“Taking someone and just being like, ‘I could elevate you so much and I know I could take you from 50 to 100 if we put in the work together,’ that's what excites me.”

Six years ago, Jessica Blevins, manager of Team Ninja, propelled her then-boyfriend, now-husband Tyler Blevins (better known as Ninja) to internet stardom. She understands the world of PR and brand management well and is now able to take the time to cultivate her own image more.

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“It started when I had been dating Tyler for a couple of years,” Blevins says. “I remember one morning he responded to a well-known company with spelling errors. It was really brief and [he] signed it ‘Ninj’, and I just was like, ‘Oh my gosh. This is not okay.’ And he's like, ‘I just want to get on [stream] and game.’ I was like, ‘You know what, let me take over this. I'll look at emails every morning, set up calls as I need to, [and] go through these potential sponsorships.’ So it started with doing that.”

Roccat Torch - via Roccat

Before Blevins stepped in to manage Ninja, he had no schedule and would stream for as long as he could each day. This wasn’t healthy for him, or the pair’s relationship. Blevins knew that for his brand to take off and for them to remain a happy couple, things needed to change.

“For me, it was professional,” Blevins explains. “Before, it was like, if I'm not there, the brand is not doing anything except [Ninja] being live. If there was that desire to grow the brand outside of streaming there were going to need to be hours and time and effort put in off-stream. And just from being his girlfriend at the time, it's like, ‘Well, we don't really have a relationship if you're streaming 18 hours a day. When are we ever hanging out?’ Those are the conversations we had - trying to find that balance.”

Once Ninja’s numbers started dwarfing his competitors, he became known as /the/ Fortnite streamer, even playing matches with superstars like Drake and Travis Scott. Blevins saw an opportunity to capitalise on his mainstream appeal.

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“This just showed us that everybody games, so let's have [Ninja] be the face of it,” she says. “Ninja is a brand now, and I need brand-worthy people all around him. It started with me trying to do a little bit of everything and now [it’s more about] being able to really take care of Tyler and focus on him and get off the computer more.”

Blevins recalls some advice Derek Jeter gave her at a party two years ago - never work with friends or family. That’s tough advice to follow for someone married to their client. Blevins says the couple is good at keeping the personal and professional separate - which must comes in handy when dealing with very public sandwich tweets.

“The sandwich tweet,” Blevins laughs. “We are, at the end of the day, a young married couple. We have to remind ourselves we are in the public eye. When we tweet, it goes to millions of people.”

As well as managing Team Ninja, Blevins is also a Twitch streamer herself. Before she had the team she’s built up around her and her husband, she had to make some personal sacrifices to ensure she could manage him to the best of her ability.

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“I love my stream and my community,” she tells me. “It got really hard when things were super busy with Tyler and I hadn't built out a team for him yet. My stream took a big hit. I told them, ‘Guys, I cannot be streaming. I have a million things to do for Tyler.’ If I didn't do that I would have done the same thing that Tyler did when I started managing, like sending a quick email just so I could go live, and obviously that defeats the purpose of what I promised I would do for him.

“I wanted to manage Tyler and that was something that I offered. If I really didn't want to do it, of course, I would step out. I had to be realistic and ask myself, ‘What did I want to do more? Did I want to stream eight hours a day, or did I want to make sure that Tyler's business continued growing?’ I have this passion for management. And my answer at the end of the day was I love streaming but I will [prioritise] the management job. Now we're back to a really good schedule and I'm able to put so many hours into my stream and my own brand.”

Being Ninja’s wife and manager meant that Blevins had to ensure the brand she created for herself was separate from the one she’d helped her husband cultivate. If she wanted to carve out her own identity within the streaming space, she would have to do something different - this partnership eventually led to her current partnership with Roccat.

“I've never streamed Fortnite a day in my life,” Blevins says. “I knew, strategically, that if I did play Halo or H1Z1 I would have gotten way more viewers because I had a direct line [to] that community that would come over to me from Tyler. But I didn't want that. I really wanted to grow my own brand and do what I really love. So I started doing a lot of cooking streams. People would come in and be like, ‘This is Ninja’s wife? What? When are you gonna play Fortnite?’ I don't play those games. It's given me my own community. On the flip side [of] what Tyler has, they know that Ninja is my husband but they're here for me. That's what I always wanted.

“I wouldn't mind being completely the manager of Team Ninja and that's obviously what I primarily do. But for me, there's so much fulfillment I get from streaming and from doing my own things that I didn't want to get rid of that part of my life and I don't have to. That's why I definitely make it a highlight and something I really try to put a lot of effort into.”

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Although being the manager of Team Ninja is her main job, alongside being a Twitch streamer, Blevins has even more on her plate. As well as streaming and managing, Blevins also pursues more charitable endeavours. Once a month, she pays someone’s vet bills, and is also involved with ocean cleanup organisation 4Ocean.

“I've worked closely with 4Ocean who pulls garbage out of the oceans,” says Blevins. “We talked about last year, once we start traveling again, actually going and doing a beach cleanup with them. And that's just something that I would love to do.”

She’s looking to expand further, too.

“I've had some calls with certain people - I'm very particular about it,” she says. “There's this one female who is a really, really amazing broadcaster across the sports networks and she wanted to talk about me potentially managing her. Would I love to have her? Yes, absolutely. But do I know enough about that space to be successful in it? Not yet. If you want to manage someone, you have to know the ropes a little bit and at least have a starting knowledge of that space.”

Blevins already knows the streaming industry inside and out, and she’s managed to create distinct but professional brands for both herself and her husband amid multiple controversies and very public mishaps. Only she knows where she’ll set her sights next, but it will be interesting to see what she manages to achieve in spaces old or new.

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