Tell us about yourself!
Hi, my name is Mathilda. I’m 24 this year. I'm a nine to five, I do a corporate job. I also run sage.soiree (a cheeseboard and sangrias company) on the side, that's my small home business I have with my friend. Also, I teach spin virtually from time to time. Yeah, that's essentially what I do.
A little bit more about me… I guess I’m someone who likes to be outdoors, someone who's very active. I generally stand for a lot of body positivity and well-being related matters on social media. I wouldn't say I'm a social justice warrior, but more of someone who likes to advocate for better practices.
How do you find the time to juggle all of of your jobs?
I really compartmentalise a lot of it. So my nine to five are on weekdays, and it’s really just me making the time during my work to get my tasks done before lunchtime. Anything after that will just be ad hoc tasks or meetings. Aside from that, because sage.soiree operates from Fridays to Sundays, we generally handle our orders only on the weekends. It’s a made to order business so we don't open up our calendars to other calendars on the weekdays.
So yeah, I think that's how I manage my time. Aside from work, I’m someone who likes to hang out with my friends. So after-work hours are for friends, family, for my partner - and we have a designated date night too. Even my workouts I do before the sun rises or during lunchtime. That's how I segregate everything.
Wow, the discipline? Are there any drawbacks to your compartmentalisation? Is there any, for the lack of a better word, a lack of spontaneity?
That's a really good question. I do still go off the bat, because my friends are very low maintenance friendships. They’re people who will meet when they’re free, otherwise it’s not big deal, we’ll just find another day to meet. Also I moved out of my family home so now I can host my friends at my home which can fit up to seven people on a good day. And, you know, this is like a home run for my friends who just want to come over to chill.
In this sense, I wouldn't say spontaneity is removed. I can always book a spin class at 7am then just jump right out of bed into that class. Weekends are then reserved for visiting places that are further away from home. I stay quite far from my parents, so that travelling time is usually saved for the weekends. I think the other day my partner and I went for an intertidal walk. We just went to explore Singapore, as if we're not Singaporeans, right? (laughs)
There's nothing much we can do now anyway. So yeah, there's always the element of spontaneity, it’s just how you weave it into your daily life.
With so many things going for you, do you have a proudest career achievement you can tell us about?
So for my career, I graduated from Polytechnic with a diploma and then went to work without getting a University degree, it’s important to have a good mentor to always keep you in check. For me, I had a very good mentor who had his head in the right place and was really collaborative in that sense. For him to tell me ,”Hey, I think you’re on the right track, you’re gonna go far,” that was one of my biggest accomplishments in the corporate setting.
For social media, when girls come up to me and tell me, “Hey, when you talk about topics like body positivity, you’re actually normalising looking different,” it’s impactful because you’re relating to an audience that never really had a voice of their own. So my proudest moments were when people who wanted to collaborate said that they love my attitude, and they would want to work with someone like me. It takes you further I guess. I don't really care about the likes nowadays, I don't care about the haters. If my campaign gets money, what’s more important to me is the impact it has to the audience in my community.
For sage.soiree because it was a local business, it meant a lot that my friends were the first ones to support me. I think that was my proudest moment because I knew then that I had a good support system. It didn’t really didn’t matter to me then if the business was going to succeed, it just mattered that I had people who supported me especially when I always felt like I was alone in the journey. I didn’t realise that there were so many people who made up my support systems and they really made me proud, made me feel like, “Shit, I’m doing something right.”
Tell us about your journey with social media, like how you started a business on it, how you created your own brand, and how you kind of got into it?
This journey was something I just fell into.
Back in 2016, or 2015, it was barely even, a thing, to be an influencer. I remember, my first few campaigns was with ezbuy. They said, "Okay, we'll give you a cash remuneration of $25. You just have to post one post of our product." After that, it just kind of fell into place because I realised that, "Shit, you can actually earn money from posting on social media and sharing your authentic views on it." I started taking on smaller campaigns with no payouts, just taking products as is. When I was 19, I got my first bigger product - a HP laptop, and I realised that with a bigger product, it meant that I had to have a bigger impact too. This then led me to produce more content about my life, like meeting more people, getting into trouble…
I wasn’t someone I had to hype up, neither did I have to come up with an online persona. I was just myself, and the people I met also grew up with me. After graduation, I transitioned to travel content, finding and posting about lesser known spots. For example in Bali, most people would go to beach clubs, but they rarely visit places like speakeasy bars, or other beach clubs with different experiences.
Up till recently, I moved into the body positivity movement. Then in April last year, the second day of circuit breaker, my mother and I were stalked by some guy and it traumatised me so I started opening up about sexual assault. I wanted to normalise these conversations, because I felt like not many people talk about it, and many girls hide in the shadows. I wanted to be their voice and beyond that, be that person that they would feel comfortable approaching for help. I would then guide them through things like making police reports, or directing them to other resources.
Today I’m focused on transitioning into adulthood. I just moved out into my own place, and a lot of people have been asking me about the rental and buying process. t’s all very progressive. It started from me just mindlessly taking up a campaign with ezbuy to having an authentic and real perspective on adulthood by being super transparent online.
