Ilana and Peggy, better known as the duo Your Sweet Guys on YouTube, are a pair of cousins obsessed with K-Pop who showcase their passions with their audience! The duo took some time out of their schedule during KCON NY to chat with us and give us the opportunity to get to know them a little better.

Q: For our readers who are getting the chance to know you for the first time, can you please give a little introduction about yourself?

Illana: Hello, I’m Illana.

Peggy: I’m Peggy.

Both: And we are Your Sweet Guys!

Illana: We have a K-Pop Youtube channel where we play games, do reactions, really just make it our personalities into every video we make in any way possible.

Peggy: We’re cousins and we like to talk about our favorite people a lot. We’re very passionate of the groups that we love and so we turn that into as many different things as we can and we like making friends through our channel. We like to include them as much as we can, too. A lot of fun!

Q: How did you both get into K-Pop?

I: First we saw the Wonder Girls open up for the Jonas Brothers in 2009, was it?

P: Yeah!

I: So when we first saw them we were like, “This might be better than the Jonas Brothers. (Laughs) This… they got their dances going on.” We loved it! And then it wasn’t until 2014, 2015 where we… it was Youtube, Youtube did it. Which is weird that we do Youtube now, but Youtube literally has gotten so many people into it. If you see one video it literally spirals into this, like, “This is the most amazing thing I have seen in my entire life, I have to see what else they have.” And it just took off from there.

P: It kind of trickled into our lives, at first. Because, obviously, we were and still are very into the Jonas Brothers, (Laughs) but, no disrespect to them. But, it’s like 2014 to 2015 was when we started to get really into it which is why the groups that debuted around that time are the ones we are the most passionate about and so the ones that are like our groups are the ones that are from that time period.

I: From when we were just getting into it, they’re embed into our hearts because they’re the first ones we had a connection with and to and that has just gone from that. We just love groups…

P: And now it’s consumed our entire lives.

I: Yeah.

P: And we love it (Laughs).

Q: What made you decide to create a YouTube channel together?

I: We’ll be honest, in our daily lives, are very, not lazy (Laughs), but we like to find creative outlets that are what other people in our families wouldn’t do and we already has listened to K-Pop music before. We have liked it, had watched it on Youtube, and then we decided, “Let’s make something of it that we like to do and we can put out creative thought into.” We legitimately sat down one day, in my basement, and said, “Let’s just film a video, let’s just make a video.”

P: We’ve always had our things that everyone knows, “This is Illana’s and Peggy’s thing.” We’ve always been fans of people as you can tell by our story of getting into K-Pop, where it started. It’s always like, “Peggy and Illana are going and going their weird thing.”

I: And we’re like, “It’s not weird.”

P: We just enjoy and we thought… We always try to branch out and connect with more people so it’s not just us.

I: Because we didn’t know anyone in our personal lives or really anywhere around is that liked K-Pop and we were like, “What better place to meet people who like K-Pop than the internet.” So the Youtube channel has done that so much for us.

Q: Is there any advice that you’d like to give to readers and fans out there who are interested in starting their own YouTube channel or wanting to pursue something in media regarding K-Pop and the Hallyu Wave?

I: First and foremost, it’s amazing so don’t think what you’re getting into or what you’re talking about is wrong or bad if anyone says anything against it. People love all different types of music and K-Pop is amazing. They put so much work and effort into it so there’s no reason why if you’re going to make your channel or media things that you shouldn’t because you just want to love what you love and don’t want people to say that what you’re liking is a bad thing. Just have confidence that what you like is a good thing.

P: And being genuine is a really big thing that we realized helps a lot. It helps you connect with people who are just like you because there’s always going to be someone like you who feels the same way about something. Just being yourself, you can genuinely be yourself and still develop a community or have people around you fell connected to and you can still be true to yourself and you don’t have to be a certain way or act a certain way to be on Youtube. There’s no like… you don’t have to be like this in order to have people watch your stuff. If you’re being yourself, there’s going to be someone who will connect to it.

I: I want to add on top of that that if you’re doing the content that you want to make, keep doing that. Just make the content that makes you happy and don’t think that you have to put out videos that, “Oh, it’s in demand so I’m going to react to this or I’m going to do this.” Make the videos that you want and that make you happy. If you want to play a random game, do it, because it’s so much fun and it will be things that you love to do. We’re not going to put out any content that it’s like, “Oh, someone wants us to do this.” We’ll take requests and we’ll use people who watch our channel because they’re our friends. We take theirs ideas and we’re like, “Oh my God, this is so much fun!” and use it in our videos, but never change the type of content you’re making because someone else wants you to. Always stay with what you want to make.

