Cassey Ho Vinh is a phenomenally successful social media fitness influencer and inspiration. She is perhaps currently best known for her YouTube channel, Blogilates, which has more than 8 million subscribers and an incredible 2.3 billion views. She is a certified Pilates and fitness instructor and her effective, easy-to-follow workout videos have found an enormous and appreciative audience. She also heads up her own brand of gym and active fashion accessories, Popflex, and runs a Pilates format called Pop Pilates. Time magazine once cited her as being one of the 25 most influential people on the internet.

Ho was born in Los Angeles and is of Chinese-Vietnamese heritage. She wanted to be a fashion designer growing up, and in 2009, she moved to Boston from LA to become a fashion buyer. However, she didn’t like the job and decided to pack it in. Instead she supported herself by teaching her other love, Pilates. Although she had already put some Pilates tutorials online at this point, it wasn’t until she began teaching full-time that she began to make more of them, responding to requests from her fast-growing audience. By 2012, she was winning fitness and creator awards, and by 2014, she was being featured by the likes of the Wall Street Journal, who noted that her videos were being watched 8 million times per month.

Ho has never been afraid to speak out, either to defend herself against body-shaming or to call out unrealistic beauty representations by major brands. In doing so, she has become even more popular with people who like their influencers and instructors to be real.