Sophia Tuxford and Cinzia Baylis-Zullo are commanding the rooms

When Sophia Tuxford and Cinzia Baylis-Zullo were on stage for a ballet performance during primary school, they both missed their cues. “We were just chatting,” Baylis-Zullo says in a now nine-year-old video on their joint YouTube channel, breathless through a bout of giggles. Two decades later, the duo would be back on-stage — this time round, at The Royal Albert Hall in London — microphones in hand, dressed in matching ballgowns with cascading sparkles that gleamed under a glowing spotlight, standing in front of an enraptured audience of young women, there exclusively to hear them “just chatting”. 

“That was a big moment for us,” Baylis-Zullo says. We’re talking over Zoom on a blustery March day, as the friends sit snuggled together in the kitchen of Baylis-Zullo’s London apartment. “The tours are always very special,” Tuxford chimes in. The Royal Albert Hall was the final leg of their September 2024 Planet Tour across the UK, during which they took their chart-topping podcast, The Girls Bathroom, on the road for a series of live shows. The following year, they were in Australia. “We were like, ‘Why are we here?’” Baylis-Zullo says, in utter awe at having an audience on the other side of the world. “You’re all so far away but you’re listening [to the podcast]. Like, that makes no sense!” 

Despite their disbelief, the feverish excitement whipped up by the tours should have come as little surprise to the pair. Now in their late twenties, Tuxford and Baylis-Zullo — originally from Nottingham — have captured the attention of Gen-Z women everywhere. Collectively, they have more than a million followers on Instagram, hundreds of thousands of followers each on TikTok, as well as nearly half a million subscribers on YouTube; which is where it all started when they uploaded their first video more than a decade ago. Meanwhile, The Girls Bathroom — a podcast centred around girly chats and listener-submitted dilemmas — is constantly topping Spotify and Apple Music charts, with an average of one million monthly listeners. 

To say that Tuxford and Baylis-Zullo have built a loyal and dedicated fanbase would be an understatement. The girls and women who support them (and make up the vast majority of their following) see them less as distant celebrities or influencers, and more as close friends. And it’s easy to see why: they exude warmth that makes the screen between us melt away, while an effortlessly playful energy surges between them. “Do you know what I’m really trying to be these days? More whimsical,” Baylis-Zullo says, at which Tuxford jokingly rolls her eyes and quips: “Oh, here we go.” It feels like I’ve fallen directly into a live recording of The Girls Bathroom — and like I’ve been given intimate access to their lifelong friendship.

And if the comments that flood their social-media posts are anything to go by, many of their followers resonate with this feeling, too. Some examples: “My close personal friends, Sophia and Cinzia”; “My mothersssss”; “Why am I emotional over strangers?”; “The calmness and comfort they bring is unmatched”. These comments are a glimpse into the unique bond they share with their audience. “That is one of the nicest things: when we meet people and they say, like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been watching since the prom ‘Get Ready With Me’ videos’. And it’s like, ‘God, that was 10 years ago’,” Tuxford says. “‘You’ve been here for a long time!’ It’s such a privilege to have an audience that’s grown up with us.”

And grown up they have. The duo have come a long way from the YouTube videos they used to upload of prank calls and tipsy Friday night pre-drinks. Tuxford is now engaged to her ‘Brian’ — the name used to refer to all men on every episode of The Girls Bathroom — while, last year, Baylis-Zullo became a dog mum to her maltipoo, Blueberry. “We’re real homebodies,” the latter says. Undoubtedly, being homebodies has informed their latest career move: creating their very own homeware and lifestyle brand, rooms (the lower-case suitably Gen Z in nature), which officially launched in November last year.

“Having a brand, for us — it was always our big dream,” Tuxford says. “Even going way back to being at school —- before we had a YouTube, before we had a blog — having a brand, whatever that looked like, was always this dream for us as children, and getting to have a project that we worked on together.” But, Tuxford explains, the course to rooms didn’t always run smoothly: “We tried a few different things, and then that didn’t work, and that can be a bit discouraging.” “It felt so out of reach,” Baylis-Zullo adds. “But rooms was meant to be.” Tuxford agrees: “The stars just seemed to align.”

“rooms was meant to be.”

