Sneaker queen and popular culture influencer Kim Jayde has taken street culture mainstream. The popular YouTuber’s Kickin’ It With Kim...
Youtuber Kim Jayde goes broadcast. Picture Supplied
Sneaker queen and popular culture influencer Kim Jayde has taken street culture mainstream. The popular YouTuber’s Kickin’ It With Kim Jayde – Broadcast Edition launches on DStv this week.
Bravo Africa, channel 124, will air the new series that’s based on Jayde’s third online season.
The eight-part show moves between Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, New York and Los Angeles with conversations around sneakers, fashion, music and creativity with guests that include streetwear pioneer Karl Kani, designer Jae Tips, African breakdancing champion Courtnaé Paul and Cape Town rapper Youngsta CPT.
Joburg, Cape Town, New York and LA
What started as a niche online series around sneaker culture has grown into something much broader, with the new season spending more time exploring the people behind the brands, the realities of creative careers and the business of building cultural influence in an industry where trends change almost weekly.
Jayde said the move to television also marks a return to the platform where her career first started. She began working in television nearly a decade ago before building her own independent brand online. “The fact that I’m back on DStv is a really big deal because I actually started my career on MTV Base and MTV Africa in 2016,” she said. “Now 10 years later, it’s becoming full circle to be back on DStv, but the fact that it’s now my intellectual property, I own the content, and I’m not only hosting and creating, but I’m also producing and directing the entire season on my own. That’s a really big deal for me.”
Jayde shared that while the television version keeps the same overall feel as the YouTube series, the broadcast edition includes additional original material filmed specifically for television audiences. So even if you’ve seen the online edition, the broadcast version has a lot more to offer audiences this time around.
Jayde self-funded it all
Behind the visuals and celebrity interviews the production process was built largely through persistence and reinvestment into her career. She financed the season independently, travelling repeatedly between South Africa and the United States while balancing production with commercial work to keep the project running. “I would fly to New York, fly the director of photography in from South Africa too, we’d create the material, and the two of us would come back here, post events, do digital brand campaigning, save up more money and then fly out to LA and shoot again,” she said.
She said working behind the scenes as producer and director fundamentally changed the way she saw herself within the industry. “There’s strength that talent will never know when you are working behind the scenes,” she said. Jayde added that one of the reasons she partnered with Bravo Africa was because the broadcaster did not try to reshape the identity of the show.
“I chose to go with Bravo because they believed in the content as it was,” she said. “They didn’t want to change it or alter it. They said what you’re doing is amazing. Let’s partner, let’s amplify, let’s showcase African creatives to the world.”
NBCUniversal executive Chrystele Fremaux said the programme as a strong fit for Bravo Africa, noting that Jayde’s perspective on fashion, creativity and African storytelling aligned naturally with the channel’s audience.
Kickin’ It With Kim Jayde – Broadcast Edition premieres on Bravo Africa on Monday, 25 May at 9:10pm and runs weekly for eight consecutive weeks until 13 July.
