Back in 2018, Hana Martin didn't think that much of TikTok. Then a relatively new name in social media, the app was simply a way of her sharing funny videos that she had filmed with her friends, having set up an account as a bit of a joke.
Fast forward to now, however, and that joke has become something truly extraordinary. Today, at just 19, Hana is one of the app's brightest stars, with millions of people from across the globe watching her videos and some of the world's biggest brands desperate to work with her.
It has been a remarkable journey for the teenager from Cowbridge, who made the tough decision to drop out of school during her A-level year in order to pursue TikTok full time. While it has not been without its challenges, through hard work and perseverance, she has forged a career that many her age could only dream of.
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Despite facing criticism from those who doubted her at the start of her new career, Hana has proved them all wrong and gone on to become one of the most popular TikTokers in the UK, with her lifestyle, fashion and makeup videos earning her over three and a half million followers on the app. As well as the invites to fashion shows and glitzy film premieres, her videos have also led her to work with high-end brands such as Moncler and Marc Jacobs, while she has also recently signed for television and modelling agencies.
Having started posting on TikTok at 15, Hana could not imagine then that just a few years later she would be where she is today. But after realising the app's potential, what started as a hobby quickly became something much, much bigger.
"At that time, TikTok wasn't the cool thing to be on like it is today," she explained. "It was still transitioning at that point from Musical.ly [which it absorbed in 2018] and not many people knew about it. So I started posting a few videos with my friends and didn't think anything of it. It all started as a joke, really, which I think is probably the case for a lot of people.
"After a while, a couple of the videos I posted started doing rather well and picked up quite a few views. It was then when I thought that I could do potentially do well from it and started to consider that it could become a hobby, or even possibly a career for me."
During the summer holidays, Hana began to study TikTok in greater depth. The app, which allows people to create, share and discover short videos, has over one billion users worldwide, making it one of the most popular social networks in the world, behind the likes of Facebook and Instagram.
While singing, dancing and lip-syncing videos long dominated the platform, a vast range of user-generated content from comedy to fashion and even ear wax removal is shared on the app every day. Central to how TikTok works is a user's personalised 'For You' page, a curated feed of videos which the app's algorithm decides you may want to watch based on your interests and past interactions.
"I started taking it more seriously and posting a bit more often, mostly special effects make up and things like that. " said Hana. "I looked at videos on my For You page and saw what was trending and going off that to follow those trends. After that, things really started to pick up and my videos began to do well.
"I had started properly during the summer holidays, and by the time I went back to school, I had around 10,000 followers. During my GCSE year, I got up to around 200,000. When I started, not many people knew about the app, but then I began to show up on people's FYP page and word got around the school, so that was that."
Despite receiving some stick at school for her videos, Hana shook it off and kept persevering with TikTok. Before too long, her self-belief began to pay off, as her soaring popularity on the app saw her invited to the first of many glamorous events, on this occasion by fashion brand PrettyLittleThing.
"It was so exciting," Hana recalled. "It was the day before my GCSE Physics exam, and my parents drove me up to the PrettyLittleThing headquarters in Manchester. I was given a label that said I was an influencer and that felt really surreal. I got back at 2am the next morning and was sitting my exam at 8am, it was all a bit mad."
As she prepared to sit her AS levels, Hana hit another significant milestone as she reached a million followers on the app. However, while her exam prep was hampered by the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, her online profile was about to reach dizzy new heights.
"The pandemic was obviously not a great time, but it was huge for social media," she said. "Everyone was on their phones a lot more and people really started discovering TikTok during that time. It was an escape from reality and a way to take your mind off things while enjoying people’s videos.
"I definitely grew the most during lockdown, I was getting tens of thousands of new followers a day, it was insane. I was posting a variety of different videos, but ones with me and my pet mantis really blew up, and I was getting loads of views. In terms of followers, I was at a million before lockdown and by the end I was close to having three million, which is crazy."
Having cemented her place as one of the UK's most popular creators, and as her classmates began to return to school after lockdown was lifted, Hana knew she had a very difficult decision to make. With her A-levels ahead of her and an army of online fans to entertain, she had to choose between sticking with education or making TikTok her full-time job.
The "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity was, of course, far too good to pass up, and so Hana dropped out of school to pursue her promising new career. While she admits her family, who now live in Porthcawl, were initially sceptical, they came to support her decision having seen how passionate she was to make a success of her blossoming online profile.
