Archive for Travel

Pixel To Persona: Safiya Nygaard

Safiya Nygaard is a very successful American Youtuber from Chicago, Illinois. She attended Standford University, studying English and Drama. She quickly noticed her love for production and began working for BuzzFeed in 2015. She started her career at BuzzFeed creating the popular show called Ladylike with a few others. After she left BuzzFeed she was able to put more effort into her own YouTube channel. She has gained over 10 million subscribers since she started posting on her channel in 2017.

Collabs, New Brand, and Other Opportunities:

YouTubers certainly are entrepreneurs but not what some people would think. YouTubers advertise content and as they come into their “voice” that then turns into a brand and this has been successful for many YouTubers including Safiya. Safiya has been able to be a part of many great projects and opportunities. Some of these projects include creating a lipstick collection with popular makeup brand: ColourPop. Aswell as collaborating with fellow YouTuber Cristine Rotenberg AKA Simplynailogical with a limited-edition collection of nail polish from Cristine’s brand Holo Taco. Safiya also owns her own apparel brand called Fiendish Behavior which is a perfect embodiment of who she is. She has added her makeup experiments to her hoodies, t-shirts, stickers, tote bags, blankets, and sweats. Safiya would call her clothing style as “comfortable vampire” which means wearing all black in comfortable styles and textures.

She is known for her series called “Bad Beauty Science” which essentially means mixing large amounts of a single type of products and creating a “Franken” etc (She has mixed almost every type of makeup product together).  This has iterated into many off shoots of channel topics. She loves testing “Weird Fashion” such as Platform Crocs, 9-foot-long jeans and many many more. Recently she has moved into showcasing her cool travel opportunities with her husband also fellow YouTuber Tyler Williams. They have visited an underwater hotel, slept in an Igloo, slept in a Japanese Capsule Hotel, and again many other places. As a fellow viewer and subscriber, I like to say she is an investigative channel of weird things but weird is a good thing because that makes the content very interesting. I found her channel in 2018 so I have been a loyal lover of her content for 7 years and still enjoy every aspect of her videos. One other detail I would like to mention is when she has a video idea she will do whatever it takes to complete it just because she is that interested in the topic. Some of my favorite longer more deep dive type videos include, “I Stayed At Every Hotel On The Vegas Strip”, “I Ate At Every Celebrity Chef’s Restaurant On The Vegas Strip”, and “I Got An 18th Century Makeover” just to name a few. In her 18th Century Makeover video she got the opportunity to live out her childhood dreams and visit Colonial Williamsburg and get to wear 18th century attire and get to participate in activities there. In her earlier videos she would mention how she wanted to go to Colonial Williamsburg and now she finally got to go. It was really cool for me as a fan to see her get to visit a place she always talks about, and I was very invested in videos like these.

Conclusion:

These videos take a lot of time, planning, and funding. I am amazed at the work that is put into these videos from Safiya, Tyler and their team. Both of them are also relatively young being 32 and 33 years old. They all have been working very hard on this channel and brand since they graduated college. As a long story short I really wanted to showcase at least one YouTuber in the blog post agenda and I think it is a very interesting type on Entrepreneur to research.

Here is Safiya’s YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbAwSkqJ1W_Eg7wr3cp5BUA

(I tried every method but I was unable to add any pictures, her thumbnails are really eye catching)

Sam Kolder Lives a Life of Adventure

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Sam Kolder is a social media star from Canada who is best known as a filmmaker, editor and photographer. He travels the world in search of the next big thing to documents in some way and share with the millions of people he influences and inspires. He acquired this fame from his Beautiful Destinations video, which has been uploaded on his photosharing app and YouTube channel ‘kold’.

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He has more than 7.1 million followers on Instagram and more than 145k subscribers on his YouTube channel. These numbers are no surprise to someone who has spent time looking through his Instagram feed or YouTube channel. The images and footage he captures are breathtaking and incredibly unique. He is sponsored by numerous companies such as Marriot and MVMT apparel. These endorsements give him the financial capabilities to travel the world and continue to inspire people. Being just 21 years old, he is quite the young entrepreneur. Another form of income for his is through editing footage for different organizations. He is one of the most skilled editors I have ever seen and is using that to his advantage to make considerable earnings.

Wearing the World – Serengetee

In 2011, Jeff Steitz was traveling the world with the Semester at Sea program through his school, Claremont McKenna College. Less than a year later, he and a few buddies would have begun a travel-inspired business marketing textiles from around the world in a unique and appealing way, all based out of their dorm room.

