The first of many! This is a letter from yours truly (Ambar) to kick things off before our regular monthly newsletter begins at the end of the month; a little personal note about what TFN means to me.

Dearest Fangirls,

I am so excited to be writing the first ever Fangirl Nation newsletter! 

When we first started talking about TFN around this time last year, I had no idea how much joy it would bring me personally, how much passion I would feel for this community, and how much purpose it would bring me. 

Some of you that have been around for a long time will remember, or have been part of Bamby Collective, a community I started in 2018 that ran for about 5 years, that focused on being a safe space for young women to connect and find friends. I took a step back as at the time I didn’t have the mental capacity or energy to keep it running on my own, and the years following were a time of immense personal growth for me. I was burnt out and struggling with content creation. I wasn’t passionate about what I was doing and was contemplating quitting altogether to pursue my longtime dream of working in publishing. Naturally I did what most people in their mid twenties do when struggling with a quarter life crisis; I went travelling. 

I spent 5 weeks in New Zealand, and a month in Australia (seriously cliche), I put no pressure on myself to create content, took a break from working with brands, and just focused on being present and going along for the ride. I ended up rediscovering my love for photography, got into a groove of creating content I actually enjoyed making, and learnt a whole lot about myself along the way. I realised I spent many years trying to be someone I wasn’t, following trends or trying to make other people like me. I now realise that the true path to happiness is what lies underneath when you strip all that away, and follow the little tugs in your heart. 

For as long as I can remember, reading has been the greatest love of my life. My companion in good times and bad. Some of my favourite childhood memories are of the wednesday afternoon tradition my mum created, picking us up from school and driving us to the big Borders book shop in Brent Cross, giving us a basket to fill with books (I would take my time perusing the shelves), before going upstairs to the coffee shop and settling in with a hot chocolate and the book we’d chosen to take home. 

While reading offered the opportunity to escape into new worlds wherever I was (sometimes sat in a shopping trolley in the supermarket), I also always had a love for the purity of cinema. Entering a blacked out room for a few hours, no distractions, just complete escapism into whichever world we’d chosen to enter into that Sunday afternoon. I remember the sheer excitement of queuing for our tickets, getting ready to run for the best seats in a world before seat selection, and leaving the cinema transformed with a whole new outlook on life. 

While books and movies offered a chance to escape my life, music lended itself to me in a different way, becoming the soundtrack to my everyday. I’ve always thought it’s incredible how music can become a time capsule, taking you back to the exact time in your life you played that song, or album on repeat. To this day, whenever I listen to Norah Jones, I’m reminded of my mum cooking in the kitchen in the house I spent my first 9 years. 

All this to say, art has, and always will be, a powerful tool to me. I cannot imagine a world without it, and firmly believe in its power to enrich our lives and bring us together. 

For some reason (misogyny) the world has generally looked down on the things that women, specifically young women, choose to invest their time into. There was always a sense that I should have been somewhat embarrassed of my love for Justin Bieber and One Direction, despite the fact that both of these have been cultural phenomenons, generating huge amounts of money for all involved (money from the hands of young teenage fans, or their parents to be precise). Even now, whenever I tell someone of my love for Taylor Swift, or The Hunger Games, or romance novels, I do so with a certain look, a tilt of the head, as if to say ‘yes that is correct, I am a 27 year old woman who has no shame in confessing her love for such things some may class as basic, or low brow’. 

The simple fact is that I am, and always will be, a Fangirl. I cannot imagine growing out of the feeling I get when I watch a TV show and debrief afterwards with likeminded women (hello the RUSH of that last season of TSITP). I’m not sure what 14 year old me who took a day off school to attend The Hunger Games premiere would think of me, all these years later, being as excited over the franchise now as she was then, if not more so.  She’d probably think I should have moved on to cooler, more adult behaviours, like drinking dirty martinis in dimly lit bars (little does she know you can do both!). 

What I learnt in my years of self exploration is that nothing you are interested in, or invest your time into, deserves to be looked down upon, by anyone else, and certainly not by yourself. So when my incredible management team and I started talking about relaunching Bamby Collective under a new name, Fangirl (which later evolved into The Fangirl Nation) I felt a frisson of excitement I only feel when I know something is worth doing. I knew that if I was a Fangirl, and wanted a community to talk about the books I’m reading, the shows and movies I’m watching, and the music I’m listening to with, there would also be other young women just like me who want the same thing. I knew that if I wanted to spend my Sunday watching the full Twilight saga in a cinema, other girls would too (and over 115 of us did!). 

And so we launched The Fangirl Nation months later, after carefully working on the aesthetic and vibe - I wanted our branding to be romantic and reminiscent of classic books, as I believe that fangirls are at their core, deeply romantic. 

In the space of 3 months we had 6, fantastic sell out events - two nights of a 250 years of Jane Austen celebration in collaboration with Penguin Vintage Books, an early exclusive screening of Regretting You in collaboration with Paramount Pictures, a 12 hour Twilight saga marathon at Everyman, an exclusive screening of Wicked For Good with Everyman, and a Christmas spin class with L’oreal Paris (I’ve truly never had so much fun doing a workout class). 

We’ve had 3 incredible book club picks, and I personally got to interview the author of our first pick, SenLinYu, writer of Alchemised, as a result. I was asked to interview several of the main cast of Stranger Things, and one of the most successful directors of all time, James Cameron, on behalf of The Fangirl Nation community.

We launched The 2026 Fangirl Diary in record time, working every day to get it right and make the deadlines for production to get it shipped to you for the start of 2026 (and it has been SO exciting seeing them arrive!). 

But what has been most rewarding of all, has been building this incredible community of Fangirls. Meeting some of you in real life at our events has made me so happy I have gone home and cried out of gratitude that you have chosen to invest your time into something that was a hypothetical dream a year ago. There are thousands of you in our online community, and seeing you interact in these spaces has been such a joy to witness. 

I’m calling it, 2026 is the year of the Fangirl, and we are going to do as much as we can to make TFN the best community possible for you all. We have big plans for this year, and can only thank you all for putting your trust in us and joining this community. Thankyou for making it all possible. 

Lots of love, 

Ambar xxx