Raleigh blogger finds niche with beauty, lifestyle content

With more than 1 million followers on social media, blogger Kate Bryan has been working for more than a decade as an online creator.

The Raleigh mother of three is a former hairdresser who started The Small Things blog in 2011.

"When it began 10 years ago...it was just small things that I liked and joy, little small things that made my day a little brighter from a fun discovery of a lip gloss or a funny moment with my cat," Bryan said.

While sticking with the original name, the blog The Small Things has evolved to a more beauty focused brand with hair tutorials, makeup tips, skincare trials and fashion.

Bryan, whose Instagram handle is K8_smallthings, first found success with hair tutorial videos. As a hair stylist, Bryan wanted to show her clients how to do easy hair styles.

"I shared them on Pinterest, right when Pinterest got really huge when it launched," Bryan said. "Other people that I don't even know in real life are finding these video hair tutorials helpful, and they're learning something...my videos are helpful. So really quickly, I got to see that I was filling a need for people."

Bryan soon found her niche by focusing on beauty and lifestyle content.

Bryan has more than a half million subscribers on YouTube and more than 200,000 on Facebook, but lately she has been focusing a lot of attention on Instagram, where she has has more than 330,000 followers. Despite featuring her children on some of her social posts, Bryan said she has been careful not to become a family blogger or mom blogger.

"I always wanted to stay true to why I started and it would be obviously very natural to infuse a lot of family and motherhood content into my business because that's a huge part of who I am, but I never wanted to have to rely on my kids for that. And I wanted to know that if at any moment, because this is, this is a new world we're in, of having a public life, if at any moment I wanted to pull them out completely, I wanted to have the choice to do that without it affecting my bottom line and like the trajectory of my career," Bryan said.

Bryan said her children have bank accounts and get paid for any sponsored content they appear in.

Bryan won the WRAL Voters' Choice Award for Best Local Social Influencer in 2019 and 2020. You can follow her on YouTube and on Instagram @K8_smallthings.