The “Boss up” term became my initial motivation to change my views as an artist. I am an artistic individual that strives for more skills to better professional career. The best approach was to realize that I should go for a side gig that can benefit my family in the long run and eventually manage my own schedule. You may not know but over the last four years, I’ve created two identities on social media to separate two types of trades. After so much research of what works for me, I decided to make a big change of combining these two identities (The Stylish Rouge and Styled Collective) into Haute Creative Co. My first initial goal when I created the first website (www.thestylishrouge.com) was to promote makeup tips and tutorials because color was my passion. Till this day, I still love color but in a variety of ways. I started to play around with my iPhone’s apps and tools a lot, until I realized I was more of a content creator and I wanted an image to tell a story. Makeup would not give me that; it was more of a cover. The Styled Collective (www.styledcollective.com) was created to promote interior design and photography services in which at the time, I was not able to find my niche.
Lightroom came into my life when I needed better editing tools for my images for @thestylishrouge and I loved the idea of how this app made my images a bit more interesting. The app has so many tools such as light, texture, and color hues functions that became a huge benefit for my makeup blog. When I was concentrating on makeup blogging, I realized that my content was just capturing photography shots of products versus the actual makeup tips. It slowly became edited makeup flat lays images and I realized I didn’t know what I wanted to promote anymore. Soon after the blog quickly started to become a preset blog due to my love of using Lightroom as my main editing tool for images. However, I still needed a way to merge @thestylishrouge with my design social media account, @styled.collective.
Since interior design is part of my career background, I would used a lot of home decor in my product photos such as candles, fabrics, and miscellaneous items to accessorize my photos. My photos consisted of interior design decor, drawings, and tiles. Then, the lightbulb that turned “on” in my mind. I was becoming an interior stylist with photography skills in addition into creating presets these images to portray its final look. However, since these accounts were separate, it became frustrating when I would switch from one account to the next for posting. Until my husband said “Can you just merge everything into one so its easier to blog, post, and advertising about?”. And he was right; I was confusing my blog posts back to back to and I need to find a solution.
I started to research names that would ultimately become the replacement of both identities. If I kept one of the names I already had, I knew it would not stand out to represent Interior Styling + Photography with Preset Creations. I went to several online websites for name generators and the results were not very impressive. Amidst of all the searching, I came across the word Haute. I knew what this word meant, but I wanted an actual definition from the dictionary. The definition identified this word as powerful and it really stood out what I was trying to do. The word Creative became the perfect secondary word as it signifies my creative insights of what I really want to show as the New Brand. Best of all, the Initials (HC) were very important to me as it was my grandmother’s (H) and mother’s (C) first name initials. Haute represents my grandmother, Herlinda, a elegant and fashionable woman that I’ve had in my life. She was very witty, trendy, and powerful individual. Creative represents my mother, Cristina, an innovative, visionary, and colorful person that is not afraid to show new ideas to make something better.
And so, Haute Creative is a symbolism of an elegant, innovative, and colorful collective. With my visions in gear, I want to boss up and start up on my brand to become self employed in times like this where its uncertain in how our way of life is going to be normal again. I feel that this brand’s approach is perfect for this time. It gives me clear focus on what I want to do as an artistic individual and how different I am from several competitions out there.
