How a travel blogger pivoted during the pandemic to rebuild a 7-figure business

I almost forget to hit “record” before starting this interview, because when Alexandra Jimenez comes up on my Zoom screen, instead of asking my first interview question, I can’t help but first ask where she got the bright pink, ribbed long-sleeved shirt she’s wearing. “Rebecca Minkoff,” she happily shares, and then I apologize for the digression but then catch myself and realize this is actually the perfect place to start.

For over 10 years, Alexandra has run one of the most successful travel blogs in the world, Travel Fashion Girl, a seven-figure business with hundreds of thousands of visitors a month and a focus on teaching women how to pack lightly and stylishly for any destination in the world. 

The website has also brought together a community of women who feel more empowered to travel the world and pack in a way that makes them still feel like themselves on their journey. “It started with a suitcase,” Alexandra says, “but it ended up being something much greater.”

But in 2020, her seven-figure business crashed, and so did she. 

All of a sudden, no one was traveling, and Alexandra thought her business was done. She decided to shut it down, letting her 10 team members know that she still had enough to pay them for another six months, and then, Travel Fashion Girl would end. 

Except, it didn’t end. 

It actually grew… into something larger than it had ever been before. 

“What am I doing with my life?”

“I didn’t grow up traveling,” Alexandra says. “My mom’s from El Salvador, and my dad’s from Mexico, and I’m from LA. I never thought I’d move out of LA because I loved my city so much.” 

The first real vacation her mom  ever took was when Alexandra was 22 years old; they went to Hawaii, and during that trip Alexandra walked on the beach alone and made a promise to herself: “If I ever leave my job,” she thought, “I’m going to take three whole months off to travel.”

Alexandra had a job in the fashion industry and wasn’t planning to leave her current job, but at that time in her life, being in-between jobs seemed like the only chance she’d ever have to travel more. 

So when she was recruited by another company in 2008, Alexandra said yes as long as they were willing to push her start date by three months. They agreed, and Alexandra said goodbye to the job she’d loved for six years, and joined a Canadian tour group going to India. 

She was amazed by how well-traveled the Canadians were compared to most people she knew, and she loved hearing the women’s stories in particular. They taught her about the Seven Wonders of the World, something she’d never heard of before.

Between those conversations and her experiences with the locals in India, Alexandra found herself thinking, “What am I doing with my life?”

Forty-eight hours before she was scheduled to fly home and start her new job, she had another revelation, similar to the feeling she got during that walk on the beach in Hawaii. But this time, it wasn’t a promise. It was a declaration. 

She was going to cancel her new job, sell her car, give her landlord a 30-day notice, and start traveling full-time. 

She told her travel companions about the plan, and, even though they were committed travelers, they thought this was a terrible idea and advised her against it. 

But, armed with a phone and a wifi connection, Alexandra did it anyway. She canceled her entire life from India and then made plans to see all seven of the Wonders of the World that year. 

“I want to feel like myself.”

For the next five years, Alexandra traveled and worked odd jobs wherever she went to make ends meet. She also took a few months off of travel to work temporary jobs that allowed her to save money and then travel again. She was, “a budget backpacker,” living on $1,000 a month, and went to places like Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia. 

It was the adventure she’d always hoped for, and she loved her life. Except, there was one thing weighing her down: her backpack.

It was heavy, even though she had packed as light as possible, learning from fellow travelers and whatever travel websites she could find at the time. 

There was kind of like a travel uniform back then: convertible pants, a quick dry shirt, and hiking shoes.

Yet despite all that she’d packed, she still never felt like she had what she really needed or even wanted. And most of what she’d packed didn’t actually make her feel like herself. The more she talked about this with other travelers, the more she learned she wasn’t alone. 

We felt like shells of who we were.

One girl cut her hair short, didn’t pack makeup, and packed tattered clothing and said she looked nothing like what she normally did at home and wished she’d at least brought some eye liner.

I also packed old clothing as was suggested by forums online at the time: “Things you could give away.”  The only dress-up outfit I brought was an ill-fitting casual black dress that I wouldn’t have even worn at home in LA, so why would I bring it on the trip instead of something I loved? Made no sense.

We were all just like, “I want to feel like myself.” 

Alexandra still laments over the photos she has of herself in Sydney. “I do not look cute,” she laughs. And for her and the other travelers she talked to, this wasn’t about getting the “perfect” Instagram picture or any sense of vanity.

