Jordan Reid, creative working

 

I first met Jordan, the brains and beauty behind Ramshackle Glam at Simply Stylist event in NYC. She’s had a wonderfully interesting career and has one of those jobs, that everyone wants, writing her own blog, a book, and working with fashion brands. I asked Jordan if she would be willing to share her story. Keep reading… it’s a good one.

 

 From hearing you speak and looking at your education background, it’s clear that you didn’t take a straight path, you instead took a lot of zig zags. For so many, once they have “that degree” and a job that matches, they have trouble leaving, even when they aren’t happy. What gave you the courage and space to make the choices to continue to adjust?

You know, I don’t know that I’d call my evolution (by which I mean the series of seriously bizarre career detours that eventually landed me in a place that I genuinely love) courageous, necessarily; it felt much more like what I “had” to do than any conscious decision. I simply couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea of being trapped in a career that made me frankly miserable; even if it made things “harder” in some ways for me to make a change, it would have been impossible not to. I very much believed that there were things that I would love to do and that I’d be good at, so I just kept trying and trying until I found that thing…which ended up not being any one “thing” at all, but rather a collection of interests that came together into a career.

 Creative people tend to have a lot of interests, and also struggle with knowing which to focus on, which to keep as hobbies and which to monetize. It looks like you’re able to have your hands in a lot of places, writing, photography, sponsorships, and speaking. How do you focus your curiosity?

When I was a teenager, I remember saying to a relative that I wanted to be a writer and a chef and a fashion journalist and work in TV – I wanted to do all those things – and she said to me that I would have to pick if I wanted to do any one of them well. And that’s true in most careers: you do have to focus your energies in order to keep things moving forward. But I think the key here is that while it does appear that my job consists of a lot of different “branches” – styling, hosting, writing, speaking, etc – it’s more consistent than it appears; there’s a through line of consistently producing content, and it’s that consistency that has helped enormously in terms of establishing a perspective…mostly because when you’re putting your work into the world every day, you can’t really help being truthful; your “real voice” just comes out.

When I started out as a blogger, all that I knew was that writing was something that made me happy enough that it was something that I wanted to do every single day, as much as I could, and I’ve been very fortunate to be able to watch my work sort of spin off in unexpected – and very exciting – directions. I think what made that possible (besides a healthy dose of luck) was a willingness to say “yes” when those opportunities did come around, to work as hard as I possibly could to take full advantage of them, and to be consistently grateful both for those opportunities and for the (many, many) people who have helped me over the years.

 I was recently read this quote: “ We do not know what we do not know. We cannot see how possibilities  are constricted by our current beliefs in what technology offers, nor in what it tends to take away. “ ( Realizing Empathy)

How did you become aware that you could make money from blogging, and more importantly how did you begin to do sponsored collaborations with brands?

When I started blogging I had never read any blog other than Perez Hilton; I literally quit my job and started blogging the very next day with very little other than the sincere belief that I would be able to transform it into a career (not necessarily advisable; just the truth). I started by blogging alongside a couple of women who had been working to transition their site into a monetized platform, and when I ended up leaving to start Ramshackle Glam I used some of the lessons I had learned in that previous venture (what worked, what didn’t) while developing my vision of what I wanted RG to become. Above all, it was important to me to be transparent about my relationships with companies – I write often about my work life and what it

entails, the same way I write about my life as a parent or my adventures in the kitchen; it’s all just different parts of the same story.

 

I started working with brands in 2010, which I think coincided with a general growing awareness on the part of brands of the value and importance of leveraging the online space. Within about a year, my business grew to the point where it made sense to bring in a team to help manage it. I’ve been working with Digital Brand Architects since the fall of 2011, and their work has been invaluable in terms of growing Ramshackle Glam and opening up opportunities – which have included a show, a book deal, speaking and hosting engagements, and the opportunity to style and curate collections for various fashion and beauty brands – that I don’t know that I would have even dreamed of without their support and encouragement.

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