1.What/who is your brand? (Name, what you do, relevant history/context etc).

Richard Tomic 25 years old born and raised in London. In 2019 I moved to Japan at 19 years of age after teaching myself Japanese and was able to work in a busy ramen restaurant in Tokyo on self-taught Japanese. I returned to London after in 2018, entered university and continued working at various Ramen shops in London while at university. I started making comedy tiktok content during the pandemic in 2020 on top of my uni course and part-time job. I quickly gained a following and amassed over 500k on tiktok and 100k on instagram since then. My videos express the hilarious, uncomfortable, and unfortunate (but very real) side of living in Japan side as a foreigner through realistic scenarios, explicit language errors and god-tier puns. Through my skits I have developed several characters based on an exaggerated persona of someone you may commonly come across in Japan. e.g. a Japanese girl who's personality has been greatly influenced by all the black men she dates, or a happy-go-lucky Japanese boss who doesn't realize that the more he tries to relate to the foreigner in the office, the more racist he sounds. I took the leap of faith and quit my job in 2021 to become a full-time content creator and now run a small Japanese tutoring business where I teach my followers Japanese through my own learning materials. It's important to note that I captured Yakult's attention deliberately mentioning them in my skits in the hope that an opportunity to work with them presented itself and it did! I've attached snippets of my yakult skits!