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Adventurous, Electrifying, and Ambitious—Shir and Jamie Are NOT UR AVG Girls
It's true— Jamie and Shir opened their closets on Curtsy. Curtsy is the the app that lets you rent dresses from other girls at your school. Download Curtsy here and start renting your closet out, too. Join…
It's true— Jamie and Shir opened their closets on Curtsy. Curtsy is the the app that lets you rent dresses from other girls at your school.
Download Curtsy here and start renting your closet out, too.
It all started freshman year when Jamie Wilkinson and Shir Ibgui met in a mutual friend's dorm room at the University of Florida and instantly clicked because of their height. The first thing Shir said to Jamie was, "Woah, you’re tall! What size shoe are you?” She then convinced her to stand up to compare heights with her and began sharing clothes with her ever since.
It’s silly to say, but because we are able to share each other’s wardrobes, we were always at each other’s places trying on different outfits and began bonding. Trying on outfits led to going out together, which led to studying abroad in Europe at the same time and traveling Europe together.
They both have a passion for traveling and learning foreign languages. Jamie is minoring in Spanish, and Shir is minoring in French, which is why they studied abroad in Madrid, Spain, and Paris, France. Their dream is to pursue their wanderlust and travel the rest of the world while immersing themselves in other cultures.
While studying abroad in Europe, the idea for their blog, NOTURAVG, came about. Shir already had a travel themed WordPress Blog about her experiences, and their friends loved reading about their traveling experiences together, so they decided to create one together.
We both have been fortunate enough to have unique experiences around the world, and we wanted to create an outlet to share them.
While Jamie was visiting Shir in NYC this past summer, they decided to finally create the site. After Sunday brunch and a little retail therapy around Manhattan, the two of them sat down to create the first blog post at one of their favorite rooftop bars, Pod 39.
NOTURAVG is a lifestyle brand to express who we are and what we love. We wanted to come up with a simple and easy to say name that represented our lives. Our daily experiences differ from the “AVG” because of our heightened perspective of life— both being 6 feet tall. People always ask us for travel, fashion, and fitness tips, so we decided to create a social media platform to direct anyone searching for these recommendations.
Curtsy: When creating content and posts, how do y’all decide to post what you do?
Jamie and Shir: We just live our lives and make posts pertaining to what we’re experiencing at the moment. Sometimes the blog actually encourages us to do things. For example, on the day of Halloween, we had a long day of school and meetings, but we saw a really cool halloween makeup ensemble and were like, "We have to do this tonight for the blog!" We ended up going out that night and perfecting the look, which led to one of our most popular posts, “S&J’s Bad to the Bone Halloween”.
Curtsy: What are y'all's favorite things about creating content for NOTURAVG?
Jamie and Shir: We love sharing these personal aspects of our daily lives and adventures with our friends and family. We feel like the craziest things happen to us when you put the two of us together, and we always have a great story to tell. We love posting in the “Wanderlust” and “A Day in the Life” sections because we can freely talk about our adventures, and we feel like we’re recounting a story to our friends.
Aside from all of the stories and writing up content, we have a true passion for photography. We each have over 10,000 photos on our phones from just this past year— we love to photograph each and every thing we do, and whenever we do something together we always say, 'Let’s photograph this for the blog!' Shir has a fancy Nikon camera and is certified in commercial photography, so we're fortunate to have the ability to take high quality professional photos.
Curtsy: What has been the most challenging obstacle while having y’all’s blog?
Jamie and Shir: There’s a saying that a college student’s life is divided into the following three categories, and you can only choose two: having good grades, a social life, and getting enough sleep. We definitely chose the good grades and social life. On top of that, we’re both very involved on campus, holding many leadership positions which take up a lot of our time. Thankfully, we’re seniors now, and our involvement is beginning to dwindle down.
We're beginning to have more free time, which we use to focus on the blog. Balancing our social lives, school, involvement, and sleep has definitely been a challenge, but NOTURAVG is our passion and we truly enjoy working on it — it doesn’t even feel like work.
Just last week, we sat down on a Friday afternoon for what was supposed to be 2 hours of working on new blog posts, which eventually ended up being 5 hours! We didn’t even notice how fast the time flew. We just have so many ideas and get so excited about them! We meet for an hour before class, in between meetings, in the evening after class, on weekends, and truly whenever we have some down time.
Curtsy: What do you plan on doing after graduation with NOTURAVG?
Jamie and Shir: We both kind of have different post graduate plans. Shir will be finishing up her Masters in International Business until December 2017, and Jamie hopes to be in design school in New York. We both have plans to travel a lot after spring semester and are excited about the opportunities we’ll have for future blog posts. Ideally, we would love for the blog to take off and for us to be able to work from any home base around the globe (like our idols, Tash & Dev).
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