Passionate for beauty, Shalini Samuel a.k.a Knot Me Pretty set on a journey to pursue beauty blogging and content creation. The Youtube star with over 960K subscribers is known for giving skincare tips and some amazing hairstyling techniques that can give you different ways to express yourself. Shalini & her ‘Knotty’ videos are a rage on the web, guiding and inspiring many to lead a stylish life.
Here is the story of a girl who had a dream, and did everything in her power to achieve it.
Born in Dehradun in a typical army household, Shalini’s upbringing taught her to adjust, share & most importantly to be humble; irrespective of what she achieves in life. Her father served in the Indian army for 20 years, before he took premature retirement & settled in Mumbai.
Shalini did her schooling from 6 different schools while staying at some beautiful locations where her father would be posted. Later, she went on to pursue B.Com. from HR college in Mumbai.
“The kind of diversity you see in meeting different people, changing homes and cities every 2 years, adjusting to a new environment at an early age really moulds you into someone super fluid who embraces the manifold varieties of life.”
The idea of going digital was seeded by her friend who introduced Shalini to the world of Youtube. The fact that you can sit in your room, making videos and sharing them with people who are miles and miles away from you was fascinating to her. The joy of reaching out to people felt priceless. She soon decided that she wanted to have her own Youtube channel.
Shalini says ,“To be honest I didn't quite understand anything about the impact of digital content. It hadn’t picked up all that much In 2016 anyway. I pretty much got hooked into watching a lot of Youtube videos and followed some creators and their lives very closely. Everything about it intrigued me.”
After having worked as a hairstylist for 3 years, She finally began her journey as a content creator. Luckily for her, when she started off there was no dedicated channel giving solutions for hair in all aspects. Using her technical understanding about hair styling, she started sharing her immense knowledge with the Indian audience.
Shalini says “I started my channel with a lot of help from my friend. The initial 6 months were very challenging. I was yet to understand how things worked at backend, while I focussed on making better content. Views were negligible. But my little family of followers I had were very motivating.”
Shalini started working as a talent for GLAMRS which helped in boosting the popularity of her channel to some extent, but it was still far from what she was looking for.
Just when she thought of giving up, one of her celebrity inspired video really took off and garnered lakhs of views overnight. She majorly owes it to the fact that she really tried to understand Youtube metadata and how helpful it is to get your videos on the suggested page, especially initially.
Shalini adds, “If you’re a new creator, you have to understand everything that goes into the end product - from content to statistics too. Understanding metadata, the tags, high searched key words, how to rank higher on Google Search is really important.”
Once her videos went viral, she focused on making similar content that was working for her. For Shalini, it has always been about making value driven impactful videos with a lot of take away in terms of knowledge and she aims to continue doing that always.
She wishes to effectively utilise her passion for skincare, hair and grooming to eventually start her own line of haircare and styling products.
On sharing about her objective as a creator, Shalini adds, “My objective is to create an ecosystem where women can find all sorts of grooming and self-care solutions to their problems. I want my platforms to be that one-stop place. I also want to have my own line of hair care and hair styling products that will make it really simple for women to style their hair.”
Shalini feels, the most important thing about being an influencer is that one can actually make a difference to people’s lives by inspiring and motivating them. Where opinions and voices are heard, but also to understand that all this comes with a lot of responsibility.
Shalini wishes to leave a positive impact on the society by making everybody understand that they’re equal no matter how they look and the importance of leading a well balanced holistic lifestyle.