We were lucky to catch up with Madison Ryan recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Madison, thanks for joining us today. What’s something crazy on unexpected that’s happened to you or your business

Taylor Swift liked TWO videos featuring my merch in one day. It was the opening night of The Eras Tour in Arizona and I had impulsively decided two days before that I wanted to fly my girlfriend and I across the country to see the opening show. Everything was so last minute that we couldn’t get a hotel for anything near a reasonable price, so we ended up renting a car and sleeping in the back of it for the weekend. Honestly, it was a really financially irresponsible decision but sometimes you just have to do the things you know are a once in a lifetime experience. My only requirement was that we needed to post on social media a lot. I was hoping that something would go viral so I could make enough money to help cover some of the costs of the trip. So we documented everything, from our flight to sleeping in the car to us having an absurd dance party at 7 am in the Walmart parking lot we had slept in.

The day of the concert we went to a friend’s hotel who also flew in to get ready. While there, I got a twitter notification saying that Taylor Swift had liked my tiktok. Naturally, we all started freaking out and I sped to the TikTok app just to find no trace of what they were talking about. I then checked my girlfriend’s account and she had liked one of her videos of us running through the airport, with me in my You Need To Calm Down inspired t-shirt. The shirt has a drawing of Taylor Swift from the music video on it, holding a sign from one of the homophobic protestors from the video on it, but I have changed the sign to say “homasekualty is IN!” instead of “homasekualty is SIN!”. It’s a silly shirt but it is one of my best sellers from my queer Taylor Swift merch.

This was of course insanely exciting, but then as we were driving to the stadium I checked my girlfriend’s TikTok account again and Taylor Swift had liked another video. This time it was the two of us dancing in the Walmart parking lot, me wearing a “Karma is my girlfriend” sweatshirt (inspired by her song Karma) and my girlfriend wearing one of my lesbian pride merch items. This was really the moment that everything blew up, all of a sudden I was getting so many orders. The adrenaline rush of everything going on that day was insane. I ended up getting enough sales that it just about covered the cost of the entire trip for both my girlfriend and I. On top of that, it was really cool to have her acknowledge videos that I was wearing merch with queer interpretations of her art. That was really special to me and to a lot of our online queer friends too.

Madison, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Madison and I have an online apparel shop with pride merch for over 25 different identities, as well as feminist apparel and Taylor Swift fan merch named Madison Ryan.

I think what sets my shop apart from anywhere else where you can get pride merch is that I have made it a priority to include as many LGBTQIA+ identities as possible. When I came out as a lesbian at age 26, I realized how difficult it was to get lesbian specific pride merch. When big corporations made pride merch beyond just rainbow, they usually included the bisexual flag and the transgender flag, and then a couple other different flags depending on the place, but the lesbian flag was almost never included. The lesbian flag is so so pretty, and as someone who was a late-bloomer lesbian it was really important for me to be able to have something made specifically for me and my experience. The more I thought about it the more I realized that this was probably the experience for a lot of identities further down the LGBTQIA+ line.

At this point I had already started my online shop, I had been making designs of different women protesting, as well as various other feminist apparel, and had gone viral on TikTok a handful of times. So I really started leaning into creating as much pride merch for as many people as I could! Fast forward to now, 3 years since I started my business, and I have pride merch for over 25 different LGBTQIA+ identities.

I am also about to venture onto a new path with creating knit sweaters. I’ll have pride versions for as many identities as I can, as well as sweaters inspired by Taylor Swift albums and songs, and I have a few other ideas up my sleeve that I’m not ready to share yet.

Through promoting my online shop on social media, I have really fallen in love with content creation. I have found it really therapeutic to talk about my experience with realizing I was a lesbian at 26. I was a serial dater of men and was always wildly unsatisfied with my relationships but just thought all the men I dated sucked instead of considering that I could just not like men. It sounds so silly when I summarize the experience in a sentence, but it was complex and traumatizing and confusing but seeing other people share their stories really helped me see more of myself that I had been suppressing before. Part of the reason it took me so long was because I never heard or saw stories of women who had my experience, so doing my part in putting my story out there so that other people can see it and go “oh ****, this is really relatable, maybe I am gay??” is really important to me. I also am really proud of my relationship with my girlfriend, falling in love with her changed my whole world view of what a healthy relationship looks like. So being able to share our relationship with the world, and show people who are scared that there is a happy gay ending available to them, it’s more fulfilling than I ever thought social media could be.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I started really building my social media audience on TikTok mid-pandemic. It started as just a way to kill time, but I started learning so much about myself through using the app, most notably how gay I am. So I slowly just started posting random stuff myself, whatever I felt called to post without a plan really. Then I posted a video about child marriage being legal in the US, it got over 500k views and I realized the potential in the app. So I started posting every single day, and have slowly but surely built an audience across TikTok, Instagram, and a bit on Twitter. I think what has been really helpful for me is that I’ve tried to do this sustainably. I don’t push myself to create insanely good content or try to hit any specific numbers. I mostly post what I want, and then when something does good I try to replicate it as much as I can until it stops doing as well. The biggest thing about content creation and building a social media presence is consistency. The more you put out there the more likely chance you have of growing. It’s important to be honest with yourself about what you are able to upkeep, for me, this was my main job so my goal is to post 2 tiktoks a day. For some people they just post a few a week and that works for them! Social media is a long game, you most likely aren’t going to blow up over night, so find a schedule thats sustainable to you and do it for as long as it takes. I watched a really interesting video recently that stated that social media really isn’t as oversaturated as we think it is. There are so many people trying, but a lot of people give up after a few months when they don’t get enough traction. There’s not a lot of people that are willing to stick it out for the long haul, that’s what will set you apart!

Have you ever had to pivot?

I feel like my entire life is just a bunch of pivots. I am constantly craving change, and usually after 6 months of something I am ready for the next. This has been really challenging for me because it’s important to build a reliable brand, so I can’t just burn everything to the ground every 6 months when I get bored. I try to pay attention closely to what content connects with my audience so that my pivots can go where they want me to go.

When I started building my social media presence and my business I identified as straight. Four years later I am a very out and proud lesbian who almost exclusively posts about my experience as a queer woman. A lot of things had to change when I realized I was queer and fully came out of the closet as a lesbian. I had to do a lot of personal work to understand how I had gone so long in the dark about who I was. I had to come to terms with the fact that I had been living a completely inauthentic life where I had been dating men consistently since I was in middle school. I had to learn how to be a good partner to a woman, and how to de-center men from my life. I had to recalibrate what people in my life were good for me. These were all great things, I kind of view my life as having two portions, one before coming out, and one after. I am a totally new person now, with totally new interests, priorities and responsibilities.

I needed my business and my social media to reflect the changes I was making in my personal life. I started making pride merch for all queer people of all identities, instead of just the L G B & T communities. I started talking about my experience as a “late bloomer” lesbian, hopeful that other women who were in a similar position as me could be shown who they really are through a TikTok, just like I was.

Since my online presence is just me being me, everytime my life changes I have to adjust my business around it. The two are fully intertwined, so any pivot in one means a pivot in the other.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.itsmadisonryan.com
• Instagram: @itsmadisonryan
• Other: TikTok: @itsmadisonryan

Image Credits
Photos by myself or my girlfriend, Olivia Bethune.