Thousands of students graduate from the University of Houston each year, and very few, if any, can claim they’ve earned a Creator Award from YouTube.
But C. T. Bauer College of Business Graduate Erica Parkinson can.
Parkinson has overseen her family’s Brasians YouTube Vlog since 2015. In the past decade, her channel, which has a majority audience in Japan, has amassed more than 31.6 million views and more than 151,000 subscribers, and has published more than 120 videos.
To earn the Silver Creator Award, a creator needs to surpass a subscriber count of 100,000.
That’s quite the feat for a student who also has also juggled a job as a bartender and is part of Bauer’s Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship program, which was rated the No. 1 entrepreneurship program for undergraduates by U.S. News & World Report in November 2024.
“In the beginning, we were just making videos for fun. It was very sporadic,” Parkinson said. “We really started picking up around Covid time, which makes sense. We try to post once a week or once every two weeks. We now have a full team to do this.”
“In the beginning, we were just making videos for fun.”
— Erica Parkinson, C. T. Bauer College of Business graduate
Parkinson was one of 1,344 Bauer students to walk the stage on May 9 at the Fertitta Center. And although she isn’t quite sure how graduation will impact her status as a YouTuber, she said she has no plans to stop posting.
“It’s going to be hard because my sister is moving away for college — to Sam Houston State University — and I’m trying to move out,” Parkinson said. “We will still try to film, but I don’t know how consistent it will be.”
The University of Houston met with Parkinson to talk about her future and how the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship prepared her for life after college.
Q: What brought you to UH?
A: I went to San Jacinto for my pre-requisites. I probably switched degree plans like three or four times before deciding on what I wanted to do. I decided on business, so I was applying for here and the University of Texas at Austin.
I got accepted into UH, so I ended up coming here. As for the WCE, I was in an entrepreneurship course and got dragged into Backyard Wolves, which is one of the teams for Wolffest. I ended up volunteering.
Q: What was Wolffest like for you the first time you did it?
A: Our team was kind of disorganized, so I ended up stepping up a lot in that. I did my own boba tea vendor and sold these little Japanese pancakes – I did a whole vlog about it. That was my big exposure to it. It was so fun and everyone was so welcoming.
Q: Why did you want to join the Wolff Center after doing Wolffest?
A: Talking to a lot of people in the program who were volunteers, it was really cool to see how everyone was so motivated and passionate. They were also very welcoming and weren’t judgmental; they were ambitious to do things. It made me feel like I could start a business. It’s not something people just do. It’s something you can actually pursue. It made me think, “I have to be here.”
Q: How did you come up with the idea for Brasians?
A: Back when I was in high school, we hosted a Japanese business exchange student who worked for my mom. She was a YouTuber who did a lot of life in America content. We slowly started getting on her channel and doing videos with her.
When I turned 19, I started my own channel. It was very unpolished; it was made in iMovie. But we started with things like visiting Japan – we typically go every year to visit family – and then I’d film videos of my siblings.
We already had a fanbase from the exchange student’s channel, so we took that when we started the YouTube channel. In 2020, we pivoted to doing a family channel and called it Brasians.
Q: What was the inspiration for using Japanese on the channel?
A: If you watch Japanese TV, they use a lot of captioning for videos. It’s very distinct: the font is cartoony, bubbly and colorful. So, once we figured out our demographic, we noticed people were using our channel to learn English.
From there, we realized if we put these subtitles on, we can at least cross-compare what we’re saying. That helped draw more attention.
Q: I saw your first-ever video had 55,000 views — what would you say is the reason you got so much attention early on?
A: I think it was all because of the exchange student — she has a whole channel of her own. And her fanbase went to mine, so in the first week I had more than 30,000 views. I was so excited; it was super cool. She promoted it on her Instagram for me.
I was just doing it for fun at that point. At the time, I also had a following from Musical.ly, which was TikTok’s old name. So, some of them came from that site.
Q: What are some of the challenges running this channel?
A: Definitely scheduling — especially now. My sister’s a senior in high school, I’m a senior in college, and my little brother is a sophomore and he plays basketball. We’re all over the place. My mom is crazy busy, too. Coordinating four people to collab on one video is near impossible.
We’ve also been struggling to make sure our content is something people really want to engage with. We’ve noticed our engagement has improved recently, but trying to find that groove is difficult.
Q: What’s next for you?
A: I’m moving to North Carolina. I think it’ll be a fun challenge to re-establish myself and start from the ground up. I’m getting my commercial real estate license to build a network and knowledge about the area, and while I do that I want to experiment with build some tiny homes and see how that goes.
Q: What’s the plan for Brasians?
A: Brasians will have a spin-off series about me in North Carolina living life away from home. I plan to post about homesick recipes and starting a business from scratch. I’ll still be involved and will continue to help direct creatively from afar.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.