P: A lot of what we do, including out reactions, a lot of people say our reactions are very… they think that we’re being over the top or whatever, but that’s literally how we act in our daily lives, it’s just that we’re filming it. The games that we play or whatever we do, that’s we we would be doing anyway. We watch things on the TV when we’re not filming or we’re not doing a video that we will be yelling just as much. [Can’t hear that clearly what she said from 5min26sec-28sec] literally just be yourself and…

I: Do what makes you happy!

P: Right.

Q: If you could collaborate with any K-Pop group or artist, who would it be and what kind of collaboration would it be (ex. music video, TV show, kdrama, feature on an album)?

I: For people that don’t know, we have favorite groups, but then we have basically a top 3 and then there’s other ones that we love just as much, but we love GOT7, SEVENTEEN, and MONSTA X, but… in our hearts, to make any sort of collaboration, we are wearing these monbebe bracelets right now, it would be MONSTA X…

P: For anything.

I: The things that… because you said drama or anything like that, we’re thinking of the games that we have on our channel already. We would love to just sit down and do a one minute rant with MONSTA X. (Laughs) something like that or play a game that we have that we can be like now let’s do it with you guys because those are our favorite people on the whole Earth.

P: Anything that we’d want to do would be… one of the main reasons we love any of the three groups that we love so much is because they’re all goofy and have fun and are super weird. So we would love to do anything that brings that side and just be able to have fun with them would be an absolute dream.

Q: Your channel is known mostly for your reactions, but is there other types of videos that you would like to do in the future?

I: Maybe more of ones that are not not-K-Pop related, but bring things into K-pop. A couple… it was like a year ago, we made a, “Trying out beauty related products” and stuff and we really love makeup and beauty products so we could bring something like, “Trying K-Pop looks,” like makeup looks, we would love to do that. Things like that sounds really fun to us.

P: We’re always like… we’re not sure if [they talked to someone else here, then got back] We also try to… since in our stuff we’re so open about who we are and everything about us, we want our try to show more of ourselves and our lives and everything else a bit just to connect even more with the people that we talk to. We’ve done a lot of thing where we’ve had our friends and people across the country or the world who watch our videos get involved and we love those kinds of collaborative videos where a fan can get involved. We love to do those sorts of projects where people who don’t necessarily have an outlet or a channel or don’t want to do that but would love to be involved for one certain thing, we would love to do more of those things, expand it even further.

I: We’ve always wanted to try… we’re still trying to set it up. It’s been two years in the works of sort of a penpal type thing. We don’t know how we would turn this into a video, but we could have people do video messages to each other and it would be on our channel because, how Peggy said, some people don’t want to start their own channel, but we would love for them to use ours as theirs because we are the Sweet Squad Family, if they don’t want to make their own, they can always come on ours because we love them and they’re part of our channel. They are our channel.

Q: Are there any other YouTubers (K-Pop related or not) that you would like to collaborate with?

I: Jae from DAY6! (Laughs) The Try Guys! Make the Try Guys do more K-Pop things. We know they went to KCON a couple years ago and they made a whole video about becoming K-Pop stars, but they are hilarious.

P: We love them.

I: Jae from DAY6 as well. (Laughs)

Q: Last question, are there any updates or information that you would like to tell readers to look forward to in the future?

P: We were destroyed by PENTAGON yesterday. (Laughs)

I: Our whole channel has changed [by it].

P: We’re traveling recently, put up a couple of vlog going to different places. That was kind of a new thing for us. Mostly we just really look forward to growing with everyone. We don’t really have surprises up our sleeves current.

I: You know, we feel like this past year so many comebacks have been amazing that we to ourselves have been like, “We need to, not to branch out, but to include more people onto the channel that we don’t necessarily talk about that we are fans of.” Because we are fans of hundreds of groups, we just mainly keep it to a select few that we talk about on the channel and we want to branch out and connect with more fans. More girl groups fans, more fans of this type of concept.

Q: Who are you guys looking forward to tonight (KCON NY day 2)?

I: We will say everyone because that’s a definite, but some specific favorites that we’ve had since the beginning of our channel are Taeyong and Doyoung from NCT.

P: There will be tears down our face.

I: We will cry when we see them because, actually was it our first… our first reaction was GOT7, but then our second one was NCT.

P: It was.

I: And Taeyong and Doyoung caught our eye in less than a second.

P: From the very beginning those were ours.

I: And ever since we’ve literally been on the Taeyong-Doyoung trail.

P: Literally one of our new catchphrases on our channel is “Ey Ey captain Doyoung.” (Laughs)

I: We love him, but also Ong [Sungwoo] from Wanna One. (Laughs) We’re excited, it going to be amazing and we’re just going to be like, “You guys are so pretty and talented” and we love them. And… do I have the pin on? (Sings) Golden Child! We are obsessed with that song. (Laughs) That song is so good.

Be sure to follow Ilana and Peggy on their social channels and keep up with their newest releases!

Twitter: @yoursweetguys

Instagram: @yoursweetguys

YouTube: Your Sweet Guys