Despite the daunting reality of today’s challenging economic times, Sami Jensen ’11 (CLAS), a sassy, savvy communications major, embodies the qualities that will enable her to succeed. For starters, Jensen could teach a class in Networking 101. For the past two years, she has had an internship at the Avon, Conn., communications firm of Williams & House – a position she landed as a result of exuding her personality in the right place at the right time.
“I was working in sales at an Apple store, and my customer needed three desktops,” Jensen says. “That was the largest sale I’d ever had. In talking with her I learned she ran a communications firm – and that very day I’d become a communications major.” The customer was so impressed with the young saleswoman that she offered her a paying internship.
In addition to being a full-time student and interning, Jensen created her own blog, Poor & Pretty (www.poorandpretty.com). The blog’s content categories range from arts and entertainment to money, sustainability and cosmetics, but entries about fashion, cupcakes and Do It Yourself are the most popular categories among its readers.
In December, Jensen added entrepreneur to her resume, launching a trendy Etsy shop – The Cupcake Soap Shoppe – to celebrate her blog’s first anniversary.
“Etsy.com is for crafters,” Jensen explains about the website that enables people to sell handmade and vintage items online and reconnects makers with buyers. “For me, that’s making soap from scratch.”
Jensen interviewed one Etsy shop owner per month to learn about selling online. Before starting up her own Etsy shop, she also experimented with vegan, hypoallergenic source materials, ultimately creating soaps that look and smell so good they include a label warning that they’re inedible.
“Poor & Pretty is about a lot of things, but I want cupcake soaps to be my signature product,” says Jensen. “I’ve learned from my marketing and communications classes that it’s best to start small and expand. My education has made me comfortable with communication technology and social change – how blogging and social networking have changed the way people shop. I’ve learned from my professors and other students how small businesses are using Twitter and Facebook to become more transparent. It’s so much easier to ask a question about a company on a Facebook page. Because of the economy’s crash, we as consumers are looking for that,” Jensen says.
A member of Bloglovin’ and Independent Fashion Bloggers, Poor & Pretty’s social networking tools include an RSS feed, Twitter account and Facebook page.
“A blog is absolutely sunk without those features,” Jensen notes. “What’s so important about me and my communications major classmates – we’re the generation growing up with social networking media – is that we’re able to speak to managers of older companies and say, ‘You need to be on Twitter and Facebook, and we know how to set it up,’ or ‘Yeah, you need to have an iPhone app for that.’ In using technology, you can be very creative or you can just be very techie – I can’t program an iPhone app, but I can design it so it’s pretty.”
This article was published in the Spring 2011 edition of UCONN Magazine.
