The One Moment That Changed Jenny Mustard's Life | Squarespace Next Chapter (Ep. 1)

This video is sponsored by Squarespace, and this is the story of the one moment that changed my life and made me enter that next chapter by kickstarting this digital career of mine. I want to share some inspiration and advice to all of you who want to take your biggest dream or business idea to the next level, just as I did, by putting your stuff out there with Squarespace for the world to see. Back in 2011, we had just moved to London and I had graduated as an animal welfare biologist. Spending 3 years studying all the different ways that we humans mistreat animals though, I had serious doubts that I could have this as a career without getting chronically depressed. So I decided to try my luck at one of my other big passions, fashion, by selling vegan vintage clothes online. Besides from wanting to work with fashion, another thing that hugely motivated me was the will to be my own boss. I have never been good at being an employee. Setting an alarm every morning, having someone looking over my shoulder and telling me I need to be at an office at a certain time every day, or when I'm allowed to go on holiday. So basically, that idea of the freedom of being self-employed made me take the plunge into starting my own site. I still don't know how I had the confidence to do it and what made me think it would be successful. Probably it was my inexperience and ignorance with the hassle and insecurity of starting a business. In combination with an unreasonable amount of confidence. More importantly was probably one very powerful thought: that the alternative wasn't an option. Being employed for the rest of my life, it just wasn't for me. Said and done, I started looking into different ways of creating my own online store. And remember, this was back in 2011, way before I've ever heard of Squarespace or the idea of an all-in-one platform that helps you out with both design templates and getting the domain easily in one place. I didn't even know what a domain was. I bought my first DSLR camera. We couldn't believe the price of that thing, £350 if I remember it correctly, and started taking photos of me wearing hand-picked vintage pieces. My online store, Mind the Mustard, was born. Now let's be honest about this, those first images were horrible. We didn't know what we were doing and decided to just learn photography and editing as we went along. My best friend was my first ever customer, and by the time customer number 3 had placed her order, I felt like a million bucks. Now, I wish I could tell you that it was smooth sailing from there, that this was a success story from start to finish. It would make for so much more of an inspiring video, but that wasn't the case at all. To get to the point where my business got off the ground, where I actually started making a decent living from it, you'd have to fast forward years. We hustled and worked on this site like I never worked so hard in my life before. We talked about giving up a bunch of times, but for some reason we never did, no matter how much our savings account shrunk every passing month. David financially supported the pair of us while I kept on trying new things and coming up with new brilliant ideas, one thing leading to another, like branching out into blogging and eventually YouTubing instead of just selling clothes. Slowly but steadily, we started making some money, and one day after years of worrying about rent and bills and buying food, we actually realized that we were making enough to support both of us. And we were even comfortable and could start refilling that savings account that we had completely emptied the year before. Not long after that, about 3 years ago, we even managed to save up to buy the camera of our dreams, a €4,000 mega machine. And that's probably the moment I knew that we had made it. I've gone from selling vintage skirts to making vegan cooking videos, to talking about minimalism before it was cool, to writing 2 books and starting a podcast where I get to talk bullshit for an hour each week on the job to working with my boyfriend every day and taking photos of myself in more outfits than I can count. I reply to thousands of comments and emails and DMs from you guys, and I almost never have to set an alarm. I moved my business from London to Stockholm to Berlin and back to London again. I feel like we've come full circle. And if someone had told me back in 2011 when I first launched my online store in a 15 square meter flat with mice and rats and cockroaches— don't know how we all could fit in that little tiny apartment together— that I would 8 years later be back in London in a lovely cockroach-free flat with all these experiences and adventures behind me, I wouldn't have believed them. Or actually, perhaps I would have. Like I said, I did have a healthy amount of confidence even back then. This story isn't one of overnight success, of being discovered and propelled into some Hollywood movie kind of glamour. But still, I do consider my story a success story. I believe that the most important reason for this is because of that exact moment when I decided to click the launch button and make my website visible to the entire internet. It was scary. I didn't have a clue of what I was doing or what the reaction would be, but I did it anyway, partly because I for some reason decided to believe in myself, but mostly because of that very powerful thought: The alternative just isn't an option. If you have a creative streak, if you wish that you could ditch the alarm and become your own boss, I really want to encourage you to try. Now, I'm not saying that everyone who tries will succeed, and I'm definitely not saying it will be easy or stress-free, but I am saying this: if there's even the smallest chance of it working out, isn't it worth at least giving it a go? Nowadays, getting your stuff out there for the world to see is the number one thing you can do to kickstart start your own career. That's exactly what I did, and it has been such a rewarding process. Now, if you're finding this whole thing scary, my advice would be to start out by creating a site that is for your eyes only. Have fun with it. You don't have to show it to anyone, and you don't ever have to publish it if you don't want to. Pretty soon, I'm sure you'll start feeling ready to show off your gorgeous stuff to the world though, and by then you'll already have a site and all designed and ready to launch. And exactly this is what Squarespace wants to help you guys out with. Go be creative and get your free trial today at squarespace.com, and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/jennymustard to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Thank you Squarespace for asking me to go down memory lane today and pinpoint the exact moment for when all this started. And thanks to all of you guys, because as you know, Without you, none of this would have ever happened to me. So love you lots. Hej då and puss puss.