Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Carol Ella & Avery Echols. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Carol Ella & Avery Echols, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

The truth is, we think about getting regular jobs ALL the time. We both have the ability to go back to our careers in film/TV production whenever we’d like. So, of course, we weigh those options, especially when we face financial struggles. Finances have been the biggest sacrifice we’ve had to make for our business. Turning away from well-paying careers that we genuinely enjoyed has been an extremely difficult decision to make.

However, every time we found ourselves on a set, working for someone else to create their vision, we both always came back to the same conclusion: we’d rather sacrifice and risk everything to make our vision a reality. Not to mention, it seemed like every time one of us tried to deviate from Demon Trash, something horrible would happen or something would go wrong. It felt like divine intervention: the universe was screaming at us to stay on track. Every time we stopped and listened to that feeling, good things always came of it.

So, are we happy? Yes, of course.

Is the life of a creative constantly asking yourself if you’re on the right track, baby, were you born this way? All the f*cking time.

One thing we’ve learned is that when you start a business or any creative venture you need to know your WHY. Why am I doing this? Why is it important? Why can’t I let this go?

If you hold on to your why tight enough, you can come out the other side of your doubt with the knowledge that no matter what you do you are living authentically, freely and with purpose—even if that thing you’re holding onto is a silly little brand you started with your cousin that was initially an inside joke.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

Demon Trash is the strange brain creation of two cousins that went from seeing each other once a year at the family Christmas party to becoming best friends in a new city, surviving our twenties and trying to figure life out. Through these experiences, we started jokingly calling each other Demon Trash.

What does it mean to be Demon Trash? If you’ve ever chosen an outfit from the pile of dirty laundry, ordered takeout despite having a fridge full of groceries, or spent hours finding solace in dark memes instead of going to the gym – you might just be Demon Trash.

We realized that a lot of people could identify with that sentiment, and we wanted to create content that represented us, them, and our interests. From this we started with our comedy podcast, where we share crazy stories, laugh about our struggles and triumphs, and discuss our Demon Trash interests. These include obsessing over fan fiction, our latest binge watch, or whatever the internet threw at us that week.

As things continued to grow, we expanded to YouTube, creating a react channel where we watch TV shows and movies with our lil trashlings.

At the end of the day, the primary focus of everything we create is to celebrate being your worst best self. When we get comments where people share that they feel they have found their “trash kin”, it truly doesn’t get much better than that.

Whether you show up late, stoned, and with an iced coffee, doom scrolled on TikTok all night, or have an unhealthy obsession with the Twilight movies (and why they need to be taken seriously as cultural milestones)… We want you to know we see you, trashling.

Have you ever had to pivot?

The biggest advice a lot of creators or entrepreneurs are quite familiar with is someone saying, “You need to find your niche. You need to be more specific with what you’re offering.”

Some advice you’ll get often as a podcaster is that your audience must leave your show feeling as if they learned something. So, at one point we felt pressured to lean into the self-help niche and like we had to create content that was self-help focused. Yet, the truth is, the point of our message is that we don’t have anything figured out, and that’s okay. Therefore, trying to fit ourselves into that box wasn’t authentic to us.

It was then that we really had to come back to the drawing board and discuss what our goals were. We had to ask ourselves what we wanted to achieve with Demon Trash. In doing so, we figured out exactly what kind of creative avenues we wanted to take, and so far so good.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

We found that a lot of the content that we are creating, and aim to create, is typically marketed towards men. We feel underrepresented. We want to create content that normalizes and represents the women that don’t have it together, or don’t have it all figured out.

We want to create content and tell stories that let other Demon Trash women like us know that they are not alone.

Contact Info:

• Website: demontrash.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/demontrashcast/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl9puo16HjaSsn5ZbEDN0Ww/videos
• Other: https://linktr.ee/demontrash