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“There’s a couple factors that go into play,” Berolzheimer, 35, tells PEOPLE
NEED TO KNOW
- Julia Berolzheimer started her blog Gal Meets Glam in 2011 to share her personal style and creative passions
- She credits her longevity to building genuine connections and prioritizing meaningful content over chasing trends or fame
- Julia and her husband, Thomas, focus on platforms like Substack to engage their older audience and drive meaningful action
Julia Berolzheimer first started posting online 15 years ago, in 2011, out of her college dorm room.
Her blog, Gal Meets Glam, started as a space to document her personal style — musings on everything from outfits to home decor — and eventually grew and grew into a business. Throughout the rest of her college career (Gal Meets Glam started during her junior year) and into her first full-time job, Julia continued expanding her business, often with the help of her now-husband Thomas Berolzheimer.
Speaking with PEOPLE 15 years after she first broke into the digital creation space, Julia reflects on her longevity in the fickle industry that is social media and breaks down some of her veteran tips for how she’s thrived.
She says “there’s a couple factors that go into play” when it comes to staying afloat for as long as she has online.
The first, of course, is that you must build something that “stems from a genuine interest and passion.” Julia explains that she started her blog before monetizing her content was an option. And, perhaps more importantly, “I started it before there was an option to get ‘fame.’ ”
“Now you see so much of what people have achieved, and you look at that, and you could say, ‘I want to achieve that.’ Versus when I started, there was nothing to look at and say, ‘I want to achieve that,’ ” she says. Her page was created from a “very pure place” of connection with like-minded people who love fashion.
A large part of Julia’s foray into content creation was that Instagram was just barely brand new.
“When I found blogging online, I realized there was this whole community, and so I was very inspired by that, and I continued to be inspired by it,” she says.
“I feel like if you want to play the long game in this business, you have to be delivering something to your audience and not just taking. It’s not about ‘Here, look at me.’ It’s about providing something for them, and that creates a long-lasting relationship that then builds a brand over time,” she says.
Thomas was first brought on as somewhat of an amateur photographer to take pictures of Julia’s outfits, but soon the pair were dabbling in affiliate revenue spaces. Together, they worked to figure out what does and doesn’t sell, as well as stay true to the content that Julia genuinely wanted to post.
While brand deals seem to be the name of the game nowadays, Julia says affiliate monetization has proved more powerful over time.
“Because upfront, a flat fee from a brand seems a lot more lucrative, but over time, affiliate monetization can be incredibly powerful,” she says.
And, adds Thomas, “Just because it’s working doesn’t mean that it’ll work forever.”
“We don’t want to be complacent,” Julia says.
Part of this is making decisions that other, newer content creators might find shocking. “We never got on TikTok, and that was a strategic choice,” Julia reveals.
Julia does have a TikTok page; however, she stopped posting on it in 2023, and compared with her 1.4 million Instagram followers, the account’s measly 5,000 is an indication that the couple had their sights set on other social media spaces to grow.
“We decided to invest our time in Substack instead because our followers are a lot older,” they explain.
“They’re in their 30s to 50s, and then it goes older before it goes younger. And we have one of the highest order values on ShopMy,” she explains. “So people are spending a lot of money, and they’re older. And so we wanted to form deeper connections with those people on Substack versus giving them short hits of short-form content on TikTok.”
“We’re not trying to just get millions of views to have the numbers,” she says. “We’re trying to get people to take action, to shop, to go to our website, to sign up for our email and be a part of our world. And that takes a lot more effort than just a follower for a view.”
In addition to the business they’ve built online over the years, the couple has welcomed two children into their family, daughters Clementine and Marigold. As such, they’ve had to figure out how to divvy up their time and roles in order to balance their careers.
“Over time, we figured out what our crucial roles are, and then how can we build a team to then support us?” Julia says. “What are the things that I don’t need to be doing?”
“So instead of everybody reporting to me and me bottlenecking everybody on our team with approvals, I now have one person that reports to me, and everybody else reports to her, and it keeps everything flowing very quickly,” she adds.
Over the years, Julia has adopted a philosophy when it comes to content creation that is dissimilar from the life-is-your-job, job-is-your-life approach that many influencers today adopt.
“It almost felt more comfortable to be polished [online] because it feels like a guard in a way,” she says.
“But I have, over the past couple of years, gotten more comfortable with being a little bit more raw and vulnerable,” she adds.
However, when it comes down to it, she says, “It felt safer to sort of have a boundary. I think everybody needs to have a boundary with social media.”
Read the original article on People
