Randi Rossario sits in a wicker chair inside of Brix Room studio in Farmington Hills dressed like a perfect Detroit fall day: burnt orange sweater, jeans, and boots. She touches up her dark-colored lipstick and makeup, glancing at her husband J.T for assurance.
Lately, it seems every time you pick up your phone or your remote you’re likely to bump into Rossario. She’s a social media influencer whose viral videos are known for their mordant humor and acerbic wit. She’s currently on tour with nationally renowned podcast Tonight’s Conservation, and her talk show The Randi Rossario Show debuted on Tubi this past summer. She’s a new age mix of Wendy Williams and Star Jones, with a splash of Iyanla Vanzant and a whole lot of Detroit.
“I’ve wanted a talk show since I was a little girl. I have been this person my entire life,” she says. “I remember when I was 5 years old and I was talking to my grandfather and he was like, ‘Don’t you ever get tired of talking?’ And I looked him in the face and said, ‘No grandpa,’ and I kept talking.”
Her penchant for being talkative followed her through high school, where she was voted “class know it all” and “class gossip queen.” “I always knew the tea,” she says, smirking. Around that same time she was learning how to turn pennies into profits working as an impromptu waitress for her parent’s basement parties.
“We used to make hors d’oeuvres, I used to walk around with my tray, and rolls of meat and cheese with the toothpicks through them, and I would get my tips,” she recalls.
The teenage business venture was her first foray into a club-like atmosphere and an inclination that she could find entrepreneurial routes in entertainment. Rossario, a native of Detroit’s Eastside, feels that growing up, African American youths aren’t presented with a full scope of occupations and opportunities to pursue.
“A lot of times I think that as people from the hood, what’s projected to us is that you can hit the next level from only a couple of avenues,” she says. “I knew I wasn’t going to be a doctor, I knew I wasn’t going to be an engineer, I knew early on I wanted to get into entertainment and as creative you jump right to music.”
After high school she began her journey of trying to discover that creative niche. She teamed up with DJ Lish and started an entertainment company together called PYT, and later broke away from that and started her own company Lucky Entertainment. In 2012 she took a job for Radio One, becoming the youngest account executive they hired. “I needed to understand how business in media worked,” she says. But after a year things felt stagnant as she felt her ideas to grow the income of the station (and herself) weren’t embraced. Rossario felt she had learned what she had needed to, and decided to move on.
Around the same time she started a rap group Ella & Rosie. The group was bold, lyrical, and beautiful, without all the trap tales of gaming men for money. Some of her music industry peers convinced her the group was too “tomboyish,” and it wouldn’t work, so she pivoted. (“It’s really unfortunate because had I stuck to rap, it really could have been my thing,” she boasts.)
In 2014 Rossario decided to return to radio, and launched Oh So! Radio.
“I knew I was a good host, I knew what direction I wanted to go in,” she says. “The radio station came about because I didn’t want to let this buzz I have from Ella & Rosie die completely.”
Oh So Radio was a 24-hour radio station that streamed online and on-air. The station hosted talk shows, music, and served as a platform for many of Detroit’s up and coming journalists. She calls it, “a hub of creatives just figuring it the fuck out!” Rossario played all roles, including on-air personality, advertising rep, and programer.
“The most important thing was the impact it had on the community and the culture,” she says. “That’s worth more to me than making money. To know that I used my time and I helped people along their path, that’s more than anything.”
After five years of building up Oh So Radio, Rossario’s music itch came back and she formed a new group. This time it was Rosie & The Fellas, a rock band Rossario started with her two twin brothers. Sonically the band was a heavy dose of pop rock with a pinch of hip-hop. They found a unique space in Detroit music as it was able to appeal to different audiences of various music genres. They performed regularly, and their song, “Options” highlighted their versatility. “The rock band was more me being who I am,” she says.
As the Rossario was both a face of a band and a radio station, she felt her creative and business career were on the fast track to stardom. But in January of 2018 Rossario’s world was derailed when a near fatal car accident left her with a series of injuries including post-traumatic epilepsy and depression.
“My body wasn’t the same,” she says. “It’s still not the same. It put a harsh halt to everything I was doing. I was physically, mentally, emotionally fucked up.”
Rossario was stuck in a mental and physical isolation. Physically, she was unable to be what she was, and spiritually she was trying to pull herself out of a darkness birthed by depression. She could no longer perform with Rosie & the Fellas, and Oh So Radio started to lose steam. “As a 25 year-old I was not smart enough or aware enough to understand to establish the business as its own entity without my face being there,” she says.
Amid healing and introspection she began writing a series of books. One of the first was “Good Day Goals: Planning and Execution Workbook,” which she calls her most important book. “It’s full of honesty, real life work for you to get through what you’re going through,” she says.
The book went on to sell more than 80,000 copies. During that same time period she began posting Instagram videos full of inspiration, humor, and self-help. This would become her “influencer” calling card, as every video ranked in thousands of views and likes.
“My videos were hitting. I was depressed and going through it. People love that kind of stuff,” she says with a laugh.
On Dec. 26, 2018, in an Instagram post that received 118,000 views she asked, “It’s time to self assess… ask yourself, why every single year you gotta cut somebody off? What is it about your energy that you always have to cut somebody off?”
On March 11, 2019, in an Instagram post that received 55,000 views, she asked, “Why do we be so proud of our character flaws? Being mean isn’t who you are by nature, being moody and rude; my Daddy didn’t make you like that! What’s keeping your spirit in such a dark palace?”
“While I’m healing myself, I’m helping them. I’m validating their feelings, I’m validating their experiences, I’m validating what they’re going through at this moment.”