It’s very surreal to be able to talk to people online to find out things like making police reports or moving out. Do you feel that social media has enabled you to do all of this? Compared to let’s say, more traditional forms of media?
I did a collaboration with DMK shoes - a local brand that sells shoes for women. They did an activation earlier this year where they sent some influencers shoes, and they were giving away a huge percentage of their profits to Star Shelter, a shelter which helps protects women and families from domestic violence. I was involved with this campaign and after reading through the brief, I realised that this was quite a heavy topic. So I did my research and I found out that Star Shelter operates under the Singapore Council of Women’s Organisation (SCWO) and they’ll not only provide mothers and children of abusive families with a temporary home for about three months, but also teach these victims on how to re-skill or up-skill themselves to enter the workforce again.
So when I heard of Star Shelter and SCWO, I was very intrigued because I realised that I could do more (than the metrics of the original campaign) with the power of social media. So with sage.soiree, I did a similar campaign - for every cheeseboard purchased, $5 would go to Star Shelter, and we’d be able to help them by housing 30 more people or families. I would never have known about Star Shelter without social media, or without landing into a campaign that seeks to raise awareness and help victims of domestic violence in Singapore.
On the flip-side, what are the setbacks to having a career on social media?
From my own experience, it's really the cyberbullies that get to me. I'm someone that values my privacy a lot. When cyberbullies talk about my family, where they stay, or when they find my partner's profile on social media and try to stalk him in real life, that’s scary for me.
Also, the idea that you can actually get cancelled is a real thing. So the work I've done for the past six or seven years could be misconstrued and entirely canceled within a few hours or a few days. How often do social justice warriors get canceled nowadays for having too bizarre or too different a view from others? Singaporeans aren’t the most liberal and the wider audience isn’t ready for certain conversations.
Do you personally have a strategy to balance out your personal opinions and opinions that are more controversial?
Oh my god. I think you need to have receipts. Receipts are everything if you want to expose a situation or a person. Also, I recently did an interview with some students and I was asked if body positivity should be gate-kept. I asked her what she meant and she said, "If you want to speak about body positivity, you have to have a certain look or be a certain size." So I asked, "So girls who fit the Singaporean beauty standard shouldn’t speak up about body positivity?” Then she said, “Yes.”
In this situation, I'm like shit, what do I say?” So I try not to speak for or about a demographic I don't identify with.
What about the importance of being transparent and authentic? How do you balance your privacy while being true to who you are online and offline?
If you speak to me in real life, I speak like this as well. In terms of my mannerisms, this is how I act. But where do I draw the line?
For physical boundaries, I tend not to take any videos that are near my neighbourhood. But on video, I think my tone of voice and my mannerisms, are generally the same. Even for new people who meet me as well, I'm someone that encourages discussion. I am also someone who is very headstrong. If I speak to you, I’ll do whatever I can to make my point clear. Online, I’m pretty much like that too. It’s just that sometimes on social media, you only see someone’s life in snapshots of 15 seconds right? But in real life, I elaborate and go into much more detail about things that I’m talking about.
There are also things that I’ll never talk about online. For example, I’ll never talk about the Black Lives Matter movement because I’m not part of that demographic and I have no experience with politics in America, I don’t see the need to talk about it. If it’s politics or issues in Singapore, of course I’ll talk about it. As much as I want to address and raise awareness on women’s rights, I realise that this year, there’s been conversations about the rights of men as well. These are things that aren’t openly discussed in Singapore, but things that I would love to address more of online.
What about the things you choose to speak openly about? Do you police the kind of content that you put out, since opinions on women rights, politics, inequality - all these always lend themselves to controversy.
When I'm speaking to the general public, I’m always prepared for the backlash that comes along with it. Recently, I did a small exposé. I swear, you could barely even see the brand’s name in my posts. But people have been giving me shit for it.
Basically one of co-owners of this brand cyber-bullied me by using some rude terms. And I just wasn’t having it. The thing is this local brand had previously collaborated with me and it was messed up because I was like, “Yo… you guys have collaborated with me before, but now one of your staff is cyberbullying me, how is that okay?” When I called them out for it, I got mixed reviews. Some people were like, “They already said sorry, why are you still pushing it?” And some were encouraging me to expose more of them to which I said no. I wanted to reach that fine line of, “Hey okay, we’re not here to scold anyone. We’re not here to put them in the spotlight. We’re here to educate other people who hide behind their keyboards.”
There’s just no good in spreading bad vibes online. And it was also a message to other brands about the chaos that this was. The brand couldn’t even handle it properly, they even told me, “Hey, don’t be too affected by it, by the way,” even if it was their staff that came to me.
At this point, choosing content to post online really just becomes a form of risk assessment. I don’t know if you’ve watched some TikTok videos, but people always start their videos off with a disclaimer before they share their opinions. I feel that this is the direction that social media is moving towards in Singapore.
What do you think about this? Like how do you think this is going to impact us in the future with the need to have a disclaimer like, “Please don’t cancel me,” every time we share something online?
