Meet The Women Behind The “Localism, Not Tourism” Travel Movement
Here at Femsplain, we love us some kick ass business ladies. This week, we’re highlighting the founders of the Vancouver-based travel blog Local Wanderer. In January 2014, Taylor Loren and Elaine Rystead quit their jobs, hopped in a car and hit the road to Mexico. Without Google Maps. This is where Local Wanderer was born. With little money and equipped with an Instagram account, the childhood friends built the now-popular lifestyle platform (now with over 36K followers) from scratch in just a few weeks.
A year into their adventure, Taylor and Elaine are ready to take Local Wanderer to the next level — with a beautiful site relaunch. We caught up with the lovely ladies to talk spontaneous road trips, being female startup founders and Instagramming selfies.
Where did the idea of Local Wanderer originate?
Taylor: We just wanted to find local places in every city. Lots of our friends go to the same typical places, and we wanted to find the local hidden gems instead. So we started Local Wanderer.
Elaine: We basically grew Local Wanderer from the ground up. And from there, the following multiplied for us. Before we launched, we both knew how to use social media, so that was very helpful.
Local Wanderer strikes a perfect balance between new-wave Instagram photography and aspirational lifestyle aesthetic. How do you create and maintain this eye-catching content?
Taylor: There’s definitely lots of trends of minimalism right now, but we love bright and colorful. We try to keep things affordable. The blog is super collaborative. Every post we do, we do it together. Elaine is definitely the more creative one; she takes and edits the photos. She’ll usually do a few option, and we’ll talk about which we like best. Then, I’ll usually write the captions and copy and all that. It’s all very thought-out and strategic.
Elaine: We kinda just go with our gut and feature places we really love. I feel so blessed to be working with Taylor. It comes really natural to us and I really appreciate it.
What are your plans for further building the Local Wanderer brand?
Taylor: Elaine had an original vision for something she told me about in the car. We’ve always had a vision for what we want Local Wanderer to be. We wanna build a brand and offerings, but for now we’re really focused on growing our travel blog.
As for making money, I think some of our best content has been our sponsored content, because it gives us the resources to create beautiful images. So we’d love to keep doing creative collaborations like the recent Sorel one. Right now, we’re not super focused on “how to make money.” We just wanna put the posts out there and see if people like them.
Given that Local Wanderer straddles both the tech and creative industries, and with Vancouver being known as “Silicon Valley North”, how has the experience of being a pair of female startup founders been?
Elaine: I think that just going out on the road and not knowing what we were doing definitely took a lot of confidence in our ability.
Taylor: When we first started, no one knew or believed what we wanted to do. We started a business out of our car. And at some point we were dirty. But having each other as friends is very encouraging.
Elaine: There are instances of sexism. One time, we were at this tech event with a lot of guys and no one was taking us seriously. It was so blatantly sexist. We’re also within the travel world, where there aren’t many female photographers that get out there. Most of time when we see female bloggers, they’re usually in fashion. In the end, we just try to be ourselves and honest in everything we do.
And finally, your tips for traveling?
Taylor: The biggest question people ask us is always about “how to travel.” We always point out that we did it with no money. Like, I had just quit my job and we were poor. Of course, not everyone has the means to do that, it’s definitely a privilege, but a lot of people overthink it. Just get out there!
