Brandy Faris – the COO of both Boann Ventures Corp. and Cashmere & Camo. Faris started Boann Ventures Corp., a company dedicated to developing customized full cycle water management services. In 2011 she decided she needed more creativity in her life, which led her to start her own blog, Cashmere & Camo.
My background is completely unrelated to blogging. I have a bachelor of science from the University of Alberta in environmental conservation science and I was in, well I’m still in, oil and gas. I’ve been doing that for 16 years and then back in 2011 I decided to start a [fashion and nature] blog, Cashmere & Camo.
Ideally, as a kid, if I could have worked for National Geographic it would have been amazing. But that wasn’t realistic, so I decided to choose a route of something that would allow me to get outside, be outdoors. Experience a natural environment and let me work in that aspect.
I decided to start a water management services company five years ago [Boann Ventures Corp..] and that was our focus.
It definitely wasn’t the easiest time to create a start up business in oil and gas, but we’ve been successful in finding a niche and holding onto it.
Just the general challenges and time it takes and energy to actually start a business and get the momentum going so you can retain your business. Like any entrepreneur, growing a startup business, getting the ball rolling, keeping it going, balancing out daily tasks of what you have to do with different clients and also internally with different employees, then trying to balance it out when you have multiple businesses happening, is the challenge.
My specialty has been on water management services probably for the last ten years.
It became clear to me that I still also wanted a creative side to my life. So that’s where I went the other route, where I created the blog and built a business around that.
I always try and goal set for what I want to deliver and things I want to accomplish. I really enjoy writing so one of the things was maybe I should write, maybe I should create a cookbook.
I went through all those different avenues of exploring what I wanted to do and it’s like I couldn’t find one topic I really could hit on. So I thought, well what if I just did a daily segment of whatever interested me that day or something that I had experienced. And that’s why I settled on the blog.
It just kind of hit me sitting on the couch, the name Cashmere & Camo, and it just went from there.
[At] Cashmere & Camo, we focus on trying to support local, trying to support small. We’ve never really chased any of the big multinational companies in terms of endorsement or stories, so we really try to support those young, or new, or local entrepreneurs that are trying to show their product, or sell, or define themselves in our community.
One of the biggest things was that we wanted to increase the quality of what we were putting out there. So photography, video content is a big thing that we want to focus on in the future, but definitely quality of both the images and then the products we are placing out there.
It’s just kind of getting in a routine and trying to understand what works for you to be the most productive.
We’re going to continue to grow out to the market share that we’ve obtained. I think for Cashmere & Camo, we’re currently in a rebranding phase where we have identified; we’re a lifestyle blog so, what does that mean? What does that look like? What is the general format and changes coming forward with upcoming social media and staying on trend?
I think that’s the biggest thing of being an entrepreneur… You have to be willing to take the bull by the horns and have the initiative to ask for what you want sometimes and not wait and just continue to grow and challenge yourself that way.
Editor: Ashley King | aking@cjournal.ca