For them, it was about feeling like they weren’t able to bring their full selves to the greatest adventure of their lives. The promise of packing lighter and traveling was supposed to make them feel freer, but instead, they started to feel constrained by what was in their bags, and as a result, a little less like themselves. 

Alexandra began to wonder, what if there was a way to pack light and pack the things that would make you feel most at home and the most like yourself, even around the world? 

There needed to be a happy balance while not needing to drag around an entire closet. 

That’s when her informal interviews turned more formal. She spent the next year interviewing every woman she met about what they packed, what they wished they’d packed, and how they felt about what they were carrying.

She became a kind of qualitative researcher, soaking up everything from these interviews, and practicing what she was learning on herself. 

She also leaned on her previous professional experience in the fashion industry and studied items from the most popular outdoor brands (like convertible pants) and worked to find alternatives that served the same functional purpose and had the same fabric properties, but offered more variety when it came to color and style.

And she didn’t want to keep this information to herself, especially thinking about all those conversations she’d had with other travelers over the past year. So on August 13, 2012, from Thailand, she started a blog.

“The newsletter allowed me to connect with my audience on a more personal level.”

She did not, however, start a business. At least, that wasn’t her intention then. “It was 2012, and I was like, who makes money on a blog, right?” she says. “I really just wanted to help people.”

And those people were telling her how she could help them – they wanted links. People were finding Alexandra’s blog through SEO, but at the time her blog didn’t include links to any of the items she was recommending. “Blog visitors actually got mad at me for not providing links,” she laughs. “I didn’t know.”

Someone online offered to mentor her and taught her how she could sign up for affiliate programs and use those links. 

She did that, and started making money from affiliate links. First $25 (after five months of blogging), then $50 (after six months), and then $80 in her seventh month. “It was very slow like that,” she says. But she still just saw it as another way to help people. 

And it did help people. They clicked on the links, and her revenue kept growing. So much so that in 2013 she turned down an opportunity to work with a marketing agency she’d been wanting to work with for years and decided instead to focus all her attention on the blog. Maybe this blog could help fund her travels instead?

It did, and within three years it was making six figures. 

She also started an email list, mostly because at the time “everybody was saying you need an email list.” So she got one. And while she very quickly got 50,000 subscribers, she didn’t really know what to do with them.

I started paying a ton of money for this email list for years, and it got really expensive because my email list kept growing. 

She also says she was on a platform then that didn’t inspire her. 

It wasn’t very user friendly and looked like software a corporate IT department would use. But then I found Kit in 2016, which was made for content creators and was user friendly. So we made the switch. 

And when she switched, she found that the user-friendly nature also made her want to write more emails, and make them more personal. 

Instead of just thinking about email as a way to drive traffic back to her blog, she started approaching it as its own space, a more personal way to connect with the people who were the most invested in her business, and in her. 

So she started emailing more, about her travels, where she was, how it was going, as well as giving more personalized information about her favorite products. 

The newsletter allowed me to connect with my audience on a more personal level, and that’s where we built a relationship.

It helped the business grow even more, and by 2019 her business was making seven-figures. 

But then, in 2020, everything changed. 

“My life as I know it is about to end.”

For most of us in the US, March 2020 is when we realized our lives were about to change.

But for travelers like Alexandra, that moment happened earlier. 

Alexandra and those in her community traveling the world were seeing what was happening  and knew it was only a matter of time before travel, among other things, would shut down. They knew a lot was about to end. 

In late 2019, Alexandra had created and pre-purchased stock of her own travel products to sell in the summer of 2020. Early in the year, once she realized what was happening, she offered up all her physical products at cost in hopes just to get them out of her home. She slashed prices and then, in March when things in the US began shutting down, Alexandra, almost in a daze, went out for a meal.

I walked myself to a sushi restaurant nearby, sat at the bar, had some drinks, and ate really nice sushi and sat there staring at the news on TV thinking, my life as I know it is about to end, realizing I was about to lose everything I’d worked so hard to build. I was numb.

After that, Alexandra’s business crashed, “like everybody else in the travel industry,” she says, “and I crashed as well.”

Alexandra had gone through some tough personal stuff in the two years before 2020 and hadn’t fully healed. And now she had to gear up to try to save her business.

At first, she buckled down and focused on what she could do. She knew she had enough savings to keep on her team of 10 people for at least another six months, which was her biggest concern. But while a lot of other creators were going live and sharing more of themselves than ever, she knew she couldn’t do that. She was still too raw.

