A decade of someone’s time committed to a craft, business, or career can reap plenty of rewards. In Jerusha Baluch’s Case (also known as Jerusha Couture™), she managed to pioneer through the early days of building a world-class brand that is continually growing to this day. Her persistence and growing community serve us as an example of how a brand that can pivot and adapt can continue to thrive regardless of the curveballs. Jerusha is an Australian fashion designer who made a name for herself in fashion through her own boutique she ran for four years. Since then, she has dominated the Luxury niche on social media such as Instagram, amassing a following of nearly two hundred thousand and leveraging platforms like Youtube to continue to grow her raving fan base of over one hundred thousand subscribers. This article covers what we can learn from a decade of social media in one niche from Jerusha Couture™.
Early Days in the Industry
Before Jerusha would create a personal brand with hundreds of thousands of followers from across the world, the beginning of her career in luxury fashion was sensational. In 2010 she opened her fashion boutique alongside her iconic godmother Olivia Newton-John who flew in from Los Angeles to open it with a charity auction for her cancer and wellness center. Her boutique was the place to be for all fashion enthusiasts. It was back in these early days when women from all over Sydney would flock towards her boutique to find the perfect dress for that perfect occasion and interact with each other and enjoy all things fashion.
Since those early days, Jerusha has felt saddened about the current state of standalone retail. The role of online shopping has become such a global phenomenon for businesses the traditional way of visiting a retail shop has nearly faded away, leaving boutiques like Jerusha’s to fend for themselves and slowly lose traffic.
How Jerusha Couture Outlasted Everyone
Based on how the world of fashion and shopping evolved, it laid the pivotal foundation that brought us the innovative Jerusha Couture we all love and know today. Jerusha spent most of her time growing her online brand and targeting her attention towards her online store rather than towards a standalone boutique. For example, when people asked her after four years why she decided to close her boutique, well, simply put, she had grown a more significant online presence to sell products and making far more income as a social media personality.
By being an early figure within the online fashion community, she quickly caught on to the gravity of how big this space could become online; this was one of the critical factors that helped the fashion influencer outlast everyone. She believes the people that did it managed to pivot as quickly but did not see their success with longevity; no one could foresee the growth of social media or work to keep their integrity intact as they grew, which led to many industry influencers just falling off.
Changes We Need to See
The Luxury fashion community is full of individuals who have been able to turn fashion into art and continually break boundaries through creativity and expression, but we can all agree that it’s not perfect. When we asked Jerusha about the changes she would like to see within this industry, she responded with, “I feel like, within this luxury world, one thing we need to change is to be more inclusive.” She believes the industry is full of fakes and auto-generated popularity doing nothing but watering the industry down. So if there’s any change, she would like to see as a 10-year industry veteran the return to inclusivity, giving everyone the same opportunity to grow and reach milestones through hard work and legitimate word of mouth growth.
