At the time, we had a small YouTube channel. We mostly uploaded travel videos from our trips to Hawaii with our family! Or just goofy videos of us in and around Vancouver, Whistler and Kelowna. We started our channel under the name Johnston Twins and enjoyed vlogging for memories to look back on from our trips. 

 

But when our family would go to search us up on Youtube, we were hard to find since there was already a channel that was pretty established as Johnston Twins! So we decided, to change our name on our channel to something more recognizable. That’s where the name “ Twin Coast “ came from! We were joking around about brand names and we said “ well we are twins sisters… who live on the West Coast… What about Twin Coast! “ That is pretty much how it went. Simple as that! We told our family and some of our friends knew, they all liked it and remembered the name easily.

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Fast forward about a year later, we heard of this new app called TikTok. We downloaded it and opened an account under the name @twincoast. Never even used the app once and forgot we had even downloaded it! Haha. 

 

In November 2019, Ashley had just passed all her final exams. Expecting to be able to celebrate with her friends, she hadn’t seen in about 6 weeks! She was stuck at home, sick. Ashley re-downloaded TikTok to pass sometime and uploaded videos from her Camera Roll. The first video she uploaded was the “Strawberries & creme with no bananas, vegan!” And it blew up over night.. we woke up with 500,000 views the next day on it! We couldn’t believe it!

 

At the time, Taylor was visiting in California and we were FaceTiming on what video to upload next! We decided to just upload all the smoothie videos we had saved in our camera rolls and we continued to receive amazing feedback! You might think… why did you have these smoothie videos anyways? Well- we had started to film and upload them on our own Instagram accounts @ash_johnston and @taylorlaurenjohnston because we thought they looked satisfying! We had found a way to make thick smoothie bowls that turned out to be like ice cream, that were healthy and fun to eat! 

 

At the time, we both weren’t eating any dairy so we would substitute for almond milk, oat milk etc. in our smoothie recipes. Naturally, this made the smoothie recipes vegan and dairy free. This may have given the wrong impression to some, as many still think we are vegan- however, this is not the case. We aren’t vegan but we do enjoy to eat vegan foods, as Vancouver has some amazing vegan restaurants and alternatives to meat and cheese! 

 

Once Taylor got home from California, we had grown our TikTok account to about 20,000 followers fairly quickly! We started uploading tutorials on “How to make thick smoothie bowls” on Youtube and continued to share more recipes on our TikTok and Instagram. It has been so fun and exciting! We are truly so thankful for finding a group of people that are likeminded like us and enjoy what we put out on our socials! 

 

Looking back, it is so crazy how everything all worked out. Ashley had learnt how to video edit at around 11 years old and fell in love with it from the start. We would film and edit fun little videos together on our parents MacBook. We both enjoyed it but never would have thought it could become our daily job. And that one day we would be working TOGETHER! Owning a brand! Life is crazy! 

 

We have this blog to share our recipes with you, so you can make them and share them with your friends and family! We hope you enjoy them as much as we do. If you end up making any recipes from our blog, make sure to tag us on our instagram @twin_coast. It honestly makes our day and we would love interact with you. Let’s be friends!

 

We couldn’t do any of this without our families support… Thank you to our Mom who is not only the best Mom. But also our Momager (Manager)! Thank you to our Dad for being the best dad and our handyman, who designed the most beautiful kitchen! Who knew it would be used for Youtube videos… 8 years later! Haha! Thank you to our Papa for being our P.R. manager and hype man. We only want to make you proud!