Oh friends, I don’t totally know how to approach this situation gracefully, but I’m going to try. I’ve made it into the final round of the HOMIE awards and so even if you voted last week, you HAVE to vote again for the final round in order for your vote to count. The last vote was just for nominations, but this week (until February 16th) is the real deal.
I feel like it’s senior year of high school and I’m up for a huge scholarship for college that will allow me to actually go to a good school, and it’s up to a group of people to decide who gets it. So this is me, Emily Henderson, imploring you, my very valued and appreciated readers, to vote for me for The Homies, if you want to. As a reminder, it’s the best of the blog awards by Apartment Therapy. But I’m not just going to expect it, nope, I’m going to make a case for it. Keep reading.
Ahem.
My blog is my favorite thing I do in life besides eating takeout with Brian whilst watching “Downton Abbey” or thrifting in undesirable suburbs. After three years of blogging, I enjoy it even more then when I started. But it’s basically the most expensive business card you can have. It takes around 30 hours a week to create the blog — hours that I love and often don’t notice — but it’s still a chunk of time that is mostly unpaid. I clocked in 78 hours of work this week (a heavy week, for sure), which is pretty bad ass, my friends, because the blog is that important to me.
Oh, how VERY “NPR Pledge Drive” of me, I KNOW. Except I’m not asking for money, just a little click of a box to vote for me IF YOU WANT TO.
More reasons why:
Here’s how it’s run: I have one full-time and one part-time paid assistants (plus three fabulous interns) that help me with everything, but about 60 percent of their job rotates around the blog. And the blog doesn’t make enough to cover their costs. So I use the money from the design business and partnerships to pay for the blog help.
Right now I am designing three spaces, unpaid by the clients, just for blog content. I know that sounds insane — and clearly I need a better business plan — but basically I found “clients” that are so fun, have great style, great spaces, and want me to do kinda whatever I want. I’m choosing to do their spaces for creative blog content and portfolio work instead of just focusing on paid clients that don’t want to be blogged about. I want to be able to give you real interior design/decorating tips, and good before and afters. I can’t do that just from my house, because it’s just not good enough and you’ll get bored — hell, I get sooo bored shooting here.
I write almost every post myself. Orlando is the only contributor I have, and the reason I even have him contribute is because A. He’s hilarious and amazing, and B. You guys know him, he’s kinda branded with me so it’s not like it’s a random person all of a sudden, he’s Orlando. Plus, I want him to be able to promote his own blog by writing on mine.
We set up two shoots a week to create original content to make sure that you aren’t just getting pretty pictures of spaces you’ve seen a million times from Domino Magazine. For instance, this week we are shooting Bri’s house tomorrow, two video’s there on Wednesday, One Kings Lane on Thursday, and bar cart styling on Friday.
Ugh. I’m so sorry if this sounds annoying. I’ve edited this post like ten times, but no matter what campaigning for yourself is sooooooo hard. But I’m almost done:
Here’s what I can promise to you:
– I will always continue to write the posts myself. I might have more help researching, coordinating, photoshopping, and editing, but it will always be me. My approach to my blog is to really try and write/create what I like to read, and my favorite blogs are the ones where there is a relatable person behind them, with one really compelling voice. I’m not looking to be Apartment Therapy or Design*Sponge — they already do that sooo well. I aspire to be more like Young House Love. They give so much information along with a healthy dose of entertainment and are always relatable.
– I will create more styling how-to videos and posts. I have a few on the schedule (two this week, actually), but I’ll keep them coming regularly, I promise.
– I won’t partner with douchey companies, I promise.
– I’ll have your internet babies.
SOOO if you enjoy reading this blog, maybe you could possibly head over to The Homies and vote for it. I’m up against Jenny from Little Green Notebook (whom I LOVE) and Nicole from Making it Lovely, plus many others, but those two are really awesome and totally formidable. In fact, I’ve already voted for Little Green Notebook on best home project blog. They deserve to win, I can’t deny that.
Oh and Meryl Streep. She doesn’t even have a blog, but she’s probably going to win.
Hundreds of thousands of people read this blog every month; let’s make something happen together, friends. It would seriously mean the WORLD to me. And if you’d help spread the word that would even mean more.
OK, that’s it. We are done. Back to a regularly scheduled post at noon, come back for some exclusive Jonathan Adler news.
Here’s the link for the vote again, in case you really need to be bombarded. Thank you so much for those of you who have already voted. I seriously appreciate it.