Gravity Meets Vix Meldrew, Founder of Grow & Glow
We sat down to speak to Personal Branding Female Founder, Vix.
We sat down to speak to Personal Branding Female Founder, Vix. We spoke about her professional growth, the importance of personal branding, tips to start creating a personal brand and the impact of personal brand on start-up founders.
Tell us about yourself and what you do professionally
I’m Vix Meldrew, female founder of Grow & Glow, a personal branding membership resource for creators and creatives who want to harness the power of their online platforms through content marketing to build sustainable and successful businesses and brands of their own.
A monthly membership provides the resources, training and support every individual behind a personal brand needs to GROW their online presence and GLOW for their audience or customers. Through monthly coaching, expert training sessions and access to exclusive opportunities and resources, we take you from strung-out to stand-out.
A runaway success, Grow & Glow launched to 100 members in under 58 minutes in 2019. We’ve since partnered with Pinterest and Shopstyle to provide expert trainings for our members and 18 months on, I’m incredibly proud that we have 600 members and counting in 16 countries across the globe including the UK, Canada and Australia.
Our ethos is to provide a community of like-minded colleagues who believe in support, empowerment, furthering of skills and leaving an online legacy - and I’m lucky that I get to spend my days working alongside a team of four inspirational women.
What is a personal brand and why is personal branding an important part of empowering your own professional development?
It’s simple: A personal brand is who YOU are and how you present yourself to the world. To find out yours, think about making a list of the unique skills and experiences that you bring to the table and planning out how you will differentiate yourself from competitors.
From there, you can start developing your public facing personal branding. It will become the backbone of everything you put out into the world and allow you to build trust with potential clients and collaborators.
Once you define your foundations, your brand personality and values - you have your building blocks and can use it as a guide to reach your goals, both personally and professionally.
Can you give us a couple of examples of individuals who you feel are doing personal branding well and explain why?
Two personal favourites of mine are:
Jenna Kutcher - she has a strong back story about being a photographer and buying a $300 camera on CraigsList so she could leave her corporate job behind and become a creative. This is the foundation of her business where she teaches creatives how to harness social media to help build their businesses. She speaks about her story throughout her content, maintains a really down to earth style and even represents that through her visuals.
Alice Benham - she’s digital marketing coach whose brand is transparent, simple, to the point and honest. She puts this across via her visual branding on her site with everything being monochrome and 'no fluff’. On her Instagram Stories she shares no nonsense advice in a straight-forward way. This also pulls through in how she structures her services and delivers her podcasts.
What impact can a personal brand have for start-up founders?
People buy from people. More and more brands are showing up online in a way that's informative, educational, inspirational or entertaining and those are the brands that get the best traction. When an individual sees something and thinks, 'oh that's soooo ‘X’ brand’, it means they’re on their way to investing in and supporting that brand.
As a start-up, a strong personal brand is important because it’s what will help you build up credibility and trust in your business and the services you provide.
Your personal brand is as important as your business brand.
What channels do you recommend to start building a professional brand and why?
Instagram is a great place to start as it's where most personal brands are being built right now. Here you can use all of Instagram's features to provide your audience with valuable content, speak to them directly through comments and DMs while also providing context for your brand via Stories, Reels and Live.
The rapidly evolving world of social media can be both exciting but also daunting. Can you give our readers three top tips for improving their social media?
Blogging, podcasting, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, cOnTeNt. You KNOW authentic story-telling is the only way to grow your platforms and glow your online presence these days but it’s all so frigging overwhelming, so:
- Find your ‘niche’. The online world can feel super saturated so it’s incredibly important to build your brand around your area of expertise or passion. Whilst you may feel like this limits the audience you can reach - it actually does the absolute opposite
- Get inside your ideal audience or customer’s head. What problems of theirs can you solve through your content? They come to you as a resource - how can you be valuable to them? Create content that answers their problems and you’ll gain a legion of loyal followers
- Be authentic. Authenticity is a word that’s bandied around often, but when it comes to building a personal brand, it’s paramount. Connect with your core values - what makes you, you. And share that throughout your message, content and offering
Making a career change can be scary, particularly in the current climate. Can you give our readers one piece of advice for taking the leap and making a positive career change?
Start researching and laying the ground works before leaving your job to go freelance or launching your own business. Use the money from your salary to cover start up costs and take the leap when you feel like you’ve built up a buffer. I also recommend working on your money mindset so that you take it from ‘what if I can’t get work?’ (scarcity) to ‘the work is coming’ (abundance).
Looking to the future, how do you see Grow & Grow developing?
We’ll be focusing on attracting a more diverse portfolio of global creators and creatives and developing an online education empire with courses, trainings and events relating to every aspect of building a sustainable personal brand.
Added to this, I’m keen to grow the team further and create new streams of passive income so I can devote greater focus to family life and my own continued personal development.
Where can our readers find out more about Grow & Glow?
We’re re-opening our doors to new members on 1 November for £27 per month. Find us at https://growglow.co and on Instagram, I’m @vixmeldrew and @growglow.co.