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Rossario admits that the advice and commentary was just as much for her as it was for her audience. She was soul searching in real time, and feels that journey was just as important to her brand as any of her other endeavors. All the while, her followers grew; she now claims nearly 400,000 on Instagram and nearly 73,000 on TikTok.
“The dopeness is that they got to feel the effects of my healing journey,” she says. “While I’m healing myself, I’m helping them. I’m validating their feelings, I’m validating their experiences, I’m validating what they’re going through at this moment.”
What she was experiencing echoed what others were feeling amid the loneliness of the COVID-19 pandemic, but both Rossario’s personal and professional life had found a new swagger. She penned four more books, birthed a child, and married J.T. Maples, a former love interest and creative peer she had known from the beginning of her career.
“I was always attracted to Randi’s work ethic and desire for the most out of life,” says Maples, who is also her manager. “At the same time, I seen that she, like most people, was too afraid to actually do what it takes to get to the next level. Randi doesn’t like discomfort, and unfortunately that’s needed in order to elevate. So I elevated her… in business, as a creative, as a partner and as a friend.”
“I went from being a rock star to being a mother with two bonus kids and a baby,” she says with a smile.
As Rossario began to pay more attention to prioritizing being a mother and wife, she realized she was giving too much energy to social media. Her daily motivational videos, while generating heartfelt appreciation from fans, started to feel like a chore. Plus, the parasocial dependency of some of her followers began to make her feel uncomfortable. On one occasion, Rossario tracked down the family members of a follower after he threatened suicide and was able to get him help.
“A year later he made a whole video about it thanking me,” she says. “But I had to make adjustments because it was starting to affect my mental health and the energy in my household. I would feel like I have to get this video done by this time or such and such, or someone is going to die today.”
Rossario decreased the amount of videos she posted and changed the frequency of posts. There would be no more set times or certain days for postings. In her case, being a slave to social media wasn’t about being chained to garnering like and followers but by being an empath.
She felt her true fans and followers would stay with her regardless, and she was right.
In December 2021, nationally renowned motivational speaker and author Ace Metaphor reached out to Rossario to join the panel of speakers on his highly successful traveling and streaming podcast, Tonight’s Conversation.
“The internet eats it the fuck up,” she says. “I am a hired talent. They call it a podcast, but it's a show. It’s deeper than a podcast, it’s a full-blown production.”
The podcast usually consists of six speakers discussing various aspects of a marriage, relationships, and adulthood in front of a live audience. The show is completely interactive, and has the feeling of putting all your favorite talk show hosts together on the same stage. The online version is subscription-based, while the touring show routinely sells out 1,100- to 2,800-seat venues and records three shows at every stop.
“It’s literally one of the dopest things I’ve ever experienced,” she says. “I get paid to travel and talk… It’s not anything else like that out here right now.”
Rossario found herself notching more wins when on March 19 of this year she succeeded in launching the inaugural season of The Randi Rossario Show on the Tubi streaming platform. Tubi, a Fox-owned company, has long been a favorite of independent Detroit filmmakers. The Randi Rossario Show marks the first time they’ve ever had a talk show. “It’s going to stay on Tubi unless another network wants to buy it and make it make sense,” Rossario says.
The show usually has three guests with Rossario, and notable Detroiters from the city’s hip-hop community including DJBJ 3525, Ro Spit, Pretty Brayah, and Stewe are just a few who’ve made appearances on the show. The first episode started off with a provocative discussion on sex, but the other five episodes explored a wide range of topics.
“That was really to catfish people,” Rossario says with a sneaky laugh. “They thought it was just going to be a sex show, but they weren’t expecting it to have substance, and conversations about entrepreneurship, mental health, fatherhood, and motherhood.”
Rossario is quick to point out that her personality is exactly the same whether she’s in front of a mic, phone, stage, or simply talking to friends. She doesn’t think there are too many misconceptions about her, but she feels the public believes her social media vigor is the most present form of her personality.
“I think people think I’m this strong ‘rah-rah’ girl all the time. But I be home making his plates, making my husband food, making sure my parents are good, washing my kids’ clothes,” she says. “Behind closed doors I’m a soft woman, I’m a feminine woman.”
From a personal standpoint, Rossario says she’s proud of all her creative endeavors and says they tell the perfect story of who she is and who she’s becoming. She says her biggest regret was allowing the 2018 car accident to take her to the dark emotional place that it did. From a professional standpoint, she regrets not sticking with the Ella & Rosie rap group, because it was the one time she let another person talk her out of an idea.
“Allowing people to get in my ear when it came to that tomboy music shit because it could have popped — I wasn’t standing strong in what I could have done in my music career,” she says.
It’s one of the main reasons she’s so headstrong now. Rossario has a Kanye-like attitude where she thrives on what people tell her she can’t do. “I’m not letting nobody stop me because the one time I did let somebody stop me, it could have been some shit,” she says. “It could have really been a big thing.”
Moving forward, the second season of The Randi Rossario Show has already been filmed and edited. She hopes to incorporate live audiences in the future, and possibly extend the season beyond six episodes. Rossario is now 31 and is the quintessential representation of Generation Y: a creative who’s going to examine all the economical avenues of what she creates without sacrificing her morals or beliefs.
As much she credits herself for putting the work in, she also credits J.T. for having the vision and keeping the batteries in her back charged to bring their dreams to fruition.
“We got back together in 2018, he literally told me, ‘You’re going to be a touring influencer, you’re going to be a household name,’ just everything I’m doing right now, he told me I was going to do.”
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