My favourite season in Australia is summer. I love the sun, beach, straw hats and swimming. I love the smell of suncreen and the beach. I enjoy sharing a good quality of life with my friends and my French Bulldog. I am a beach girl from Bronte and Tamarama. Naturally, it’s a real pleasure I introduce you to Laura from Bondi Beach and her beautiful beachy blog: This Island Life. This blog has beautiful photographs, product reviews and many bikinis! Indulge yourself in the real summer state of mind.
Can you give us a little background on your career to date?
I had my first piece of writing published in a book when I was five years old. But I never thought that writing would become my profession. I studied music and drama at uni – classical piano (until I realised my hands were too small) and training in opera (until I found out I’d have no social life in my 20s). I still thought I was going to be a performer, but the universe had other plans. I landed a job as a junior copywriter at a digital advertising agency right out of uni and never looked back.
Tell us how This Island Life came to be
I’d been writing for a popular blog for years – mainly covering emerging fashion labels and trends. I wanted to start my own blog but didn’t just want to write about fashion.
Three years ago I was planning a trip to South America and realised that my point of difference was summer. I only care for hot weather, warm-weather fashion and I’m obsessed with bikinis and the beach. So This Island Life was born!
What makes you aim This Island Life at women?
My blog is aimed at anyone who loves summer and travelling. Most of the fashion I write about is swimwear, but I find that the website attracts a gender-balanced audience.
Did you have any technical problems when you were creating your business?
Earlier this year I started shooting all my own photography and as a result massed an enormous image library of over 200 gigs. My Macbook ran out of space so I moved the data over to a hard drive. I went to back it up on a second hard drive, but it broke. Then the sole hard drive with EVERYTHING on it failed. I almost lost six months of data and my entire image library. A data retrieval guru managed to recover everything, but it cost me $800. The lesson of the story is – never rely on Seagate hard drives, invest in a solid-state hard drive and back everything up on a server.
Would you call yourself a tech-savvy woman? and why?
I am digital, but I don’t think I’m that techy. To the average person I am – but working at digital agencies with creative technologists, developers and UX experts makes me realise I still have a long way to go.
Name 3 apps that you can’t live without.
- Spotify
- Snapseed
How do think technology is going to change the women’s life?
Technology has already changed the lives of women and it will continue to do so. I think women will increasingly get better at multitasking as a result, but I think we need to know when to step away.
I believe there’s going to be a real backlash on the role of technology in our day-to-day lives. I think people, not just women are going to start reverting back to a simpler way of life that doesn’t revolve around passwords, usernames and logins.
Visit This Island Of Life
Images Courtesy: This Island Life
