We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Julie Barlow. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Julie below.
Julie, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Going back to the beginning – how did you come up with the idea in the first place?
Early adulthood was a struggle for me – after a couple of toxic marriages, I entered my thirties single with two toddlers, a mountain of debt and very low self esteem. Fortunately I was blessed with amazing parents, friends and mentors to help me lift myself out of the muck I had created for myself and redesign my life. I gave my belief system an overhaul and learned to make affirmations and cultivate an abundance mindset, among other things.
Years later I was debt free, an officer in a publicly held company, teaching yoga and leading international wellness retreats on the side. Yet I knew I wanted to share the tools that had helped me recreate my life in a bigger way. The idea of how to do this hit me one day when I realized I’d neglected to use my daily planner for a couple of months, yet again. I loved planners and found using them to be great for keeping organized and reaching for goals. Unfortunately I would always get bored and stop using them. I thought to myself that this could be the perfect forum for sharing daily tools like mindfulness and positive thinking while also setting up a system to help people reach for their dreams.
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 background and context?
Over the years, I came to realize more and more the power of mindfulness. It helped me work through the aftermath of trauma, regain control of my health, recognize stress within my body and find my inner me. I started noticing the beauty all around me and began to find joy in the simple moments. Mindfulness rescued me from the expectations I’d allowed others to place on me, helped me discover what truly makes me happy and allowed me to begin cultivating my life in a way that incorporates more joy into my days. I wanted to find a way to gently guide others to find this too, without having to go away for a course or spend significant amounts of time and money to figure it out.
To help the user explore mindfulness in their own life, each week within the journal has a theme based around a mindfulness challenge for the week. Quotes, poems and other helpful content for the week center around this theme as well.
The JMB Living Journal was created as a way to share self development tools, but early on it became so much more. Through our work, we seek to create community by uplifting and empowering the voices and experiences of all women. Knowing how much I’ve learned from others over the years, I decided to include inspiration from other women in the journal as well as my own. We share wisdom and short stories from women around the globe, accompanied by their picture and a short biography that shares what they are passionate about and where people can find them.
I also understand from personal experience how challenging it can be to carve out time for self-care when you are struggling just to make ends meet. I’ve been there. Yet just a few minutes of journaling a day can go along way to creating peace within and it is my hope to help many more women find this in the times of their life that they need it the most. As a result, we’ve made significant contributions of the journals to non-profit organizations such as Dress for Success, women’s shelters, rehab facilities and more since the inception of the journal. Starting a business is hard work and scary territory, but knowing I’m making a difference in this way and reading the thank you emails I regularly receive fuels me to keep going.
Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?
Since my brand is all about helping women create more joyful, mindful and balanced lives, I use several methods of sharing information to help facilitate this. The most frequent communication comes from my weekly newsletter. I consistently have a higher than average open rates and I believe this is a result of my intention to share value of some kind in the vast majority of emails that go out. I share helpful tips and suggestions that can be incorporated easily into daily lives, weekly affirmations and posts that I’ve found interesting on Pinterest. I also let them know what they can find on my blog (published every other week) and my weekly video on YouTube.
I also find Instagram as a place where I can easily share helpful knowledge and in the process grow my community and email list. Here I strive to provide information that is created in a way that encourages sharing with others. I believe my audience is growing steadily as a result of sharing this type of information as well as sticking with a consistent format and color scheme that is visually pleasing. I also believe that it is important to be open and share personally with your clients. As an introvert, this hasn’t come easy for me, but the personal connection has been wonderful and really helped me to get me know my audience and clients better.
YouTube is a fairly recent expansion of my brand connection with clients, but within this area I also seek to provide value. I currently offer guided “journal with me” videos to share journaling prompts and ideas to help people learn the multitude of ways that journaling can provide insight into what is working in their lives and how to change what is not.
Lastly, I have a Facebook group where journal users can connect and I use this as a platform to share what is happening on my blog and YouTube as well.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I decided to kick off my journal through a crowdfunding campaign. I invested heavily in expertise on how to do this appropriately as well as Facebook advertising to build a list of interested people to buy as soon the campaign opened. Success on crowdfunding can very much be a numbers game. You need a sufficient amount of backers within the first hours and day of the campaign to make the algorithms work in your favor to share your product on a large scale.
My list building was going well at first, but then came to a grinding halt when ads for the 2020 presidential election hit the social media platforms. I had a healthy list built by this point, but it was disappointing to watch the momentum come to a standstill. I decided to move forward with the Indiegogo campaign regardless.
The first day of the campaign, we hit it out of the park. We met our goal for the first few hours of the campaign as well as our goal for Day 1 of funding. It was so much work to get to this point and so exciting to know that we now had the momentum needed to make the algorithms start increasing our early success.
Sadly this didn’t pan out. The product simply didn’t resonate with the Indiegogo audience. While the firm I hired to help with the campaign had warned this was a risk and that Kickstarter was the preferable platform for books and journals, they didn’t expect how dismal the results would be. Virtually all of my sales on the platform came from my own list building efforts. I sold barely a quarter of the inventory I had needed to purchase ahead of time to get the journals to buyers prior to Christmas that year.
In hindsight, there were changes I could have made that would have made it possible to launch on Kickstarter instead. But rather than exploring and brainstorming for these options, I moved forward with the first advice I was given. This was a costly learning experience and had I not believed so strongly in my product, I would have been tempted to call it quits right then and there. Sales grew steadily each quarter that followed, but I did not have the strong original start that I had anticipated. This resulted in the need for significantly more upfront capital and honestly was more risk than I was comfortable with at the time.
I’d hoped to be an overnight success story, but found that I was going to have to dig in and really do the work to keep going. Despite my initial disappointing slow start, I’ve come to realize that the effort and hard work needed is far outweighed by all the good things that come with owning your own business. I love the freedom it provides and the way it pushes me to grow as an individual. And at the end of each day I love going to bed knowing that my efforts were of value and helpful to others.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.jmbliving.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jmbliving/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JMBLiving
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfwl5npdKzU7F97J70x0NyA
Image Credits
Lola Bloom Photography (all shots except one of journal on chair and journal with succulents taken by me)