Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:00:00 · Julia Berolzheimer
[00:00:00] S0: It would not be smart of me to not integrate AI into certain parts of my life. Yes. I use AI. I use it as an editor. I write my post. I get my voice out, and then I ask it questions of, you know, helping me figure out, you know, to get to the point that I'm trying to get to or to give suggestions. How can you write a personal post when it's it's not you, it's not your voice, but I'm... I mean, it's it's like the core of our brand, so we would never sort of pass that off to AI.
00:00:33 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:00:33] S1: Welcome to Inspired. I'm Alexa von Tobel. What if a single person could become more powerful than a department store? This is exactly what we believe is happening to the future of ecommerce. Julia and Thomas Berolzheimer have spent fifteen years proving that this is where commerce is headed. Julia started her blog, Gal Meets Glam, in college back in 2011 and has now become one of the most beloved influencers. Today, she's one of the most trusted voices in fashion with millions of followers across her many, many platforms. Thomas, her husband, is a tech minded business partner behind their empire. Together, they built one of the most sophisticated creator businesses in the world, driving millions in sales annually while raising two daughters and working alongside one another day by day. In this conversation, we'll talk about the power of human curation over algorithms, whether AI can have taste, what it's really like to work with your spouse, and why authentic connection, not just AI slop, is the future of commerce. Both Julia and Thomas have become friends, and I'm so excited
00:01:29 · Alexa von Tobel, Julia Berolzheimer, Thomas Berolzheimer
[00:01:29] S2: to have them on today. Dive right in. If you're running a startup, we know things like managing equity and communicating with investors are always top of mind. Carta has built a connected suite of tools that over 40,000 companies use to do just that. Their platform of software and services helps you lay the groundwork so you can focus on building. To learn more or get started, visit carta.com. And with that, I'm so excited to have Julia and Thomas on. Guys, first of all, I'm so pumped. I'm also pumped to have you in the Inspired offices. We're all just sitting right here together. I'm so thrilled to have you on today for a million reasons, but most, I'm just excited to call you guys friends. So first, just welcome. Thanks so much for being here. [00:02:12] S0: Thank you and likewise. [00:02:13] S2: And Julia, God, it's been so fun just being pals and I think so highly about you and your amazing husband. Let's step back. Let's go to the beginning. Talk a little bit about, first of all, how you guys met, how old were you, and the founding of your incredible business being one of the most powerful and beloved influencers online right now. [00:02:36] S0: So we met... Was it 2010, Thomas? [00:02:40] S3: Yep.
00:02:40 · Thomas Berolzheimer, Julia Berolzheimer
[00:02:40] S3: Yep. [00:02:40] S0: We were both going to University of the Pacific. He was a year older than I, but our families had grown up together. So I knew about him. I knew his grandparents. So when we met, there was sort of this shared history there between our families. And it was just one of those immediate immediate best friends and really have not spent a ton of time apart since we met then. And it was just a year later in 2011 that I discovered a website called lookbook.new. And it was a site where people could... It was essentially sort of an Instagram for outfits. It was where people could upload photos of themselves, and it was sort of this whole world I discovered because Instagram didn't exist yet. And I was somebody who has always loved fashion, and it was... It felt like this untouchable category to me. I I... My only access to it was online and magazines. I didn't know anybody in the fashion industry, and this felt real. These real women across the world who had their own unique take. It wasn't a model. It wasn't a celebrity. And I found that really interesting and immediately turned to Thomas and said, you know, you need to buy a... Or we need to buy a camera and you need to take pictures of my outfits. And that's really how the the the blog started. We started on Blogger, which many bloggers started back in the day. And I never in a million years would have thought that this would become our career and that an entire industry would develop, you know, because of the idea of sharing online.
00:04:29 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:04:29] S2: Thomas, I know that when you met her, you did not wanna be her best friend. Can't even fathom that that's what went through your head. I give us the sort of high points. You know, you guys have now built a massive business just like really as somebody who's learned more about it. It's so impressive. Give us the high points over the last decade of, like, sort of the milestones. And, Thomas, the compliment to you, you've always been very tech forward and really leaned into the tools and how you think about it. So just maybe give us a sense of the evolution, including Gal Meets Glam when you did a licensing deal. Give us a quick sense of all that.
00:05:05 · Thomas Berolzheimer
[00:05:05] S3: Yeah. I said... So we launched our own brand, Gal Meets Glam Collection, in 2018, and I would say that's actually a really good reference point because everything before then, you had affiliate working a lot, and then you would... We were starting to work a lot with sponsored posts, and then we were like, we wanna own something. We wanna create a product of our own. And so then Julia worked with designers, and we did a licensing deal and had a amazing, huge success of a launch of Gal Meets Glam collection. And that ended up being all consuming for us and not like... We were selling so much product, but because it was a licensing deal, not seeing so much of the money being returned back to us. And so it became really hard for us to to grow and then continue and invest in that business. And I would say, like, that was really when people were saying, okay. This is the influencer brand era, and, like, everyone was starting a brand. And I feel like we've kind of... We went through a phase of that, and we've sort of I feel like it's fizzled out. You've... Now I would almost say that there's bigger brands being built that aren't necessarily, like, influencer brands or celebrity brands, but influencer brands don't see them as big of a thing. It's more like how do you get influencers behind other brands, which is why I like ShopMy coming in. You know, affiliate's been around for a really long time, but I feel like ShopMy has done it differently, which we can go go into more.