Fabrics are a universal product—anywhere people travel in the world, they’ll find cloth being produced and sold in a limitless variety of patterns. Serengetee’s signature product, the pocket tee, is a basic t-shirt sporting an attached pocket made of fabric from another country. Customers can choose from over fifty designs, a selection which is constantly being added to as Serengetee reaches more corners of the world.

“It’s amazing how far you can go in only a year from literally nothing to having a full-fledged brand and business,” Serengetee co-founder Ryan Westberg observes.

Besides supporting vendors, each Serengetee pocket is associated with a specific grassroots organization, to which every purchase gives back a portion.

Ryan says that the business was truly a “product of social networks” in the way they had to depend on individual connections— “our friends and their friends”—to succeed. Their innovative spirit matches that of the international businesses they support, who often struggle to make a profit and progress in their ventures.

“What makes us feel great about the future is that the more products we sell, the bigger the impact will be on our partner causes. These win-win situations are the true benefits of a social venture,” says Jeff Steitz.

The process of founding Serengetee has proved to be rewarding, as the business generates a profit margin between 60 and 80%, with 13% going toward charitable causes. As their products are scattered all over the world, Serengetee’s five sales executives are appropriately spread all over the U.S., with representatives across college campuses working to promote the brand and get their fellow students to “travel more.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bnrk3IDnn8_/

Shop their site: https://www.serengetee.com/

How This Hawaii Surfer Boy Went From Rags to Riches

Jay Alvarrez was borSee the source imagen on the beautiful island of Hawaii and raised by parents who always supported him. When Alvarrez was just 14, his mother passed away. She had an incredible impact on his life and taught him how to love others well. After her death, Jay got the phrase “let’s live” tattooed on the inside of his bottom lip, a memento he lives by and will never forget. After his mother’s tragic death, Alvarrez made the decision to drop out of high school and live the life he knew his mother wanted for him. He began experimenting with film, and started to document his adrenalin including adventures, capturing beautiful footage of his experiences and travels. Posting these incredible videos to social media, Alvarrez began to accumulate quite a following. This was the beginning of his path to stardom. Producing increasingly impressive content, Alvarrez’s work began to catch the eyes of companies such as Calvin Klein, Bonds Swimwear, and Hyundai and participated in high paying advertisements, and sponsorships. These new sources of income blessed Jay with more opportunities to travel the world and build a brand of himself. This is how Jay Alvarrez is an entrepreneur. He wisely gripped his wide array of talents and turned them into an outstanding source of income. His fashion and self-developed trends have spread across the world, and he has inspired million to go out into the world and go live. This is a perfect example of a rags-to-riches situation. He was handed nothing, and became a self-made millionaire. See the source imageFast forward to the present, Alvarrez boasts a hefty 5.9 million followers on Instagram, he has travelled the world several times over, and is now a designer and primary ambassador for DoucheBags, a luggage business whose mission is to create “Better journeys through smarter travel gear”. Learn from this and apply it to your life. Recognize the areas that you have been blessed in and use that to your advantage. Use your gifts to help other people and you might make a little money in the process.

“Hijack a Human”

Still in the funding phase, Omnipresenz is revolutionizing the way people explore and interact with the world. Indiegogo is hosting the crowdsourcing fundraiser and they are asking for €33,000 or about $45,000 for the project. The concept is simple: use real people as avatars for a client who is sitting at a computer.

Avatars were originally introduced to instant messaging as a way to bring 3-D socializing to the web, but as virtual reality costs decrease it becomes more available to the average consumer. Omnipresenz labels its company as the “Ultimate social sightseeing adventure.” The process works through an online interface that shows you the first person view of the real life avatar who is exploring the world, riding a roller coaster, or choosing fruit at a local market. The client at the computer can type questions or directions to the avatar . For instance, the client wants to smell the flowers, he simply types that into the “chatroom” and the directions get converted to the audio for the avatar to complete.

This technology – the ability to control a real life avatar – can have so many sphere’s of influence, such as health care, culture, art, education, and tourism.

Daniel Gonzalez Franco is the CEO of Omnipresenz and he has a fascination with creative design for diverse telepresence, binaural audio, and audiovisual interactive art installations. This passion led him to many international music festivals, but now to the web in order to change the way we thought we explore, socialize and engage with the world around us.