Yes, She Knows How to Influence You

Nigel Garcia dresses impeccably well for someone in graduate school. Her style is shown off on the streets of New York via her Instagram, but witnessing it in real life is something completely different. Without the well crafted angles and poses, Garcia is simply another girl in New York loosely following the fashion trends, and making them her own. No one would know her other life–the beginnings of a social media influencer tucked away inside the iPhone she carries. 

Although you may guess things about her based on her Instagram–she appears to be a young woman in her twenties, possibly a native New Yorker who knows the city almost too well. But she has lived in the Philippines her entire life, up to about a year and a half ago, when she decided to attend Parsons School of Design for her master’s degree. 

She made the jump to move here a little over a year ago–applying to Parsons without telling anyone in her life, getting in, and moving over 8,000 miles away from her friends and family. 

Her life in the Philippines was good, she says. She was having fun as a girl in her mid twenties, working in public relations and social media marketing for the nightlife and entertainment industry in Manila. She was considered a micro influencer there, with a strong network of connections backing her when she began her own social media pages. Her first supervisor in the marketing world, Kaye Pernia, helped in honing her skill set. 

“[Kaye] would let me do the things that I wanted to do on my own without micromanaging me. She would give direction but not be so on top of it, not controlling my creative output,” says Garcia. “If not for her, I wouldn’t have learned the ropes to produce campaigns or to manage this or that.” 

“Nigel was my marketing manager at Escape to the Palace, a sister brand of The Palace Manila, the premiere nightclub in the Philippines,” says Kaye Pernia. She credits Garcia with their success in marketing their company. “Beyond Nigel’s expertise, her positivity and creativeness was exceptional.” 

Garcia says  the COVID-19 pandemic had a lot to do with her decision to leave this job and life behind. 

“I’ve always wanted to study abroad. I was already super content with the job that I had back in the Philippines. But it was the pandemic that helped shift my mind and to pursue this dream of mine  that I’ve always had, like, many, many years ago.” 

Usually, Garcia says, when someone decides to move to the U.S. from the Philippines, it’s because they’re going to do something in the medical field. “I would say, I’m like, the first in the family to move out because of fashion.” 

Years ago, before social media marketing took over her life, Garica was entering the modeling industry for the first time. This was back before modeling became “diverse” and casting directors were looking for thin, tall girls. Booking jobs was difficult. After being compared and looked down on for her size four body, she decided it was time to move on.

“But now, [modeling] is so different. And I feel like if I started now, I would have enjoyed it. But back then it was really toxic.”

Now, in Garcia’s work, there is no casting director, no one picking her last, and no one telling her she isn’t cut out for it. 

At Parsons, Garcia studies Fashion Marketing and Communications. In college, her interests varied. She was curious about fashion, but she didn’t know what angle to approach it from. She calls herself “a digital native.” She grew up, like most Gen Z, surrounded by technology. She grew up along Instagram and Tumblr, when they were freshly new companies and still figuring out what the term “social media” truly meant. Advertisement and marketing overtook these sites–turned them into large corporations rather than an innocent place for people to express themselves.  

And marketing and social media were not always linked. When you think of typical marketing, you think television commercials, billboards with a product on it. Not someone on Instagram with a ring light showing themselves putting on makeup that was sent to them. “I think what’s so good about our generation now is that we have social media marketing, you know, it’s not just the normal marketing that we all thought it was,” Garcia says. 

“[These businesses] are looking for someone who knows how to do social media marketing, because people who are older don’t know how to do that.” 

Along with going to classes twice a week, Garcia works part time at STONE AND STRAND Jewelry, doing their social media marketing and creating content. In her free time, she does her own social media work, or as she calls it, “UGC”--user generated content for brands that reach out to her. “I would say that takes up a big bulk of my schedule.” 

For her UGC, brands reach out to her through email or straight through social media, usually with Instagram direct messaging. Usually brand deals are seen in larger accounts–Instagrams with over 10,000 followers usually get the most branding opportunities. But Garcia says posting her own content helps, and not relying on brand deal money to further her career. “And also because I’ve been going to events in New York, so I get to meet with some people who are working in the marketing team [of a brand] and then they remember me.” Again, it’s all about connections in this line of work. 

“The number of brands that have been reaching out to me on a weekly basis to make content is so much more compared to Manila,” Garcia says. 

As she has amassed over 4,000 followers on Instagram over the last few years, she collabs with brands on a regular basis. And good brands too. Her most recent one being Neutrogena, who sent her their famous Hydro Boost moisturizer to promote in a video. Another brand, Go in Athletics, sent her workout sets to try on in a video, and shared her promo code–Nigel10–to let her followers know they could get their own set for ten percent off. “I’m really happy when brands reach out to me because I’m like, oh, you know I exist?” 

The only drawbacks? Following the lead of a brand’s marketing team that sometimes doesn’t know what they’re doing. “It gets draining when I get asked to redo something, especially if the budget wasn’t that high in the first place, or it wasn’t specified clearly in the beginning,” says Garcia. 

Garcia’s friend group from the Philippines have continued to show their love and support, still commenting on Garcia’s Instagram posts with adoring comments, and keeping in touch with her, even as she creates a life here in New York. 

“You know, I’ve gone so far now and it gets so stressful at times. I’m like ‘Oh my God, I want to give up.’ But then I also think about the friends that I have back home and my family that have helped me,” says Garcia. “I don’t want to let them down. Of course, the first person I let down is myself. But I also don’t want to let them down.” 

One of her old supervisors, Vani Altomonte, from MEGA Magazine of the Philippines and later, a coworker at the Palace Manila considers Garciaa close friend in and outside of the industry. “Nigel is a person you can depend on,” Altomonte says, describing the days they spent working overtime until they were satisfied with what they’d accomplished. 

“As a friend, I know I can run to Nigel for anything,” Altomonte says. “If there’s anything that I want to try–tennis, a new cocktail–I know that I can always just give her a call.” 

Towards the end of the interview, Garcia remembers she forgot to mention something–she has her own start up company too. “It’s a B2B [business-to-business] for second hand goods and we operate worldwide.” 

The company is called The Lean Archives, and Garcia’s official title for the company is the “Head of Global Partnerships.” She started the business in December 2022 with her partner Javier. 

Garcia compares her business to what The RealReal does–the online site for buying and selling top designer fashion. Her goal is to expand the business, make it bigger and build some real traction for it. After she’s finished with her master’s degree, she’ll have more time to dedicate to it. 

Garcia’s time is precious. Her Monday through Friday schedule is a routine she can only stick to if she manages her time well. For anyone who wants to one day go into this type of work, and maybe become a social media influencer, Garcia gives this advice: keep track of what you're doing. Time management is the only way to succeed. “I think being very organized is key to this.” 

Garcia is in her final semester of graduate school. In the last year and a half, she has come to see New York as home. She hasn’t gone home to the Philippines since she first left a year and a half ago. She will spend her Christmas here, in the states, working, and maybe visiting extended family nearby.

Garcia’s outward persona, from what I can tell, is fresh eyed and eager. She still marvels at the possibilities of the city, learning and exploring, and searching for connections wherever she can find them. 

She is only five years older than me, but I feel as though I am in the presence of someone much wiser and self-sufficient–someone who knows who they are, and is themself completely. Social media and its well known toxicity hasn’t changed her too deeply. There doesn’t seem to be a performance going on within her–no perfectly curated feed or designer clothes will make her forget what she came here to do.