In January of this year, I hit the grand old milestone of 10k on Instagram. Over the last few months, I’ve reflected on how my focus has shifted from chatting about life as a surgeon’s wife, to moving the lens more towards my life as an entrepreneur, my love for interiors and my passion for creating beautiful lifestyle content.
I love sharing and connecting on Instagram, but social media can be fickle and Instagram’s algorithm means that you may not always see everything I create.
It’s surprising that the average shelf-life of Instagram content is just six hours! A lot of work goes on behind the scenes to create that content, so it won’t come as a surprise that I want to find other ways to develop and share what I do.
Since hitting the 10k milestone, paid opportunities with brands I love have come my way, so a website that collates the different aspects of my life seemed like the natural next step.
Simply Caroline is my home here on the internet, where you’ll find me talking about interiors, beauty, style, motherhood and all things modern country lifestyle.
The creative process behind launching my website
One of the most important business lessons I’ve learned is to delegate the areas I find tricky, allowing me to concentrate on my strengths, which are photography and connecting with people and businesses.
I wanted to write a blog for years, but because of my dyslexia, I’ve not felt able to until now. I wanted to find a creative copywriter who gets my style and cares about writing in a way that represents me as accurately as my visual content does.
Housing my blog within my website means I have the scope and flexibility to share the other aspects of what I do, such as my fabric company, Flohr & Co, featured brand work and my photography.
I approached Sophie, https://www.sophjh.co.uk/ who I’ve known from the early days of The Enterprise Collective. Back then, she was doing her GCSEs and used to come to the events with her mum. She’s very tech savvy, understands how social media works and has a flair for graphic design.
I want to support Sophie as I’m passionate about working with local businesses and she’s young, ambitious and talented. I’ll be doing a photoshoot with Sophie in a few weeks, so look out for that. It’s great to support another woman to achieve her dreams.
Sophie started up her own company whilst still at school and I really admire her entrepreneurial spirit. When I was at university, I worked on the side, but it was to buy clothes and wine, haha!
I met with Sophie and we discussed the brief in detail. We share similar creative influences and like the same bloggers and vloggers, so I think it helped that we had the same shorthand when it came to what I wanted the website to look like and where I want it to go. Sophie now edits my vlogs, so it helps to have consistency in graphics between my website and YouTube channel.
I didn’t want to go for the typical black on white aesthetics - I wanted something more considered and less corporate.
We decided to incorporate sage green and a taupe-grey that closely matches Farrow & Ball French Gray. I painted my bathroom this shade and I love its chic, understated style. I also wanted to include little details, like torn masking paper on the images, so they would resemble a mood board. I wanted the website to strike a balance between pretty, professional and polished. Sophie really understood what I was trying to do and translated it - she’s created everything I asked for, and more.
You may have already noticed that all my social media handles have changed to @simplycaroline.co.uk. This makes it easy for you to find me and let’s be honest, for me to keep track of.
If you’re not already following me on social media, then come and say hello and remember to sign up to my new monthly newsletter!
Comentarii