A dating app brand reached out to Laura Whaley, and she was ready to decline. She had been engaged for years, and the product was a clear mismatch. The brand clarified that they were not interested in her. They wanted Brenda.

Brenda does not exist. She is one of several fictional coworkers Laura scripts, voices, and plays in “Project Poodles,” a multi-year episodic workplace comedy set in a remote office. That a brand wants to build a campaign around a character, rather than Laura herself, shows how far the project has traveled from its origins.

As the owner of LoeWhaley Media Inc., based in Greater Vancouver, Laura has built a following of more than five million across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. A McMaster University commerce graduate who spent years in the corporate world before turning to content creation during the COVID-19 pandemic, she has made working life her editorial beat.

Her “How to Professionally Say” series turns workplace frustrations into polished corporate language. Her audience goes by “Work Besties.” And “Project Poodles” has quietly produced a cast of fictional characters that now have brand relationships of their own. “The business is bigger than just the socials,” Laura says.

Bored, Remote, and Running Out of Things to Do

Laura started posting on TikTok in 2020 with roughly 20 followers, most of which she suspected were bots. Her partner worked outside the home. Lockdown had shrunk her world to an apartment, two dogs, and the rhythms of a remote corporate job. “I started making content during COVID because I was bored,” she says.

Her early videos documented Zoom calls, the repetition of remote work, the low-grade strangeness of professional life conducted from a home desk. She posted without expecting a return. “I had a lot of people start to engage and be like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I thought I was alone in this,’” she recalls. What struck her, and kept her posting, was how universal workplace experience turned out to be. Messages arrived from Argentina and further abroad, from people with no geographic connection to her at all.

But growth itself was never Laura’s sole focus. “I’m creating for the audience I have and not the audience that I necessarily am hoping to get,” she says.

She juggled corporate work and content creation for roughly a year and a half, using the period to learn the business. She tapped into her experience from navigating corporate environments. When the transition came, it was structured.

The Language Lesson the Corporate World Never Taught

The “How to Professionally Say” series grew from the observation that many people in a corporate setting have no vocabulary for pushing back. Laura began making videos that offered one. “My goal with that series was to offer alternatives,” she says, framing it as “a thought starter” rather than a copy-paste script.

The dynamic the series taps into runs deeper than professional phrasing. “We grew up in an era where you don’t really talk about work stuff,” she says. Workers absorb conditions without examining whether they hold options. The series surfaces those options.

Laura frames this as a reorientation, not a confrontation. “I’m able to kind of show people [that] you don’t necessarily have to,” she says. If someone has been told they must arrive early to prepare, the natural question is whether that preparation time counts as work, and whether leaving accordingly is therefore fair.

The community that formed around this framing took the name “Work Besties,” a designation Laura chose to bring warmth into a professional context. Within the content itself, “Work Bestie” also refers to a real former colleague who co-appears in the “How to Professionally Say” videos without being identified. He prefers to stay private. The character designation protects that.

Building the Office No One Can See

“Project Poodles” arrived from a different creative impulse. Laura, who describes herself as a committed introvert, has long been drawn to episodic storytelling. “I love episodic content,” she says. “In my mind, I am a big fan of watching ‘The Office.’” She built a fictional remote workplace, populated it with characters navigating professional life, from toxic management dynamics to team departures and new arrivals, and began releasing episodes.

The format attracted its own loyal community. “Some people follow me just for that series,” she says, “and some people follow me for everything except that series.” The audiences overlap only partially. “Project Poodles” operates on its own internal logic, distinct from her broader output.

The production load is significant for a solo operation. Laura scripts every character, voices each one, and handles the editing herself. “It’s definitely a lot more work,” she says of the back-end demands. Her longer-term ambition is to bring a supporting team to the project. “A dream would be to work on an episodic series with more of a supporting team around it,” she says. 

For now, every element of “Project Poodles” runs through one person. That concentration, as it turned out, produced something unexpected.

The Brand That Called for Brenda

The dating app pitch changed how Laura understood what she had built. The request for a brand integration was familiar. What was not familiar was its target. “Not for you, for Brenda,” she recalls the brand clarifying. Laura agreed.

Since then, the pattern has repeated. “I’ve actually had a handful of brands wanting to partner with a character specifically and not Laura,” she says. “I love that. I think it’s so much fun.”

A dating app that would not suit a creator in a long-term relationship suited Brenda without complication. Laura had scripted a character detailed enough to hold her own commercial relationship with a brand.

The same principle governs all her partnerships, character-based or otherwise. “If you are not giving a creator a lot of creative freedom, that will reflect in how the ad performs,” she says. Her standard is for brands to share their goals and then step back. “Let me know what has to be in there and let me do the rest.”

The Moment She Isn’t Trying to Outgrow

Laura’s daughter was born this year, referred to in content as “Little Work Bestie.” Her face and name stay private. Her partner has taken parental leave in Canada; Laura has returned to work, adjusting her days around energy that no longer runs on a fixed schedule.

She approaches her daughter’s presence in content with the same care she applies to everything else. “She’s not able to consent to being in content,” Laura says. The question she holds is concrete: If her daughter watches this footage back when she grows up, how would she feel?

The platform, meanwhile, keeps producing things she did not plan for. She mentions a new parent meetup she is organizing in her local community, a small gathering made possible by the reach and resources the last six years have produced. The model that started with boredom and 20 TikTok followers has since accumulated corporate clients, fictional characters with brand relationships, and a corporation to hold it together. 

“Because of this journey I’ve been on,” she says, “this moment is possible.”

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