giving them a script and telling them what to say. 

Christy: With the heightened awareness about Black issues, we also saw an influx of brands looking to engage our talent. So our creator business gained lots of traction, and our platform more than tripled in size. It was overwhelming. There was a lot of virtue signaling and attempts to tokenize, but through it all, there was a sliver of hope that things were changing. So we focused on that.

The racial reckoning complicates what we now see as normal, since it shed light on so many of the commonplace, systemic issues affecting Black life. Unfortunately, we feel the movement has lost its momentum, and many brands have since not renewed their commitment to anti-racism. We were surprised to see how quickly many people were ready to “move on” from this.

Shelcy: It’s also why we decided to start our own agency. Our brand partners started asking us things like, hey can you look at this statement we’re about to put out and make sure it’s tone sensitive? We saw an opportunity there to really guide the brands who wanted to be more progressive and more inclusive, and we wanted to make it a little bit more official. That’s why we launched NYCXSTUDIO. It was an organic extension of the work we had been doing. We were already having the conversations and this was a way to bring all these offerings together. We didn’t only want to be a place to educate brands who truly wanted to be inclusive, but we could also help them really identify talent who we could recommend as partners. We became a one stop shop where brands could tell their stories and enlist the right partners to create content and bring their own stories online. That’s why we go with our tagline that we’re championing inclusive storytelling online and in real life. 

Shoenthal: What is the biggest obstacle you faced over the past 18 months? Was there anything unexpected that you learned? 

Shelcy: We learned that community has the power to foster healing.

Christy: On the business side, we learned not to ever get comfortable. That things can change from one moment to the other, be it due to algorithm changes or a pandemic that cancels all in-person activations.

We’ve launched an agency that stands for transparency and inclusive storytelling. We’re proud of the work we do, our vision for the company, and the impact it’s going to continue to have. Now we’re looking to hire our first full time team member. We’re looking to bring in a strategic thinker, proficient writer and someone well-versed in social media to be our right hand.

In our industry, there are ways to do more thoughtful and multi-dimensional advertising campaigns. We want to see more inclusive storytelling all around.





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