The wait was worth it. The brand’s first ever drop — featuring a butter-yellow and pale-pink dressing gown and a sculptural, space-age candle — sold out within the first week of releasing. “These are products that we’d been working on for about a year, and just getting that validation from customers like, ‘We love this, we want this, we can’t wait to get this’, and then seeing it in people’s homes and seeing them wear [the pieces] was huge,” Tuxford recalls. “We looked forward to this era of our careers for such a long time, and to finally be in it, to be working on it and learning and building is all very ‘pinch me’. It’s been really special.”

By the time we meet, Tuxford and Baylis-Zullo have just announced the brand’s second drop for the new season, aptly named The Spring Pantry. The entire collection is a retro-inspired ode to pastel shades — from the marshmallow-soft pyjama sets to the jelly-shaped, pistachio-hued ceramic vase. “We love colour,” Baylis-Zullo says. It’s all very much in keeping with their unapologetically girly aesthetics; their new set for The Girls Bathroom is a bubblegum-pink, Barbie-esque wonderland. “Now we’re getting rooms items that we can decorate the podcast set with,” Tuxford says. “We’re dying to put the vase on the set,” Baylis-Zullo adds. 

The Spring Pantry drop was announced in true Tuxford and Baylis-Zullo fashion: with a glamorous, dollhouse-themed photoshoot, in which they both sport ’60s-inspired bouffant hairdos. “I saw the most incredible bouffant on TikTok today, I was gonna send it you,” Baylis-Zullo says to her blonde counterpart. “Honestly, I think we should bring it back.” The playful vibe of the shoot, too, reflects their growing confidence when it comes to rooms. “We felt a bit more reassured going into drop two,” Baylis-Zullo explains. “We thought, ‘Okay, we’ve got something. We’ve got the rooms customer’.” “We’re trying to give them what they want,” Tuxford says. And it seems they’re doing just that; the jelly vase sold out within a minute of releasing.

With a thriving podcast and a burgeoning business under their belt, Tuxford and Baylis-Zullo feel that they are entering a new era of their lives. “We think it’s been a lovely natural evolution from the vlogs and the podcast to the brand — to have them all,” Baylis-Zullo says. “And we still pour into all of them.” “They’re different extensions of us, you know?” Tuxford adds. “They’re places where we can explore creatively in different ways. But we love them both. They’re our children.” “They’re our babies,” Baylis-Zullo agrees.

“We love them both. They’re our children.”

Their babies are, by all accounts, flourishing; something that Tuxford and Baylis-Zullo are both quick to attribute to the plethora of powerhouse women they have consciously surrounded themselves with. The rooms team, for example, is entirely female. “We’re surrounded by people who believe in [us] and have similar passions to [us] and are championing [us],” Tuxford says. “They’re women that we trust on their opinions and bounce ideas off. They take us seriously.”

Behind the scenes, other female founders have been an invaluable source of inspiration for the pair, propelling them in the right direction when needed. Grace Beverley — bestselling author, host of the Working Hard podcast, founder of clothing brand Tala, and a Forbes 30 under 30 entrepreneur — has been a steadfast “sounding board” for them both. “We really admire Grace and what she’s built with Tala,” Baylis-Zullo says. “She’s our icon, our queen. We will go to her for advice if we need it. She really did help us, like back in the day when we were trying to do other projects. She really gave us some valuable advice.”

Spurred on by a network of supportive women — including their followers — Tuxford and Baylis-Zullo are on a dizzying upward trajectory. “We’re just really proud that we got to this point,” Baylis-Zullo says. “It’s always very scary starting something new,” Tuxford explains. “Adding another string to the bow, it’s like, is this going to work? The goal is that it just keeps growing and we keep enjoying it and people keep liking it.”

And when it comes to their audience? They’re right there on that journey with them. “Especially in recent years, the podcast has become so much more grown-up than it had been,” Tuxford says. “We’ve noticed the type of email we get now is quite different,” she continues. “Back in the day, it would be very school and uni[-related]. Now it’s like, we’re talking about mother-in-laws and careers and it’s a little bit more X-rated than it used to be. It’s ever-evolving, and we’re just along for the ride.” And it seems that ride is showing little sign of slowing down; even a rooms Christmas drop is already in the works. “Stay tuned,” Tuxford teases.

Shop rooms here.