"At the end of 2020, I was still in school, and I’d completed my AS levels and got my grades, but I was doing everything from home. People did start going back into school but I had already made the decision to work from home for TikTok anyway.
"But at that point I was putting 50% into my A-levels and 50% into TikTok. So I knew I had to make a decision, it was either going to be one or the other. Either I was going to fully commit to school and education and have TikTok as a hobby, or I was going to take this once in a lifetime opportunity to work at making it my full time job.
"Ultimately, my GCSEs were good, my AS levels were good, and I knew education was something that I could always go back to. I had never really known what I wanted to do or what direction I wanted to go in, but I knew I had to take this opportunity."
Her big decision was to pay off, as just a couple of months later, she was able to move out of her family home and get her own place in Reading, aged just 17. Now living in London, she is reaping the benefits of her bold move, both personally and financially, earning big money through various brand deals and helping to promote music labels' latest releases.
"Without going into too much detail, it’s extremely financially beneficial for creators," she says as conversation turns to money. "It's crazy the kind of money that people invest in TikTok and social media as a whole. Having started early on, I've seen how brands have started interacting more and more with TikTok, as it's the best place to be in order to reach younger audiences."
The list of high-end brands wanting to work with Hana is a long and impressive one. Among the biggest names are Moncler, Marc Jacobs, Rayban and Nivea, with these kind of deals also allowing her to walk red carpets and sit alongside catwalks at some of the world's most prestigious events and pursue other opportunities that she could only dream of as a child.
"London Fashion Week, that one hundred percent stands out for me as one of the highlights," she recalled. "I saw it as a kid and thought that it was so cool, so to be there in the front row and having items gifted by designers was just incredible. I’ve attended movie premieres too, in fact the first one I went to was for House of Gucci, and I was walking the red carpet straight after Lady Gaga, Jared Leto and Adam Driver. It was so surreal."
"I’ve been flown out to Barcelona for a fashion show, that was absolutely amazing and I'd love to do more of that. My goal now is to travel a lot more, and be invited to these kind of events around the world. I’ve also just signed with a modelling agency and a TV agency which I dreamed about when I was younger, so there have been so many of these crazy opportunities all from TikTok."
There is, of course, fame to deal with too. "I get recognised out and about and on the whole I enjoy it," she added. "It's nice to talk to people who notice me and it’s a really great feeling to hear that they like my content or that I’ve inspired them to do something similar."
"TikTok is quite an odd thing in that your career is largely just numbers on a screen. You can sometimes forget that there are people behind them, so meeting fans and being able to put faces to those numbers is something I really enjoy too."
However, while she admits that there are not many downsides to her job, Hana knows that her journey to TikTok stardom has not always been smooth sailing. As well as the pressure of being on camera and judged by millions on a daily basis, meeting the demands of an ever-growing audience on a constantly changing platform has also proved challenging.
"It can be hard to think of original content ideas every single day, and I’ve really had to work at my content to get to the point that I’m at," she said. "I’ve worked on makeup looks that have taken between seven and 10 hours to do, content that I’ve filmed over a couple of days, content that I’ve had to plan in advance and spent a lot of money on as well.
"There can be lots of positives but comments can be very negative too. Obviously I’ve chosen to be a creator and be in the public eye and I have to accept some of the negatives that come with it, but having people comment on your appearance or just hate on you for no reason at all isn't nice regardless.
"Your mental health can also really be affected too, especially if your video doesn’t hit a certain number. That probably sounds so silly and it can be hard to understand if you’re not involved in it, but it's real and it has a knock-on effect on a lot of creators’ work."
Having only just turned 19, and with ambitions to transition from the phone screen to the big screen, the world of TikTok and beyond really feels like Hana's oyster right now. While she has been supported along the way, however, she knows best of all that none of what she has achieved would have come without her self-belief.
"I have absolutely no regrets about my decision," she said. "I’m so glad that I went with my gut and followed it and worked at it. It’s a complete privilege to be able to have this as a career and it is incredible the amount of opportunities that have come through it. Just to be able to be put in this position is amazing, I wouldn’t change it for the world.
"When I told people I was dropping out of school to do TikTok, quite a few were sceptical and I received a lot of backlash as there is so much stigma around being a school dropout. But I have never viewed that as a negative thing, in fact it’s done me wonders.
"I’ve done myself proud and proven a lot of people wrong at the same time. It feels good."
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