Daily Inspiration: Meet Jessie-Sierra Ross

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jessie-Sierra Ross.

Jessie-Sierra, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My journey has been an interesting one! I started my career as a professional ballerina & instructor based in Boston, MA & Providence, RI. After years of training and performing on the stages across the region, earning a degree in dance, and establishing a career teaching in the performing arts, I retired from dance to begin life out in Western Massachusetts. Having been born and raised in the city, giving up my fast-paced urban life for a ‘farm to table’ one was quite the adjustment! After settling down near the Berkshires and becoming a full-time parent to my three little boys, I began a blog as a creative outlet and a way to keep my sanity while surrounded by baby babble & diapers!

Having grown up watching Julia Child & Martha Stewart, I have always had a thing for cooking and entertaining. With my move out to the country, I suddenly found that I had a lot more time to explore, but I kept running into the same problem: online recipes that were poorly explained and poorly tested.

There was an assumption that the general readership had enough background knowledge to know how something ‘should’ taste. I would try a fabulous-looking recipe, only to end up with something wildly different, despite following the directions as best I could. I developed a passion for creating step-by-step, well-tested recipes of my own! I have always liked to write, so I combined that with beautiful step by step recipe photographs to create the blog “Straight to the Hips, Baby”!

What was started as an outlet & hobby has turned into a content creation company that is known for gorgeous original food & cocktail recipes as well as home entertainment content. Featuring our signature light & bright photography with lush minimalistic styling, we have become a strong creative voice in our niche.

With lots of hard work and dedication, “Straight to the Hips, Baby” has grown ‘beyond the blog’, and we have been fortunate enough to collaborate with amazing partners on branded content, recurring TV food segments across New England, and recently started “The Food Blog School” on the Clubhouse media platform. I can’t express how thankful I am to our followers and fans for believing in this vision as much as I do!

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I think many small business owners encounter ups & downs. The growth of “Straight to the Hips, Baby” was fairly rapid at its outset, but once my third son was born, I had to take a measured step back. There just wasn’t the time to devote energy and focus to everything. It was an agonizing decision, but one that I don’t regret.

Regaining ground after this ‘pause’ truly felt Sisyphean, and just as we rolled back to what seemed to be a comfortable place, I was dealt an additional blow, having to became the primary caregiver for my father, who was seriously ill with cancer. We rode the waves of his illness and treatments while my husband and I also raised our three young sons.

After my father’s passing, I had a moment of reflection and realized I wanted to take the blog to a new level. Acknowledging that life is short and following your passions deserved energy, I rebounded and went all in on the future of STTHB. With a mantra of “why not”, I spend half a year saying “yes, please!” to every opportunity that came my way. Putting aside any nerves, I sought out and accepted new opportunities to start live TV and cooking lecture demos. We began to churn out a new recipe per week and our photographic style began to truly crystalize into what you see today. What was most rewarding? People noticed!

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
As the Founder & Content Director of “Straight to the Hips, Baby”, I specialize in creating delicious step by step original recipes for both food & cocktails, as well as sharing home entertaining & lifestyle tips.

We feature industry-recognized food and cocktail recipes using amazing ingredients. I want to help guide a new generation back to the kitchen with confidence. I think that once a novice cook realizes that making a homemade cake is truly no more difficult than a boxed version, you can break down mental barriers and light up a real passion for making things yourself! I have had readers and TV viewers reach out to me, excitedly sharing how they’ve worked through a selection of my recipe index, and with each dish learned something new, building up confidence in their own skills!

We are best known for the balance of our cocktail recipes, all of which are created from a foodie perspective rather than the standard alcohol-forward approach. I believe in layering flavors and creating a truly rounded cocktail. Each ingredient can shine individually, but when enjoyed together, combines into an experience that the at-home mixologist can feel proud of! We have had the pleasure of being featured by world-renowned mixologists, and that is one of the greatest feelings in the world to me!

Our photography style is another thing that sets us apart. We started our blog when dark & moody photography dominated the genre. As we worked to find a unique viewpoint in that space, we found that my artistic viewpoint and food style just didn’t mesh with dark & moody!

After some experimentation, we developed a light & bright photography style that we loved but honestly wasn’t popular at the time. Fortunately, I’ve always been a rebel, and we kept pushing out dreamy, bright, and airy photos, which really stood out in the market. We like to describe our style as ‘lush minimalism’, which incorporates natural lighting and floral touches. We’ve been lucky that our gamble paid off, and our style has been attractive to a growing audience.

“Straight to the Hips, Baby” is also unique because we are a fully in-house content creation company. Because we take care of all the elements of our content creation: recipe development, writing, styling, photography, and videography, we can offer a bespoke experience for our clients with quick project turnaround. Since every element is under the same roof, there is no need to coordinate a complex mix of specialists to make things happen. We can even offer packages that mix our content elements with lecture/demos and television segments with minimal lead time.

What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
I think the online food content world will be shifting more and more over to video & video platforms. The rise of apps like TikTok and features like IG Stories & Reels only re-enforces this in my mind. We have recently geared up for this shift and are beginning to produce more videos of our work, ranging from casual behind-the-scenes glimpses designed for social media to full cooking show “episodes” for specific clients.

Obviously with such a long spell of social isolation, we have seen an emphasis on home dining and recipes for small groups, and I think that the theme of small group cooking will continue to trend upwards for several years, with a segment of the market remaining reluctant to ‘get back out’ with the same avidity as before.

On the professional front, beautiful still photography will always maintain a crucial place in the food industry because of the impact that it brings in so many venues where video is impractical. Appetizing photographs are important for food – after all, “we eat with our eyes first”, so I don’t foresee a decline in emphasis on beautiful plating, styling, and clearly worded recipes. Being a visual creator, it’s my job to make my food photos as enticing as possible because my audience can’t smell or taste through the photograph! That’s a big job!

It’s also just as important as creators to diversify our content, as well as where we post it. I always advise that we should house our individual content on a website that we can control, versus having your food content reside exclusively on social media platforms. The social media world is unpredictable, and I feel better having a site that I can control myself!

Pricing:

• Sponsored Social Media Post: Starting at $350
• Photo Packages for Brand Use, with Original Recipe & Social Media Options: Starting at $2K
• Photo Packages for Brand Use, Blog Posting, TV/Social Media Options & Recipe Development Packages: Starting at $4K

Contact Info:

• Email: Jessie@straighttothehipsbaby.com
• Website: https://straighttothehipsbaby.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/straighttothehipsbaby/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StraighttotheHipsBaby/
• Other: Join the fastest growing food content creator community on CLUBHOUSE! “The Food Blog School”, hosted by Jessie-Sierra Ross

Image Credits:
Jonathan Ross