We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Emelie Rochford a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Emelie , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I’ve always known that I wanted to create and have my own company one day, I’ve always had a very entrepreneurial mind but I didn’t necessarily know what I wanted my company to be so I knew I had to test the waters and kind of let time tell where I would end up. Right after college, I started working in influencer marketing, I kind of just fell into it but loved the industry from the start. I loved that I could mix my creative side with my business mind and I knew that this was an industry I’d come to fall in love with.

I spent years working for Scandinavian brands here in the US as well as working with influencer marketing in Sweden, where I’m from, and connected with amazing, inspiring, professionals in the industry and I knew that this was my space to explore and grow within.

I’ve always had an interest in health and wellness so when I decided it was time to start building my own business, I knew I wanted to incorporate my interest into my business. So I started to look around and I saw that there were not too many creative and talent management agencies that have that boutique and personal approach within the health and wellness space. The wellness space was and is still a growing category on social media so I saw an opportunity to create a unique, personal, and hands-on agency with the main focus on managing creators in a way that makes them feel seen, that make them feel a part of a team, and that makes them feel inspired to keep creating content and the most important part, to let our creators do what they do best – to be creative.

I’m not going to lie, it took me several months to get things going, not only am I new to just creating a business, and learning everything that goes into it, but I also had a feeling of me never being ready to launch my own company. Let alone in a country that I’ve only lived in for a couple of years. But after endless conversations and pep-talks with my husband, I decided to go for it and give it my all. All day, every day, and now almost 6 months later we are growing the most amazing roster of creators whom I’m so proud to work alongside and creating long-term relationships with brands I could only ever dreamt of working with.

One of the most exciting and unique approaches ROW has is that we work a lot with Scandinavian brands, as I was born and raised in Sweden I love to create engaging campaigns with brands that I’ve personally loved and used for years. ROW Collective has two branches, one is the creative agency part where we are focused on working with brands on digital and social campaigns, influencer gifting, brand building, and events. We create unique concepts that will engage an audience and always do so with the main focus of including one or several of our creators in the campaigns. This leads us to the second branch of ROW Collective, Talent Management where we manage creators within the wellness, beauty, and lifestyle space. Meaning that we are the one-stop shop for brands and creators who share our interest and love for wellness, beauty, and lifestyle and who want to create unique and memorable campaigns that will leave a mark.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m Emelie Rochford, I’m originally from Gothenburg Sweden but came to the US almost 6 years ago and am now living with my husband here in Los Angeles, California. I started my journey with influencer marketing straight out of college and fell in love with the creativity, movement, and newness that the industry brings. I started working for a Scandinavian brand here in the US called Daniel Wellington and later moved on to working for one of the largest media houses in Stockholm, Sweden before coming back to the US and freelancing for Scandinavian brands here in LA. I always knew that I wanted to start my own company one day but I never really thought I could be the person who did it. Not because I didn’t have the work ethic, but because I didn’t feel like I knew enough to be able to run something on my own. I’ve always been someone who loves stability, and if you’re familiar with the start-up culture, you know there is no such thing as stability.

After endless conversations and millions of pep-talks from my husband, we decided it was time for me to try and get my vision of a creative agency and talent management to come true. And if there is one thing I learned early on, it’s that if you say that you’re going to do something, and you tell others about your idea and dream, you kind of feel like you have to do it now and you have to do give it you all. And that’s kind of what I needed to push me to take a leap and give it all to a dream I’ve had since I was 5 years old. My mom would always ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I would always say ” I want to have my own company one day”.

I’ve always had a large interest in health and wellness, and as I was building out my dream I saw that there are not too many creative agencies that are focused on brands and creators within the wellness space. The world of wellness is an online space filled with some of the most creative creators and I felt a need to highlight their knowledge and their way of communicating a wholesome lifestyle to the world and their followers. The thing I love as well is that wellness can be so many different parts of your life, it can be found in the beauty products you use, in the food you eat, the way you think, the way you move your body, the way you treat others, the way you treat yourself and how you choose to live your everyday life. So it became pretty natural for me to focus on wellness brands and creators, but also on beauty and lifestyle since that goes hand in hand with the wellness category as a whole. And since it’s one of my biggest personal interests I knew that this was the niche for me and ROW Collective. I saw the opportunity to combine my interest with my passion for influencer marketing and that’s how ROW Collective came to be a creative agency and talent management for creators in the wellness, beauty, and lifestyle space.

Some info about the Services ROW Provides:

Talent Management – We offer exclusive talent representation for creatives within the Wellness, Beauty, and Lifestyle space. We handle all brand deals, negotiations, contracts, and collaborations for our talents so they can focus on doing what they do best, to be creative. The most important part for us it to always work as a team, we make sure to put strategies in place so our talents always feel like they’re growing their brand with a personal and very hands-on approach.

Influencer Campaign Management – we offer full influencer campaign management for brands who feel like they need some creative guidance and assistance with their campaigns. We help with everything from creative ideas to gifting campaigns, to paid partnerships with creators both that are exclusive to ROW but also with creators that are a part of our “Influencer Network” – a collection of more than 150 creators with whom we have personal relationships with but are not exclusive to ROW Collective as talents.

Events – We offer full services event management, we do everything from concept ideas to planning, finding partners, sponsors, location, invitations, and invitation management, to make sure your brand is shown to the right people and in the right setting.

What makes ROW Collective unique? We are a one-stop shop for brands and talents in the wellness, beauty, and lifestyle space. We work a lot with Scandinavian brands on the US market and create unique opportunities for our talents as well as the brands we work with. One of the things we love to do is to always create 360 campaigns, meaning we love to include one or several of our creators as the core of a campaign or an event and then work around that to create the most profitable campaigns for our partnering brands.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Organic reach out and pitch creative ideas to brands we feel align with ROW Collective and the creators we work with and represent. It might seem like a lot of work and it might be discouraging at times, but honestly connecting with like minded brands and creating that genuine relationship has been so important for us. We still do it to this day but as we continue to have our creators work with big brands in the industry, we are now super lucky that brands reach out to us and want to work with us.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

I think it’s super important to treat every relationship as a friendship, even if it’s a professional relationship and you just connect via email and behind a screen, I think the most important thing you can do is to look at it like a friendship and always keep the brands best interest in mind. At the end of the day, we want to work with amazing brands that we love and for us to do so we truly put a lot of time and effort into checking in with the brands we work with, make sure to share any exciting news we have coming up or any opportunity the brands might benefit from.

When it comes to the creators we represent, we have daily contact with them all. We are such a close team but spread out all over the US so it’s super important to keep that daily contract, to make sure our creators are up to date on what’s going on, what brands and collaborations we are working with and just make sure everything we do is benefitting their personal brand and growth in the space.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.rowcollective.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rowcollective/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/row-collective-creative-talent-agency/

Image Credits
Henrik Wergeland Stella Cocozza