Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicole Grames and Lauren Toma.
Hi Nicole and Lauren, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
So how did we become Happiest Girls on Earth on YouTube? Well, as best friends in high school with a shared love for Disney, we decided to take our first girls’ trip by ourselves senior year before we graduated. During this trip, the two of us made a video highlighting our vacation and posted it to a personal YouTube account. We did this for our next girls’ trip several months later too and then March 2020 came. With scattered Disney plans but still a strong love for the parks, Nicole and Lauren decided to make a YouTube channel, Happiest Girls on Earth, using the two videos from their past trips as a foundation. It was not easy starting a channel during the pandemic, but with creative thinking and new ideas, we found a way to stand out in the Disney community without physically being in Disney for quite some time. Since things have opened back up, the status of our channel has never been better! Lauren is a local to Orlando and Nicole is a Midwestern girl, but we make our girl’s trips at Walt Disney World still happen very often giving us plenty of content! Our YouTube channel really started, and still is, a place for the two of us to look back on our adventures and our friendship that’s bound by our love for Disney. We hope this channel always serves as a time capsule to look back on all the laughs, smiles, and good times!
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
Happiest Girls on Earth is continually a work of progress every day. Having a long-distance best friendship is an intense struggle in itself, but thanks to technology, we are still able to continually produce videos for our channel together. Our girls’ trips to Walt Disney World are spaced out throughout the year so we try to film as much content as possible then so we can share it in waves until our next time together. These are some of the current struggles, but perhaps the biggest struggle was coming up with creative content ideas that people will want to watch during the pandemic when we couldn’t be in the parks. We resorted to everything Disney that we owned like showing off rare merchandise, cooking Disney Parks-inspired foods, or telling funny stories from our trips together. This has not been a smooth road and continues to have bumps, but our friendship helps us get through it and is ultimately what propels Happiest Girls on Earth forward each day.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Over the past two years, we have created a variety of content including resort tours, dining reviews, vlogs, and our favorite: Disney Dare Days. Disney Dare Days are days we dedicate to completing dares in Walt Disney World that are respectful to Cast Members and other guests, but will also leave you laughing uncontrollably. Both of us have dressed up, sang, danced, gotten makeovers, and had many hilarious character interactions. We both originally came up with Dare Days because we wanted to have even more fun at the parks. Disney World is already a magical, special place, but we wanted to make it even more memorable by challenging one another to complete these crazy dares. Like we mentioned before, our channel was made to be a time capsule so the two of us can look back on our adventures. Therefore, we embody humor and fun throughout all of our content for ourselves and for other individuals to find entertaining. We really are most proud of how much we have grown during a challenging time, but also for staying genuine and true to ourselves for our audience to see. In the end, if we have made just one person in this world smile or laugh, then we have done our job.
In regard to how we set ourselves apart from others, we have gotten many exclusive opportunities that few content creators were able to have, like first looks at new Disney World attractions or rides as well as a peek behind the curtain at some of Disney’s most secretive places! We also had the pleasure of meeting legendary imagineer, Bob Gurr, which was such an honor to do on the 50th Anniversary of Walt Disney World.
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
Although we would not consider ourselves risk-takers, the riskiest thing Happiest Girls on Earth has ever taken is creating the channel in the first place. We have loved to film ourselves in past trips, but putting ourselves out there during a pandemic and following our passion for videography and journalism was a huge step for us. In addition, we had to take the risk of our audience not liking our content during the pandemic because there was no way to make in-park content when we were creating from the Midwest. We had to rely on ShopDisney hauls, Disney-inspired cooking videos, and sharing vintage memorabilia. It was risky to start a channel in May 2020 amidst the pandemic, but we are both glad our hard work and dedication has impacted so many audience members positively.
Contact Info:
- Email: happiestgirlsonearth@gmail.com
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ-M3QgVAWwbsxqwBaXAqvg
Image Credits
Happiest Girls on Earth
