Triciaisabirdy left a high-paying finance job to become a famous Twitch chef. Brands help make it possible.

It’s a cold December day in Alaska, and Tricia Wang, known on Twitch as Triciaisabirdy, is bundled up, sitting on a folding chair on a frozen lake. She’s wearing big earmuffs and a brightly colored jacket, but it’s a little space heater and an insulated tent that is—somewhat—protecting her from the worst of the subarctic climate. A Southern California native, she’s not exactly prepared for this kind of cold, but that’s not stopping her from having a blast while ice fishing with the guidance of a local and livestreaming to her loyal Twitch community.

“Ohhhhh, it’s a fish! It’s a big rainbow,” she says laughing as they reel in their first catch of the day out of a small hole in the ice. “We’re going to eat that later.”

Soon enough, they’re grilling their catch right there on the ice, with Wang, a professionally trained chef, admiring the smell wafting from their icy makeshift kitchen.

“This is incredible. The fish is so tender, so juicy,” she says, tasting a meal that’s as fresh as fresh could possibly get.

Though she’s normally cooking (at home, not on a frozen lake) or gaming with her viewers, this special stream is part of her Twitch travel show called Tricia Travels, sponsored by H&R Block.

“The ice fishing was so cool. We were able to show the livestream of us catching a fish on the ice in Alaska, then we cooked it,” Wang remembers a few months later, back in the warmth of sunny California. “At one point, we saw a bald eagle and fed it a fish. It’s amazing to be able to stream because normally you’d have to grab your camera and not be able to capture these moments. But because I’m on Twitch and I’m live, I can capture these moments. It was brilliant.”

Tricia Travels has taken her to farms in Hawaii, a fish market in Japan, snack stands in South Korea, and more amazing places across the world, working with brands along the way.

Considering this globe-trotting life she lives today as a culinary influencer with 133K followers on Twitch, it’s incredible to think that only a few years prior, she was working in finance as an investment manager.

Having graduated with a degree in economics and accounting, Wang was three years into her finance career when someone asked her a question that was difficult to answer: Can you see yourself doing this for the rest of your life?

“I was like, financially, yes, absolutely. I’d be set. But happiness-wise, maybe not,” she remembers, thinking back on her lack of passion for portfolio management work.

Cooking has always been a meaningful part of her life, whether it was for friends or family or herself. “My friends were terrible cooks, and eating out was expensive. And in my family, if you cooked, you didn’t have to do the dishes. So I loved cooking,” she says. She even started working night shifts at a sushi restaurant after her day job to hone her skills.

And in 2018, she quit her desk job and moved to Japan to attend culinary school.

“A lot of people thought I had lost my mind,” she says. “But I liked the sushi chef job more than my finance job, so I was like, OK, this is the right decision.”

Wang made her way to Tokyo, where culinary school was intense—a lot more intense than cooking for her friends and family.

“I thought culinary school was going to be like summer camp,” she says. “But they would start the day making sure our apron was ironed. We’d lose points if we had a stain. In Japanese cuisine, we do this technique called katsuramuki where we shave down a daikon without breaking it with just a knife, and [then] peel it so it’s a straight sheet. It’s really hard, and if you could do it, they’d say you’re a real chef and we had to do that every day.”

And Wang absolutely is a real chef. She made it through the program and, after graduating from culinary school, worked at restaurants, before eventually making her way back to the U.S. and working at a two-Michelin star restaurant in Los Angeles.

But like a lot of success stories in the early 2020s, the pandemic threw everything off.

“When the world shut down, the restaurant only did delivery and so I wasn’t learning anything anymore,” she says. “I quit and stayed home for a bit, and a lot of people were like, ‘You should make some content.’”

After experimenting with recording videos, she found the editing inconvenient and exhausting. When a few friends invited her to work as a private chef in a content house, she decided she’d start livestreaming herself as she cooked meals.

