Grace Atwood on Building and Sustaining a Career Online
By Leslie Price
Grace Atwood founded her lifestyle blog, The Stripe, 13 years ago today. At the time, the job of a content creator looked and felt a lot different. These days, in addition to writing, Atwood is a full-fledged social media influencer. She makes it all look easy, but we know firsthand that it’s not. We spoke to her about finding career longevity in blogging, the grind of posting to social, and the tips she’d give to those who’d like to follow in her footsteps.
Your career would be so hard for me because I hate how I look in pictures, and I feel like that wouldn't fly.
Having my picture taken is still my least favorite part of the job. I like planning out the shoots and making sure that everything looks cohesive. But after I shoot, I have to give myself half an hour to sit and read or just do something quiet to feel normal again. Really. For the first couple years of the blog, I didn't show myself. I was working in the beauty industry and was terrified that someone would find out I was doing this.
The blog was a hobby. I never thought it would make money. I think I did it for two or three years without making a dollar. At the time, I was a marketing manager for a big nail-color brand and I had this terrible boss. She was very, very mean. She got into the office at 7am, which in New York is really early. At my other jobs, people got in at like 10. I was getting in at 8:30 and was already late, even though no one else on our floor was there. I would go home and write in my blog; that was my happy place. As people found it, that little community helped me get over a bad day at work.
When did you shift from having a job, and doing the blog as a hobby, to doing it full-time?
I was doing the blog and I wrote about BaubleBar, which at the time was a small start-up. They offered me a job in social media.
I was there for five years. So much of my identity was [wrapped up in this idea that] I'm a blogger, but I've got a day job too. I didn't want to leave. But around my five-year anniversary for [my blog], I was starting to earn a low six figures from it, which was the same as my salary from BaubleBar. At the time, I was saving that money and figuring out what would come next.
I had a big party when [my site] turned five and I rebranded it. It was called Stripes and Sequins and I rebranded it to The Stripe. After that party, I don't know what happened. I was working like 60 hours a week for BaubleBar and then I was doing another 20 to 30 hours a week on my blog. I was so tired. It was a weekend, and I remember watching The Good Wife in bed for two days, getting takeout, going back to my bed, and feeling paralyzed. The next week, I went to my bosses and said that I didn’t think I could keep doing both. At first, I consulted and did three days a week. But they kind of crammed the most important and most difficult parts of my job into those three days. So I was just working more, and I didn't have health insurance. I was like, what am I doing? But having that transition from working full-time to going down to part-time is what gave me the confidence to [blog] full-time, if that makes sense. Kind of like training wheels.
I assume that was scary because now you're an independent contractor and you have to figure it all out on your own.
It's fine now. You just have to adjust. I think any self-employed person can probably relate to this: I am either stressed because I have too much work or I'm stressed that I don't have any. Knock on wood, it's always been fine, but it's different because you're not getting the same amount deposited into your bank account every month. You have to budget and plan for the slow seasons.
How many years have you been blogging?
It'll be 13 on January 20th. I have a teenager.
Now you have to blog and do social media, which is like another job. Do you do it all yourself or do you have some help?
I have a little bit of help, but there's so much that you can't really outsource when it's about you, you know? It’s my perspective on everything, so I couldn't have someone else picking out the items I feature or doing the writing. But I have a great photographer that I shoot with once a week. She's so brilliant and we work really well together. And then I have a woman who posts my sponsored Instagram stories for me. It is a godsend. If you have one a day, you kind of have to drop what you're doing to post at the exact time and then you have to go back in and add all the hashtags on the brand handles (because everything gets submitted ahead of time for approval). It nets out to like five hours a month. And then I have an amazing 23 year old who I work with once a month and we film Reels together because I cannot get ahold of Reels. It's so hard.
I was looking at one of your recent Reels and everyone in the comments was so supportive. Like, “you're really nailing these transitions!”
They’re on this journey with me. I have to do this for Instagram to show my content. It’s like, I know you guys would rather see a photo. I'm kind of goofy and awkward, and they're so encouraging of me, which is so sweet.
