I can hardly believe that HerCampus.com is finally up and running! Stephanie, Annie and I have spent a ridiculous amount of time working on Her Campus over the past 9 months! Some of you may be wondering how this whole Her Campus thing came to be! Here I am to give you the low-down.
It was summer of 2008 (two summers ago) and Stephanie and I were talking on the phone, chatting about whatever it is girlfriends chat about, when the conversation turned to Freeze College Magazine (www.freezecollegemag.com) – Harvard’s fashion and lifestyle online magazine that she and I were currently running. We both agreed that working on Freeze was TONS of fun and that there was a huge amount of room for growth in this part of the industry, and we started thinking about how amazing it would be to run an online magazine of our own after graduation. As college women, we also saw a huge hole in the media market – there was no magazine written specifically for women in college! Long story short, we decided that it was our job to create this magazine, and what better space to do it than the web! When Harvard College’s business plan competition rolled around last year, we brought Annie Wang, the Freeze Creative Director and Kelly Peeler, the Freeze Business Director on board and the idea for Her Campus was born! Fast forward to March 2009 when the four of us won Harvard’s business plan competition (the i3 Innovation Challenge) with our business plan for Her Campus! Shortly thereafter, Kelly was offered a sweet summer internship and stepped down from her role in Her Campus. Over the summer, Stephanie, Annie and I lived together in a TINY apartment on the Upper West Side in NYC! The three of us spent our summer working at our respective internships and dreaming about Her Campus.
Flash forward again and you have Stephanie, Annie and myself at the Her Campus office at 4am on the night (morning??) of the launch last week. The site is live, and the three of us are combing through it making sure that it looks perfect, super sleep-deprived but also super excited!
There you have it! A brief history of Her Campus from idea to launch! Of course we know that Her Campus’s journey is only beginning, and we are so excited to have you join us on it!