Today we’d like to introduce you to Julia Jverie.
Hi Julia, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Looking back now, as contradicting as it sounds, I owe my creativity to my very strict parents who didn’t let me do much aside from study academics. I wasn’t allowed to pick my own clothes, wear makeup, paint my nails, dye my hair and grew up really sheltered. Once I started to have more freedom and own money by working a part-time job, I started to buy my own clothes, secretly put on makeup during school (wiped it off before school ended, haha), and just fell in love with the freedom of creativity. I rebelled hard once I had a taste of being able to create a sense of style for myself and indulged in every moment of it. I became obsessed with it. It felt so good – finally being able to be me.
Everyday I was excited to put on an hour of makeup and dress up because it gave me a personality and purpose. Most days, I went to school or worked, which meant not very many people got to see my curated look that I spent hours on. That’s when Instagram came into the picture. I saw other girls post their amazing outfits and thought it would be a great idea if I could do the same. It started as a hobby for me to document my outfits of the day and it somehow grew into something so much more.
It helped that my first job was being a photographer at a photo studio which is where I learned all my photo taking, posing, and Adobe Photoshop skills. As for college, I loved fashion so much I decided to go to FIDM and became a fashion designer. While working in the fashion industry, I was constantly surrounded by other creatives – models, makeup artists, photographers, other designers. Being surrounded with people who have the same passion and creativity as me, I started to make close relationships with other like-minded people. These people ended up becoming my friends, sharing outfits, sharing makeup tips, and then taking photos for each other to share our creativity on our own platforms.
At one point I realized, I could share all these tips online – hopefully help someone like my younger sheltered self who was constantly looking for their own style by idolizing Tumblr and lookbook.nu girls. That’s when I started blogging and creating YouTube videos. I wanted to share everything. Style, beauty, cooking, yummy restaurants, and travel.
I got really into it all and started eating out at all the restaurants I wanted to try to write reviews. I started testing out makeup products to see which were worth the money and weren’t. Made really in depth and detailed travel itineraries. I even experimented a lot with my own hair because maintaining colorful hair was too expensive and I wanted it to be available for anyone who wanted it. I wanted everyone to be able to be who they wanted to be, not waste time during travel, eat good food, and own well-working makeup products without having to waste money on trial and error.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
This kind of road is all about learning, making mistakes, growing, and sharing. There were quite a few struggles that came with the blessing of being able to turn passion into a living.
• Burning out: Being given so many opportunities to create content also meant having to constantly think of new ideas or ways to create unique content with due dates. The hobby becomes a job. Especially in the beginning when I wasn’t balancing a schedule, everything started to feel like a burden. The content started to lack creativity and everyone, including me, could see it. The best way was always to take a step back, not take every opportunity that came, and also repeating to myself, “I get to do this.” instead of “I have to do this.”
• Insecurities: You become your biggest critic. I started comparing my stuff with other people. I wondered why I didn’t get as much likes or engagement as another. I started picking at my own appearances. Thoughts like; “What am I doing wrong?”, “I can’t upload this, it’s not perfect.”, “What will my peers think of me, they’re going to make fun of me.”, “I’m not as skinny or pretty as that other girl.”, “I totally gained weight from last month.”. It was a hard battle mentally and took a long time to realize that it wasn’t about what other people thought. It didn’t matter how much engagement a post got, it didn’t have to be perfect, all that mattered what that the content was good in my own eyes and that I did my best to create it. The key importance is not other people’s opinions, but it is actually all about consistency.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
That’s a complicated one to answer, I feel like the best quote to describe what I do is that I am “A jack of all trades, a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”
I create content as a side hustle. It’s an outlet I love to keep up with, to keep sharing, and doing what I love.
I’ve always had an entrepreneurial side to me so I left the fashion industry after eight years and decided to move onto creating in a much more technical realm and start my own business. Took a full stack web developer bootcamp at UCI, got my MERN stack web developer certificate, and ended up working at a Fortune 500 company in tech. Then I went into marketing – both social and digital – and started off as an assistant and worked myself up. Because I had the experience of being the “influencer”, this came easy to me to switch to the other side and handle other businesses social media platforms.
Currently, I am a freelance front-end web designer, developer, marketing specialist. Also, after many failed business ventures, I proudly now have two successful businesses. From product research, designing and developing my own websites, creating content, and handling all the digital and social marketing, I can say I literally – do it all.
Being a “hybrid” is what sets me apart from others. For example, most marketing specialists probably aren’t influencers or most web designers don’t know how to code into live development. Being able to see both sides of a situation makes finding a solution much easier.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: www.jverie.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/juliajverie/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/juliajverie
