Lauren Riihimaki

Lauren Kobayashi Riihimaki was born on August 11, 1993, in Toronto, Canada, to Gail and Greg Riihimaki. Her mother is Japanese, while her father is half Finnish and half Ukrainian. She was an active child and took lessons to learn swimming, skating, piano and guitar. She was also an athletic child, participating in a number of sports while growing up. Till 6th grade, she attended Alexandra Public School, where she won the French Award and the Female Athlete Award. She next moved to Queen Mary Public School for middle school, where she enrolled in the French Immersion program and once again won awards in French as well as in sports. She then attended Sir Winston Churchill High School. During this time, Lauren Riihimaki had a brief affair with a boy named Joey. The two of them later broke up but are still friends. She is currently in a relationship with Alex Burriss, the creator of the popular YouTube channel "Wassabi Productions". After school, she moved to Toronto to attend Ryerson University, from where she received her Bachelor of Technology degree. Her grandfather died while she was still in university, and to honor him, she later got his birth year "1932" tattooed on her wrist in Roman numerals. Presently, she lives in Los Angeles.

Lauren Riihimaki's entry into the DIY blogging field, and eventually YouTube, was nothing sort of a coincidence. After enrolling into a Graphic Communications Management course at Ryerson University in Toronto, she realized that while the course had future employment opportunities, it didn't allow her to showcase her creative talents, which she was too eager to find an outlet for. She often channeled her creativity in redecorating her "prison like" residence room with DIY stuffs. On a bored day, she searched on Google how to create websites and was led to the WordPress platform on which she created her first blog titled "Desire & Inspire". She initially walked her readers through her DIY blogs with the help of pictures showing various stages of the creative process. However, she eventually felt that a video demonstration will do a much better job. Thus, she sought out the YouTube platform to upload her videos so that she can later embed those into her blogs. To her surprise, she found out that her YouTube channel, which she casually named "LaurDIY", started to gain a huge number of subscribers. Within a few years, her creative DIY videos have earned her as many as 5.4 million YouTube subscribers, apart from over 5 million more followers on Instagram and Twitter combined.

While Lauren Riihimaki started her YouTube journey in late 2011, posting DIY videos on her channel; according to her parents, she showed potential as early as when she was only four years old. Looking through old pictures of herself as a child, she found a number of images which now strike to her as hidden signs of her creativity. The one image, which she has specially singled out in this regard is the one in which she can be seen cutting out a cardboard box (with the help of her father). Throughout her teenage years, she continued to nurture her creativity, which eventually found the right platform through her YouTube channel.

Despite the fact that Lauren Riihimaki's life story sounds like a fairy tale, she was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder after she first moved into Toronto. She hated the course she took up and had to overwork constantly to meet deadlines. The stress eventually led to depression and she even had to go through medications. However, she had made a lot of friends who helped her cope with the dullness of her life. She thinks that the experience has made her more confident about herself.