New year. New name. New era.
Hello old friends (and new!) I’d like to introduce you to Thoroughly Modern Millennial.
I started this re-brand journey just before Wishing For Chanel turned five last year. At such a momentous anniversary, as well as reflecting on the past five years I was also trying to look ahead to what the next five could hold for my little corner of the Internet.
Some of you guys may have noticed I had a bit of a blogging crisis at the beginning of November last year (and lets face it all the way through 2015 in varying degrees of ridiculousness). The result of said crisis was basically this post where I basically stopped trying to ‘keep up’ anymore. I inevitably lost momentum. Life took over essentially – as it has a habit of doing. One week turned into two. Then two months.
It was my longest break away from blogging and Internet ‘life’ since I started on this crazy train five years ago. Suddenly without the crutch of ‘my blog’, my mind was forced to concentrate solely on ‘me’ and who I was outside of ‘blog me’. And in all honesty? It felt nice to skirt away from the responsibility of running a blog, but I missed the community aspect of the blogging and actively writing something everyday, so I formulated a plan to comeback.
After a few ‘rebrand’ talks with close friends (bloggers and non-bloggers alike) I ended up with the following conclusion. I had outgrown Wishing For Chanel. This blog needed to change.
As much as I was proud to be known as ‘Ria from Wishing For Chanel’, the blog name and the content I was producing felt restrictive. When your blog name is closely tied to a lifestyle brand, whether I like it or not people have an expectation of the type of content you’ll be pumping out and I set up an expectation of myself to follow and stick to. Even though I adore fashion and will continue to write about it with passion, it’s starting to play a smaller role in my life and my blog needs to be a reflection of that.
Every so often I had a go at sharing more serious posts on different topics on Wishing For Chanel, but the juxtaposition of the blog name and the niche I tried hard to keep within felt disjointed and didn’t sit well with me. In my head I hated how messy the blog felt to the point I hit a wall every time I sat down and went ‘RIGHT get your head in the game and write’.
As soon as I came up with the new name, new content and new ‘focus’, I felt excited again. TMM (as I’m lovingly abbreviating it) is me turning over a new leaf yet acknowledges the fact that life has changed so much since I’ve started formally blogging. I’m hoping the blog will still be ‘me’ but more ‘me’ than before – if that makes any sense?
So what should you expect from now on?
More. (Hopefully anyway) As I said the new blog name is freeing and feels much more like ‘me’. TMM’s mantra will be sharing varied content I feel really passionate about and as well as a peak into the other parts of ‘me’ – the geek, the journalist, the cynic, the fashion fan, the writer, the feminist, the cf-convert, and the bookworm. You will also see content from Feminist in Training and The Unabridged Writer migrating over to this space, so there’ll be more posts on gender equality and writing in general over here too. I want to share more of that content with you guys and – as it has been commented by many people – I need to stop spreading myself out too thinly online. Too many fingers in too many pies!
I hope this switch will have you understanding a bit more about what makes the girl behind the blog tick and hopefully the new title will help me be a bit braver with my content. But for anyone worried and sad about missing any of my usual features – ha! – a few may be making appearances here and there, and all my old posts are still knocking about if you fancy delving back (please don’t do that, they’re awful).
And on that note I bid a final farewell to Wishing For Chanel. The name, the persona and the five years it gave me have honestly shaped the blogger I am today.
But in the words of Sheryl Crow ‘a change will do you good‘ (God I love that song)
*raises a glass to the next chapter*
Ria
Leave a Reply