“Suddenly I’d graduated from the phone to a webcam and I had two screens, and my stream started doing really well,” Wang says. “It made more sense to be a streamer than a private chef. I’m really lucky because working at a restaurant is insane hours and very little pay and I’m cooking the same thing over and over again. But with Twitch, I can cook whatever tickles my fancy. And I get to eat it myself. And I make enough money to survive.”

In her early days on Twitch, Wang would stream twice a day, taking her viewers through her full cooks of lunch and dinner. Eventually, she started experimenting with some games and collaborating with other streamers, which helped introduce her to more audiences. She’d been streaming for two years when a viewer sent her the link to apply for a new cooking competition called Next Level Chef from superstar celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay.

Though she didn’t know what to expect from a reality cooking competition, Wang held her own, making it to the ninth episode in an 11-episode competition among a talented group of seasoned chefs. And in one viral moment, Wang even got the chance to explain Twitch to Ramsay.

With the success of the show behind her, she embraced streaming full-time and worked to grow her community, cultivating a space that was safe to talk about mental health, chat, cook, play games, and travel.

“On a lot of social media sites, you get a snapshot of a creator’s life. And it shows when everything is hunky-dory, but with Twitch you’re showing hours of your life when it isn’t all perfect,” Wang says. “I suffer from mental health issues. I pay my taxes too. And sometimes I have to go to the bathroom. It’s really important to share with your community the ups and downs of life. It helps for Twitch streamers to show their communities that it’s OK to go through hard times, you’re not alone, and in my community, we talk a lot about mental health—especially in the Asian community where there can be a stigma against it.”

And there’s also a lot of food. On a recent stream cooking Hainanese chicken rice, Wang gave tips for stopping a cutting board from slipping (put a wet paper towel underneath), she dropped some pointers for cutting onions (if you put water in your mouth your eyes won’t tear up). But because of her versatility, she can also play Teamfight Tactics while sharing with her viewers the best place to get cheap scallops in the Los Angeles area.

This versatility of content has helped Wang forge relationships with a variety of brands across different categories. Over the years, these relationships have taken the form of sponsored livestreams, where she helps introduce products and services to her community, as well as longer-term, more bespoke sponsorships and ambassadorships.

Most memorably is Tricia Travels, which was sponsored by H&R Block. “It was really good because this was right before tax season. We could talk about how you could use your tax refunds on traveling or if you spend while traveling for work, it’s all tax-deductible—and actually because of my finance background, it was very relatable,” she says. “You’d think because I’m a chef, the only sponsors I could work with were pots and pans and food or knives and pans, but because I’m a variety streamer, I can tie pretty much any brand into my content.”

According to the 2023 Amazon Ads and Twitch Ads study Anatomy of Hype, which surveyed fans across the globe, 55% say they are more likely to consider a brand that sponsors content related to their fandom. And 62% of fans feel positively toward brands that have been involved with their fandoms for extended periods of time.

“Twitch is maintaining not just brand visibility, but also brand loyalty. People who are watching Twitch are watching for hours and hours,” Wang says. “What brands should do is when they do sponsorships they should do them long term. When they’re there often enough it becomes part of their streamer’s life and the streamer’s brand. Everyone knows I use Alienware computers and I cook with HexClad pans. Because of the length of time that they’re engaging with you and learning about the product, it makes sense why the brand should understand that it’s more valuable.”

Wang adds that these sponsorships from brands are exciting for her community too. She notes that they always get excited during giveaways, and they are interested to hear from her about new products. “Another benefit to the viewers is that, like the Tricia Travels show, it gives the financial ability to diversify my content and show them things that I might not have streamed without the sponsorship,” she says. “I probably couldn’t afford to travel around the world and try different foods, but because of H&R Block, I was able to do Tricia Travels, and because of Twitch I could show them the top restaurants in Japan or how to ice fish.”

Now, Wang is looking forward to doing another season of Tricia Travels, and for the time being, her days of working at restaurants—and finance—are behind her.

“I wouldn’t choose any other career.”

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