But her audience kept reaching out, asking how they could support her. She’d built a connection with the people she’d been emailing all these years, and they wanted to help, even asking if there was a place they could donate. She didn’t feel comfortable accepting donations, but she did want to keep paying her team, so she decided to tell everyone reaching out exactly how they could help if they wanted to. 

To do that, she explained to them how her business operated and exactly how they generated revenue. She explained in detail how affiliate links work and how when someone in her audience clicks a link and buys something, a percentage of that builds their revenue and keeps their business going. 

I explained, and that was everything.

Once they fully understood how their actions could help support her and her business, the business grew even more, and Travel Fashion Girl stayed afloat in 2020 because of the audience she’d built.

The business kept going through the pandemic, and Alexandra was able to keep on all 10 team members.

But by the end of 2020, Alexandra was completely burnt out and decided to exit her business. 

“I was so drained.”

Alexandra gave notice to her team, telling them, “I’m gonna let go of Travel Fashion Girl. I think it’s time to walk away.” She kept on the three team members that she could, asking them to stay on to keep the website in maintenance mode while she disappeared. 

She spent the next month offline and with family. 

I was so drained. I hadn’t given myself a chance to recover from two personal events that had happened the two years before the pandemic. And then everything that happened in 2020; I was just like, I’m done. I was very broken.

For the next few months she stayed offline and didn’t watch TV. And in the background her team kept her business afloat as she rested, recovered, and healed. 

After the time away, once she felt rested, she was surprised to find that she actually didn’t want to quit her business at all.

We kind of go and keep going, and don’t give ourselves a chance to take a break. But in that break is where you regenerate energy to carry on. The disconnecting gave me more energy.

After three months away, Alexandra returned to the business refreshed and motivated, working with her team in a “more collaborative way than ever before. We operated more as a team,” she says, “instead of me just being the leader. And we took more risks because we had nothing to lose.”

They also slowed down and became more deliberate, asking lots of questions, doubling down on what was working, letting go of what wasn’t, and doing all of that without the intensity they’d had in the early days. She wasn’t worried about fast growth this time, but sustainability. 

The team and I worked with one goal: focus on quality, not quantity. One post at a time, one project at a time. I was avid about not having deadlines and not creating unnecessary stress.

And there was one more change they made that took the business back up to seven-figures. 

“That boosted our open rates and our revenue.”

After 2020 Alexandra struggled with her newsletter, because she could no longer write about where she was traveling or what she was packing, and travel was still irrelevant in the lives of the people on her email list.

But people did still want to shop, and they were still asking her for links. But at that time she never put affiliate links in her newsletters because it was against Amazon’s rules. 

However, Alexandra realized, was it against the rules of other affiliates? Why had she never checked?

So she and her team started researching and found out that there were plenty of other retailers that allowed affiliate links to be shared in emails.

So the next time she sent a newsletter about a sale a big retailer was having, instead of just saying, “this retailer is having a sale”, her team would also provide an affiliate link for their favorite backpack sold by that retailer. 

Her readers loved these emails, and they clicked on the links. 

Once Alexandra saw how well that was doing, she and her team started using the “resend to unopens” feature in Kit, sending the email again to people who didn’t open it initially.  

We’d send the newsletter on Sunday and then resend to unopens on Monday. That boosted our open rates and our revenue.

Because of the newsletter, Travel Fashion Girl became a seven-figure business again, which blew her away, especially because, as Alexandra explains, website traffic to the blog had never quite returned to what it was before 2020. 

Because of Kit and our newsletter, we still beat our 2019 revenue even without the same website traffic.

 

“Don’t worry, you’re gonna get there.”

Today, Alexandra and her team focus a good part of their growth strategy on email, which for them has meant seven-figures, but people on the outside don’t always see that part. Recently a brand reached out to Alexandra wanting to work with her, but then, when they saw her Instagram account, they said, “Oh you only have 20,000 followers? Don’t worry, you’re gonna get there. Maybe we can get you a free pair of shoes or something.” 

Alexandra laughs and says, “I don’t need Instagram for my business, I need Kit.”

And while she never set out to build a business, let alone a six or seven-figure business (“I would’ve been happy making $200 a week to cover my backpacking expenses”), she’s been blown away by the way it’s grown and the community it’s built. 

Her business also enabled her to make her next move; she’s recently acquired a conference: Women’s Travel Fest. 

I’ve brought women together for years virtually and now it’s my chance to realize a long time dream: to have a conference where I can unite everyone together.

You can connect with Alexandra on Instagram, subscribe to her newsletter, or learn more at travelfashiongirl.com.