Taylor Richard

Born and raised in Canada, Taylor Richard jumped at the chance to travel to Asia on a modelling contract. After spending time in Japan, she arrived in Hong Kong in 2010, and has called this city home ever since. Although she claims she’s retired now, Richard is still a terrific model, but what she’s known and loved for are her storytelling and content creation. She now has 1.3 million YouTube subscribers and 655,000 Instagram followers, with a further 705,000 on Facebook; in an ocean of content creators, she’s one of the best.

“I don’t think I’m necessarily doing anything different,” she says. “But I’m me with my own unique story, experiences and opinions, and I’ve always shared my life authentically – the ups and downs, moving countries, different milestones … and my community has grown with me through all of this.”

Richard isn’t afraid to be vulnerable in front of the camera or discuss difficult topics – when she shared a series of videos detailing her fertility journey, we wept with her, just as we celebrated when she gave birth to a son a year and a half ago and cheered for her as she manoeuvred her way through motherhood. Making your life public takes courage, and Richard admits she still has moments when she wonders whether her content is good enough. But her rapidly growing following suggests she must be doing something right.

“I always thought I needed to have everything figured out with the perfect end result to show for it. When I started to share things online, I thought I had to be an expert,” Richard says. “That mindset got old fast and slowed me down tremendously. Now I remind myself it’s the process that’s so much more interesting, because no one really knows what they’re doing. We’re all trying to figure life out. How fun is it we get to do it together and learn from each other?”