Intellifluence's video: Jessica Strange Influencer Spotlight 111

Join as an influencer for free! https://intellifluence.com/influencers Browse Marketplace offers: https://intellifluence.com/offers View our top influencers: https://intellifluence.com/influencer-lists Jessica Strange is a mountain bike journalist, guide, mechanic, outdoor enthusiast and trail runner based in the United Kingdom. In 2015, Jessica launched the website Velo Me, a space dedicated to encouraging more women to step out of their comfort zones and get active with mountain biking. The momentum from this venture gained a great deal of traction online, via social media and in the UK mountain bike community. Additionally, Jessica has worked as a staff writer and Editor at Total Women’s Cycling, a leading online magazine for women, while also contributing to other publications such as Dirt Mountain Bike Magazine. Be sure to check out velome.co.uk to find a list of Jessica’s social media profiles and follow her to keep up with all the mountain bike antics! Can you tell us a little bit about your background, including what led you to create Velo Me? I actually started off as an economist working for the UK government, which is totally far from what I’m doing now. Basically, I kind of was working in an office, so, for really long hours and it was a little bit soul destroying for me. I decided to actually move away from that kind of public sector work and took some time out and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do so much, so I decided just to try a bunch of new things and try and get some new skills and in that was mountain biking. But it was mostly to start off as a hobby and I just got really into it. I got more into it when I learned that there weren’t very many women mountain biking in my area. I kind of just started Velo Me as really a blog to kind of talk about mountain biking and about why I like it and reach out to other women in my area and also in the UK who I could speak with. It just grew from there. It was quite a really happy accident, actually. How long was that transition between the work in finance to being immersed in the mountain biking community and starting the blog? It was probably about two years. I worked for the government for a few years and then I took about 18 months off. I did some contract and freelance work in that time, but I just wanted to really give myself a bit of breathing space to find something that I was actually passionate about, that I actually enjoyed, and I didn’t realize that mountain biking would go from being a hobby to a career, but basically once my website Velo Me took off that opened up a load more doors where I was getting spoken to by magazines and people wanted to work with me and that actually landed me my first writing job at Women’s Cycling Magazine in the UK. That’s where I started and found my feet and then, yeah. That was five years ago now. Yeah, it’s just gone from strength to strength, really. Read the full interview transcript: https://intellifluence.com/blog/jessica-strange-influencer-spotlight