Erin Flynn of Righting Style: Expose Yourself
How did you start your business?
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact start. Being a blogger myself, (my blog is Reality Chic) I’ve continuously encountered certain problems. This past July, we started to actually take action on our idea. The premise behind Righting Style: Expose Yourself is that we’re a fashion democracy that aims to identify the top fashion blog content. We like to think of it as the love triangle for fashion bloggers, brands, and readers!
Our backgrounds and professional experiences uncovered a couple of recurring trends. The first: PR firms, brands, and businesses recognize the ever-growing relevance of bloggers and want to build partnerships with them. The second: they don’t have an efficient way of identifying the best bloggers to partner with or tracking the success of those partnerships.
How did you come up the idea for your business?
Through Reality Chic, I experienced the ins and outs of being a blogger, from attending Fashion Week, to being on a reality TV show, to becoming a Huffington Post blogger, to partnering with Microsoft Windows for their Windows Champion Program, etc. I know first-hand how hard it is to build a following and the difficulties of managing a productive relationship with brands. This is the reason we came up with Righting Style. In simple terms, we want to solve these two problems.
What resources here did you take advantage of and how did they help?
We moved to Cincinnati last November. New York and Silicon Valley are great places to start a startup, but sometimes you can get lost (literally). Cincinnati is a big enough city to have everything we need, but it’s small enough that we can make a difference and be noticed.
We’ve really taken of advantage of the different meet ups in the start-up community from Startup Weekend to Continuous Web to meeting with those at
The Brandery and
CincyTech. This was in large part due to some key people who guided us in the right direction, like Tim Metzner of
SparkPeople and Dave Knox of The Brandery. The people here are very willing to meet and take the time to meet.
What inspires you?
So much! Bloggers, media, the startup community, fashion, working in my passion and the idea of never having a ‘”real job” are on the top of my list for inspiration. After graduating in 2009 with a marketing degree right after the economy crashed and moving to a new city (Scranton, PA) where I had no family, friends, or connections, I really struggled to find inspiration.
I took multiple internships, even one that even included taking a three-hour bus trip to and from New York City. At that point, I decided to follow my passion in fashion (and yes, I realize that sounds ridiculously cheesy). The biggest inspiration is in the opportunities Righting Style can bring to brands and the future of blogging and integrated campaigns.
What’s next for you and your company?
Short term, we are in the process of developing our website, raising funding and networking with PR firms, brands and bloggers.
Long term, we want to take this model into other blogger-heavy industries. We want to create an ecosystem around bloggers that exposes their value and hopefully increases that value to new levels.
Compiled by Robin Donovan