Yeah, I think people are going be afraid to say what they want to say. I believe that a lot of topics are now "locker room talk" instead, things that are only discussed behind closed doors. Generally, I think we should be educated on how we address certain situations instead of angrily bringing businesses or people down. You can’t really control who watches or reacts to your content, but the way you present your opinions is something that you can control. When people are more open to other opinions and having discussions, then we won’t have to put up anymore disclaimers.
But yeah, I just think it’s sad when someone’s intentions can be so easily misinterpreted online. It’s so easy to say, “Oh, you’re just trying to cancel them" or, “Why do you have to bully them back?” But if you have receipts that can support the situation that you were really in, you can invite people to start empathising with you instead of angrily trying to cancel you. Maybe that’s how people will put out content in the future, with receipts.
It’s sad that so many conversations, and as a result, other perspectives, can’t happen online because of the fear that people might get cancelled. There are even discussions on whether the idea of disclaimers or trigger warnings are helpful or just coddling some people who really need help.
It is, isn't it? Actually, about the whole trigger warning thing, I never noticed how it would be interpreted as coddling someone. I thought trauma should always be addressed internally first. But anyway, this makes me think that instead of social studies, we should have learnt how to consume media. Creating content is one thing, but consuming media is something we haven’t explored yet. It’s sad but maybe our education system hasn’t advanced to that level yet. I mean for god’s sake, they only just recently started teaching primary school students coding, who knows how long they’re going to address the topic of media consumption?
But I think this is something we can do within our smaller group of friends. It’s definitely easy to tell someone to get help, but some people just don’t respond well to that. They’ll be like, “Oh, why are you assuming that you know about my mental health?” And then it suddenly seems judgemental to tell someone to seek help. But yeah, wow. There really isn’t a one size fits all solution to this situation. But maybe on the individual, we can start by introducing more touchy topics into our personal group of friends, and then gradually start talking to more people about it. Sooner or later maybe more people will get educated on these conversations instead of just seeing it on social media.
On the topic of friends, do you ever feel that social media takes you away from being present with your friends or is that not a problem you have?
With my friends, I take at most one Instastory with them because my time with them is shared and we respect each other in that way. On date nights with my partner, we don’t use our phones after 6PM. I’ll take one or two stories and that’s it. We don’t talk about anything on social media or things we see online. We just talk about our lives, and you know, how our day has been.
What about your advocacy work? Some of the issues you speak about online can be quite heavy, do those ever come into conversations in real life?
I’ve always tried to be as much of a support system as I can to my friends. So I always encourage conversations about different issues. I’m not someone who’s out to shut someone else’s opinions down. It’s just the way I live, and my social media reflects that too.
But in terms of boundaries, for example the whole Black Lives Matter campaign; if my friends brought it up, I would just say that I don’t have an opinion on it. But they can teach me, educate me on it, you know.
Or earlier this year, when there that fatal car accident at Tanjong Pagar and everyone was talking about it. I started seeing a lot of stories about the accident from my own friends. I later found out that there were people I was very close to who also knew the victims, and like, oh shit, this is too close to home. So when other people started talking about the accident and about the people who had passed on, I was angry, I was so done. But I didn’t share my thoughts online because it would be me speaking out of anger and the victims and their loved ones needed to have the respect that they deserved.
Instead, I dropped in privately with people I knew who were affected by this and posting about it. Just to check if they were okay, if they wanted to talk about anything and that I was there for them. And that’s when I really just switched off social media because I hated the fact that people were questioning the victims even when they had already passed on.
That was the moment when I realised some people are straight up evil, and you can’t stop them, you can’t educate them. Because if in the face of death, these people still choose to speak about it so brazenly online - what makes you think they’ll want to listen to you?
That was the only time I ever felt like I had to draw a line when it came to social media. These things are heavy and I tend not to talk about them online.
Yeah, it’s a lot. There’s a lot of etiquette when it comes to being online, what do you wish you knew about social media before you got into it?
I wish that I knew that people are not going to like what you put out all the time, and that's okay. If you're being true and authentic, and you have a good support system and like I mentioned, receipts, it’s going to be okay. Also some people are just on social media to waste your time, they’re not there to have the same vision as you, so you can’t pick your audience. Some people try to give you feedback, but it’s not feedback, they just want to pull you down more.
I wish someone told me how to identify the intentions of other people. I also wish someone told me to really look through T&Cs (terms and conditions) to see if a brand or a company’s core values align with my own. There’s no prosperity if your views don’t align, there’s no use for a campaign there.
Finally, how to say no, to the wrong people at least, and how to negotiate.
What’s next for you?
I'm hoping to scale sage.soiree a little bit more, and to encourage more sales and revenue. It's something that my partner and I actually really enjoy working on. With social media, I’m really looking to set up a business. I don’t know what business yet. I have so many passions, I mean, I could foresee myself selling chairs and tables. I just want to start a business, or maybe my own spin studio. That’s my ten year plan but right now it’s really just to focus on what I’m doing, providing more value to my audience on adulthood and honest perspectives.
This written interview was edited for brevity and clarity. Due to the nature of the topics discussed, this interview will not be available as an audio recording.
