We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Anneliese Kridle, Cristina Chiappini And Grace Tellers. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Anneliese Kridle, Cristina Chiappini and Grace Tellers below.
Hi Anneliese Kridle, Cristina Chiappini and Grace Tellers, thanks for joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
As young women in our twenties, we all found ourselves in different stages of life. Anneliese had recently started graduate school, Cristina had just moved back to California from New York and was beginning her marketing career, and Grace was a couple of years into her full-time job as a graphic designer. Although we all knew each other from middle and high school, we started to realize the difficulty of forming new friendships as young adults and the lack of unique experiences available to us in Orange County. We were all stuck in our daily routines, making it hard to go out and meet people and try new things. We found that this gap in our lives was not uncommon to other twenty-somethings, which is what drove us to start Orange County Social Club. We wanted to create a space specifically for building friendships, especially at a time in our lives when we were all in such different stages but still yearning for those new connections and experiences.
There was a desperate need for this “third space” amongst people our age in the area, so Orange County Social Club quickly became the first co-ed social club exclusively for people in their twenties. With our first event having over 250 people interested and our Instagram growing to 10,000 followers in the first month we launched, it became clear that we were not the only young adults in Orange County searching for connection and a break from the mundane daily routine. The basic need for human connection and new life experiences is what truly drove us to start Orange County Social Club.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
The intention of Orange County Social Club was never to create a business. The three of us just wanted to provide a space for others to form new friendships and attend fun events. It was not until September of 2024 that we decided to form an LLC and make this an official business, mostly to streamline relationships with the various brands and venues we had been working with.
Between the three of us working full-time or attending school, running a business was never something we all sought out to do, but more so, something we fell into. Cristina is currently a full-time marketing manager, Grace is a full-time freelance graphic designer, and Anneliese is a speech-language pathology graduate student and a children’s ministry curriculum director. That being said, we found ourselves learning how to run this as we went, which is arguably one of the best ways to learn! We launched in May of 2024, hosted our first event in June, and have since hosted 15 social events with guests ranging from 15-175. We constantly take feedback and ideas from our followers and businesses that we work with and are often operating in trial and error. Although this does not necessarily feel like a “business” to us at this point, we are proud to have been able to create a space for community, and we are proud of the relationships that we have personally built along the way. We have always made it a priority to host at least one free event a month, ensuring our focus stays on the relationships and not the potential income we could receive from it. At the end of the day, we created this for the community, not for our own benefit, so remembering that we are serving others is what keeps us going.
How’d you meet your business partner?
Anneliese and Cristina met in the 6th grade and have been best friends ever since. Anneliese and Grace met in high school, and over the years, she connected Grace and Cristina. With Cristina’s MBA in Marketing and Grace’s graphic design skills, creating this group when starting OC Social Club was a no-brainer.
How did you build your audience on social media?
Instagram was our biggest tool when starting OC Social Club. In the first month, we posted two reels a day for about 20 days. This is truly what grew our following. We did not spend any money on marketing or social media ads; we were just consistent with posting on Instagram! We also utilized TikTok and gained some traction from that, but we found that short 5-6-second videos on Instagram worked the best. The advice we would give would be not to focus so much on creating perfectly edited videos to share. Our biggest reel is just an old video Anneliese took from her trip to Mammoth with some text over it that says, “for the girls and guys in their twenties… introducing OC Social Club.” There is no special editing tool that we used to create the video, and it isn’t more than 6 seconds, but it has over 1 million views and was crucial in boosting our account.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.ocsocial.club
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oc.socialclub/
Image Credits
photo of the 3 of us speaking at an event- Zoe Ergino
landscape photo at night of an event – Madalyn Engel
individual photos and landscape photo of beach event – Grace Tellers