Esme Higgs seems to have life sussed. The 22-year-old lives on the south coast of England near her family in a 100-year-old cottage that she bought last year. Most days are spent with her horses Joey, Casper, Mickey and Duke, her donkeys Bruno, Toby and Willow, and her chickens.
Examples of her content that may sound familiar include morning routines, day in the life vlogs, satisfying cleaning and organising videos, get ready with mes (GRWMs) and challenges.
Higgs also specialises in tours of well-known equestrians’ barn setups, pony pamper sessions, horse tack hauls, trying new riding disciplines, presenting at big horse shows across the world and epic adventure series such as riding with elephants, lions and cheetahs on safari in Botswana and South Africa with Horizon Horseback Adventures.
Sounds idyllic? The reality is working 80-plus-hour weeks, battling through the wind and rain, sharing the realities and responsibilities of owning animals, and pushing every day to create the highest-quality offering and work with the very best.
Key takeaways
- Think the best way to make a success of a social media career is by going all in on your niche? Think again
- Esme Higgs started her YouTube channel when she was 15 and now has close to one million subscribers, 327K Instagram followers, 519K TikTok followers and 53K Facebook fans
- She has worked with everyone from horse food companies to country living brands, the BBC and high-end fashion labels such as Stella McCartney
- Not only that, but she has evolved into podcasting, writing a series of bestselling books and releasing official collections and merchandise
- Higgs’ branded items grossed more than £1 million in 2022 and her high-quality content production is what sets her apart
- What’s next? Making a splash in the US
Becoming Esme Higgs the YouTuber
For 15-year-old Esme, her YouTube channel was just a convenient storage bank for her horse-riding videos and a way to share them with family and friends. Having more time on her hands the summer after her GCSEs, she decided to upload a tutorial on how to tack up a horse, which was her first taste of attracting a wider audience, and lead to her trying vlogging for the first time. At age 18, the decision was made to take a gap year and give being a full-time content creator a real try.
“It wasn’t an overnight success or anything like that and I never thought it would be my full-time job,” Higgs tells CORQ. “I knew that people like Zoella did it as a job but I never thought something so niche would be so popular.”
With 10K subscribers, summer 2017 was when she made the leap to stop doing everything on her mobile phone and invest in proper filming equipment, editing software and her own computer. Ever since, she has uploaded a YouTube video at least every single Friday, and generally uploads two or three a week.
Over the years, Higgs’ content has grown and matured naturally alongside her. Her “This Esme” intro has been dropped – though remains a vital part of her branding, with This Esme branded items grossing more than £1m in 2022 – and her offering has widened from purely equestrian to include fashion, beauty, interiors and lifestyle.
Beside the horse updates and day in the life vlogs are a cottage renovation series, decorating for Halloween, clothing hauls, fitness routines and more, benefiting from people’s love for behind-the-scenes content and her audience’s interest in all things Esme.
“With social media, you’re always having to adapt, whether that’s because the algorithm changes or what your audience likes watching changes. It wasn’t a case of wanting to completely change the channel and rebrand,” explains Higgs. “It was more wanting to try something a little bit different. A lot of my audience are either teenage girls or girls in their 20s, who are also into other things such as fashion and beauty.”
One of the highlights of this approach has been working with Stella McCartney and being invited to Paris Fashion Week this year – “an incredible opportunity” – which she promoted on YouTube (107K views) and Instagram (931K views and 62K likes).
“It’s very important to stay true to me and my audience. I think one of the reasons why so many people like to watch my content is I’ve always been very relatable,” says Higgs, who is chatty and warm and bright, and attractive to a wide range of followers and companies. “So there are some more high-end brands that I work with but it’s also important to work with more mid-range fashion and beauty brands that are aspirational but more affordable.”
As if keeping up with socials, video production and brand deals wasn’t enough, this year Higgs also started her own podcast (in video form on her YouTube and also available on all other podcast platforms) and written a bestselling series of books, The Starlight Stables Gang, with co-author Jo Cotterill.
“I managed to speak to [publishing house] Penguin at a horse show where I was doing a meet-and-greet and that’s how it started,” she says. “It’s been incredible working with Jo and she’s from a non-horsey background, which was really important.”
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Building a business
Behind this powerhouse of content is mainly Higgs, ably assisted by her dad David, with the two taking on all of the filming and editing themselves and navigating most of the partnership deals, especially in the equestrian sector. Higgs’ business has been set up as a limited company since 2017 and her father is a full-time employee.
“I’m very lucky to work with someone that I know has my back,” she says. “He’s the main person I would go to for any business advice as well.”
For other professional support, she also consults an accountant, solicitor and media lawyer for checking contracts. Everything else – filmmaking, broadcasting, presenting, promotion – is self-taught.
In 2022, Higgs signed with US management agency Dulcedo to assist with non-equestrian deals, such as with beauty and fashion brands. Perhaps surprisingly, her YouTube following is greater in the US (40%) than in the UK (35%).
The split is 77% female to 23% male and the age range spans from 13- to 17-year-olds (12.6%) to 55- to 64-year-olds (3.9%), with an emphasis on 35- to 44-year-olds (25.7%).
“My audience is so broad. I have a group of people I call the Born Again Riders who are in their 50s or 60s and have gotten back into riding after their children have flown the nest,” she says. “My main demographic is probably teenage girls who watch the videos with their mums. My channel is definitely one a lot of families like to watch together.”
Long-term partnerships and collaboration considerations
Long-term partnerships are an important factor when it comes to Higgs’ authenticity and the trust her audience holds.
For brands, this involves being an ambassador for Fairfax & Favor and a sponsored rider for Redpost Equestrian, Voltaire Design, Baileys Horse Feeds, LeMieux, Lister, Bloomfields and Equito, and Charles Owen.
Her riding helmet collaboration with Charles Owen has “sold extremely well” and brands can see an uptick in sales when Higgs mentions their product online.
“I really like to work with brands on a long-term basis so a lot of the equestrian brands I work with are on a yearly or biyearly contract,” she says. “It’s also important for brand awareness. Maybe someone doesn’t need a new helmet yet but next time they do they’ll buy Charles Owen because that’s what I ride in. I wanted to make sure I was promoting the safest helmet on the market so I did a lot of research into that before working with them.”
The collaborations don’t stop there – just as important for Higgs are the ways she gives back to the equestrian community. She is a patron of World Horse Welfare and Team Tutsham, an ambassador for The Brooke Charity and Riders Minds, and regularly works with the Riding for the Disabled Association and Make A Wish. Alongside World Horse Welfare, earlier this year she rode through central London to protest against the live export of horses for slaughter.
So what’s next for the YouTuber and business that already seems to have it all? Breaking into the US, of course – or rather, reaping the rewards of a successful career that just so happens to involve a large US-based audience.
“My main aim for early 2024 is going over to the US as a lot of my YouTube subscribers are there, as well as a lot of the equestrian and country brands that I work with, so I’m filming a series of videos out there,” says Higgs.
Other priorities include presenting and social media work for various horse shows across the globe, hopefully attending Paris Fashion Week 2024, continuing the cottage renovation, and, most importantly, “going on many adventures with the horses!”
By Lauren Harris, CORQ editor. Picture credit: Esme Higgs