Speaking of challenges: What would you say is the hardest thing about your job?
The photos and the video and creating all of that; balancing it. It feels like something is added to our plate every day. I consider myself a blogger and I want to have a new blog post up every day on my site. But Instagram – first it was just a grid post, so it was pretty easy to have a blog post and a grid post up every day. Then there's Stories, and along with Stories, people can reply to your Stories, so you have to reply to those messages, too. Then Instagram's like, yeah, actually I want you to do Reels, too, and we're not going to show your content to anyone if you don't post for a while. I went from getting like 5,000 likes on a photo to getting maybe 500.
If I take a day off, Instagram will show my Stories to half as many people as they usually would. So now I have to post everything I'm doing over the weekend and like, god forbid you want to lay on the couch and watch movies all day. Then you have nothing to say.
What's rewarding about it, aside from being your own boss?
The number one is flexibility. And the community. My audience is so cool. I have this Facebook group, I think there's 13,000 women in it now, and they're answering each other's questions. People will write in really personal things – we created this function where people can post anonymously – and the advice being given is so wonderful. My readers aren't just supporting me, they also support each other.
Also, I've met so many of my friends through this, whether it's people who have their own brands or publicists or other content creators. Making friends as an adult can be really hard. I moved to Charleston and had a few friends, but this job has led to so many new friendships.
When you were 31, you wrote about how you felt old for a blogger. How do you feel now?
You know, it was so new at the time. [It seemed like] every blogger was in their early-to-mid twenties, so I felt old compared to them. The industry has evolved so much. I follow all these amazing content creators, like Carla Rockmore and If It's Tuesday. But back then, I only knew bloggers or influencers or whatever they were calling us who were like 24 or 25.
How do you decide what you want to share and what you don't want to share? How have you learned those boundaries?
I've been in a relationship for a little over a year and a half, and he's not super into the idea of being posted. But when we first got together, people were demanding photos of him. I'm fair game, but for anyone who's in my life, if they don't want to be on the internet, they don't have to be. Dating me shouldn't come with exposure to 180,000 people.
It's been a hard line to walk because people will ask, where is he? Or they assume we're not happy because I don't post him. But no, he just doesn't want to be on there. And I honor that. There are other things. My sister has a four year old who's like my best friend and I do not post her either because my sister does not want her daughter on the internet, which I really respect. I am not a parent, so I can't opine [on that topic].
What I've struggled with is that I’m such a people pleaser, so if my audience wants to see something, I want to say okay. But at what cost? I don’t want to jeopardize my relationships. 99% of the people who follow me are awesome and cool, but there's always the 1.05% of trolls who will say terrible things or send him weird messages.
You are so matter of fact about aging, and you even talk about Botox on your blog. How do you feel about sharing that, and how do people respond?
For the most part, people are like, thank you for sharing this.
I love skincare; it’s a hobby for me. But the second I got Botox, people would be like, well she gets Botox, so that's why her skin looks good. I think of skincare as preventative, and Botox as corrective. And I'm not telling anyone they need to get Botox – for me, it felt like the right decision. But in a weird way, I felt that it affected my credibility.
It's important to just be honest. I'm never going to be someone who tries to paint this picture of a perfect life where everything is wonderful all the time.
If someone came to you and was like, I think I want to do what you do, what would you say? Because building your own personal brand and making content sounds great, but also kind of impossible.
I would say absolutely go for it, but have an angle. When I worked at Procter & Gamble, it was like, who is your “who?” Every launch we had, it was so detailed. Who do you want to appeal to? You can’t just launch a blog and post about whatever you want to, like I did 13 years ago. Now you have to have a business plan and a strategy. Also, you have to be on video.
I would say, do it for love and not for money, because the money will come if you are consistent and you work at it every day and you really love it. If someone told me 11 years ago that that's going to be your job someday, and you're going to be able to buy yourself a house with the money that you've earned, I would have laughed.