🔴 How this creator built a 6-figure lifestyle brand

Lucie Fink has spent a decade in front of the camera — notably at Refinery29, then on her own. She's weathered trolls, algorithm shifts, and platform changes to build an audience of 1.4 million across channels, growing with the creator economy.

In this episode:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

ElevenLabs is the all-in-one AI creative platform built to bring your content to life. A single platform to generate, edit, and localize premium audio and video content in minutes, powering millions of creators, marketing teams, and media companies worldwide.

Companies like Disney, Meta, Duolingo, and Mozart AI use ElevenLabs to power expressive audio dubbing, multilingual marketing content, character voices, and song creation.

Get started for free with 10,000 monthly credits on the Free Plan.

This is an advertisement.

🎧 If you prefer a podcast platform other than YouTube, we’re on Apple, Spotify, and all the rest.

By Natalia Pérez-González

Women who make lifestyle content often attract a particular kind of criticism: your life is too charmed, you have no adversity, everything looks easy.

One day in 2020, Lucie Fink uploaded a video. Over the next few hours, a particular follower would leave a flurry of stinging comments.

Lucie had spent over half a decade on camera up to that point — notably as a host for Refinery29, then as an independent creator — and had developed a thick skin for negative comments. In her early days, such comments triggered shame, embarrassment, a flight response. Block, delete, pretend it doesn't exist. Years of that, and you either quit or you calcify.

This time, Lucie was curious; she sent the woman a direct message.

Lucie wanted to know who she was, what her life was like, and what was driving her comments. Would she be willing to get on a call? The woman accepted her invitation.

As they spoke, there was no vitriol, just raw and uncomfortable emotion. The woman said that everything good in Lucie’s life — her job, marriage, forward motion — was the inverse in hers. Two people on a call see each other much differently than the poster sees the commenter in the feed, and vice versa.

Years of such comments had built up some mental callus, but they still had a cutting edge. That call dulled the blade.

Nowadays, when Lucie responds kindly to a mean comment, one of three things tend to happen: the person deletes it out of embarrassment, they double down to fight, or they flip entirely — Oh, I didn't know you were really here. Hi, I love your videos.

For a while, the woman Lucie called stopped leaving these comments. But only for a while.

Lucie makes her living on the mic and in front of the camera. She started out making stop-motion videos on Instagram and a YouTube series for her college admissions office.

After school, working as a production assistant at Ogilvy, Lucie connected with an executive who eventually left for Refinery29 and brought her along, asking her to help build out their digital video department.

This was the pivotal moment: Lucie worked full-time as an on-camera host, spending half a decade building Try Living with Lucie into a hit show.

By the time she left Refinery29, she'd already built 100,000 subscribers on her personal YouTube channel. And instead of walking away cold, she negotiated a transitional contract for her final year: $100k for 16 videos, more money than her previous salary for a fraction of the output.

At first glance, this was an incredible deal, an upgrade. And it was, but as a full-time employee at Refinery29, she had a team of around 20 people who handled distribution and much else — editing, copywriting, posting across platforms. Alone, Lucie had to build that infrastructure from scratch. Nobody would do it for her; it took a year just to realize she needed to treat herself like a mini media company.

Then she got married and had two kids. Her two maternity leaves became, unexpectedly, her most creatively productive periods.

Lucie’s audience aged with her, shifting from majority 18-24 year-olds to 25-34 year-olds as her life and content evolved from girl-in-the-city to suburban motherhood.

Since that Refinery29 contract ended, brand deals have been the backbone of Lucie’s revenue. She told us around 90% of her revenue has come from brand partnerships since.

It's good money, she says, but it's fragile — dependent on algorithms, on trends, on brands continuing to spend. So Lucie started building alternatives.

The goal is to reduce brand deals from 90% of her revenue to 50% — to build a diversified and durable business.

Big picture, she's angling for an unscripted hosting role on a streaming platform — something that takes her off her own channels and back into the professional communicator role she started in.

Lucie’s career arc has flowed with the growth of digital video and the creator economy — a media startup giving a platform to millennial talent, who leaves to chase higher growth potential on their own.

As the creator economy matures and integrates with traditional media, it would be certainly be fitting to see her join up with a streamer.

In April 2019, months into Lucie’s transition out of Refinery29, a dance company invited her to film a 20-minute hip-hop class at their Brooklyn studio. No payment — just come in, learn the routine, and post it to your channel.

She wasn't a fitness creator, and the video didn't fit her content, but she liked dancing — so why not experiment? Her audience responded as expected — just a few thousand views. She moved on.

A year later, COVID hit, and everyone was stuck at home, scouring YouTube for inspiration on how to move their bodies. Lucie's video got sucked into the algorithm, and for a period, it was the top search result for "learn a dance."

It brought in:

So she leaned in, filming more dance classes consistently over the next several years (her most recent one was posted a month ago). Five of her most-viewed videos are these dance tutorials. From these videos, she gained ~200,000 subscribers collectively — nearly 40% of her total audience. At one point, she genuinely considered pivoting: Should I just become a dance channel?

Though the numbers were tempting, she decided against it. And for anyone in a similar content crossroads, former Spotlight guest Andrew Huang’s ikigai-style system helps evaluate every idea through a five-circle Venn diagram:

An idea is only worth pursuing if it answers at least four of these questions. In Lucie’s case, she wasn't a dance creator, and she didn't want to become one. Her content had always been wide-ranging: lifestyle experiments, emotional storytelling, poetry, vlogs.

Siloing herself into dance cardio would have meant abandoning everything else that made her platform hers.

Between September 2023 and December 2024, Lucie's YouTube channel stalled, gaining only 4,000 subscribers. Her videos were still performing, but the channel was flat.

Her large influx of dance subscribers had followed for hip-hop cardio; they weren't there for lifestyle content about suburban motherhood, podcast clips, or poetry reels. They showed up in the subscriber count but not in the engagement, which makes sense: they got what they came for, and Lucie moved on to other things.

Lucie still makes dance videos occasionally — she recently filmed one as a paid brand partnership. That's the play: monetize the format directly, but don’t hinge on audience growth strictly from those viewers.

Former Spotlight guest Sydney Graham, a sewing creator on YouTube, offers a useful contrast.

Sydney grew her audience from 16K to 118K subscribers in a year, partly through SEO-driven content riding a trend, just like Lucie's dance videos. But Sydney is a product-focused creator; her offerings are streamlined. Her tutorial Ganni tie top dupe tutorial, for example, captured search traffic and converted viewers into customers for her core product.

That's easier when you're an expert-creator selling a skill. For lifestyle creators, the math is different. There's no product to slot into a dance tutorial.

The value proposition is you — your taste, your perspective, your story — and that takes a specific, thoughtful strategy to convert: bridge content that connects the trend to your identity, CTAs that point new viewers toward your core work, or email capture that lets you nurture the relationship beyond one video.

Do you want to advertise an open role in Creator Spotlight? Reply to this email.