Hi, I’m Steph.
About Me: The Quick Version
- I’m a freelance social media strategist
- Instagram is my favourite platform
- My services also include blogging, copywriting and photography
- Creative small businesses, artists & makers are my main focus
- I worked with my first freelance client in 2016 (she’s still a client!)
- I also sell photography prints in my Etsy shop
- In 2018, I went freelance full time
- Before that, I worked for seven years as a social media strategist and content creator in international education
- I was born in New York
- I lived the expat life in London for 16 years in my 20s and 30s
- On New Year’s Eve 2022, I moved to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, Spain
- I live with my husband Jorge, two kids Emilia and Sebastian, and a cat called Oakley
About Me: The Longer Version
A bit about me…
My life has unfolded in a way I never expected it would.
I was born in a suburb of Buffalo, New York—North Tonawanda—15 minutes from Niagara Falls and the Canadian border. I studied abroad from SUNY Fredonia and London made such a strong impression that I moved back when I graduated. My intention was to stay for six months; I stayed for 16 years (apart from a six-month-long adventure in a small village in the mountains of northeastern Colombia). In 2022, now with a family by my side, I moved again. This time, I landed in the north east of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, Spain, just off the coast or Morocco where we live now.
Jorge, a Spanish garden designer, and I were married in 2014 at Chelsea Old Town Hall where people flung heart-shaped confetti a friend and I spent hours punching out of an old London A-Z. We adopted a lazy cat called Oakley and welcomed our daughter, Emilia, into our lives in 2017 followed by our son Sebastian who was born during lockdown 2020. While on maternity leave the first time from my job (where I was a social media strategist with a study abroad company for six years), I built up my freelancing business. I’ve now been a full-time multi-hyphened freelancer since 2018, with a mix of social media strategy, content creation, copywriting, editing, and photography on my agenda.
Some things I love: A perfect cup of tea, the scent of eucalyptus, losing myself in a book, wandering around with my camera, collecting cookbooks and trying new recipes, travelling to places I haven’t been before, anything creative, and of course, spending time with friends and family.
What’s in a name?
Long before I became a social media strategist, I was a blogger. I started sharing stories and photos online in 2002 (yes, in the days when MySpace and OpenDiary ruled) and continued posting nearly daily through 2017 when my daughter was born and sleep became far more important than updating my little slice of the internet.
I called that space Little Observationist and it became a journal of sorts where I could share my observations of daily life and my travels. It was about enjoying those little things we sometimes forget to notice, like a pile of pastel cherry blossom petals scattered across the pavement or the smell of fresh tomatoes plucked from the vine. While I blog less for myself these days and more for my clients, the name stuck around.
What exactly do I do?
Working with the study abroad company as a social media strategist on a marketing team, in a typical office setting, taught me a lot and helped me to build an amazing foundation to take the leap into freelancing. The organisation I worked for those six years before I went solo are still a client, and I still really enjoy the work we do together.
My other clients are mostly small businesses across a range of industries, but mostly visual arts, travel and children’s brands.
There are many ways we work together. I create highly customised social media strategies, offer social media audits, do extensive hashtag research, set up new social media profiles, hold one-to-one training sessions, get involved in some photography projects, write, edit and curate content, provide analytics, and many other things that small businesses don’t have the time or – in a quickly changing landscape – sometimes also the knowledge of best practices, to do themselves.
As a side project, I also have an Etsy shop where I sell photography prints.
This is my “Why”.
Freelancing is not always easy. It’s flexible, I get to call the shots and there are some great local independent cafes I love to support that let me hang out, drink tea and eat cinnamon buns all afternoon while I type, but I’m working longer and harder and with more intention than ever before (and loving it).
I come from a family of entrepreneurs who value hard work and support small businesses. Helping creative and innovative people, especially other women and other parents, reach goals and succeed is the reason I became a freelancer. I want to help those who deserve to stand out from the crowd share their stories and make themselves more easily found by the audiences they want to connect with the most.
Interested in working together?
Here are a few of the ways I work with businesses.
Reach out through social media or my contact page and say hello. No pressure, just tell me a bit about yourself and your brand and let me know what you most need help with and we’ll have a chat to see if we’d be a good match.
Follow my adventures on social media, check out my etsy shop for prints, sign up to my mailing list or find out how we can work together.
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