Sofia Levin has a busy job that happens to combine her interests. In partnership with Hostplus, we find out how that doesn’t prevent her from pursuing a good business idea when it presents itself.
In 2015 freelance food and travel journalist Sofia Levin bought a red toy poodle. That’s a breed of dog, not an actual toy. She named the dog Jinkee.
“I started an Instagram account for her, so my own followers wouldn’t be flooded with puppy photos,” says Levin. “About a week later I emailed a photo of her to a large, curated account to share. Her followers spiked by a few thousand.”
Eighteen months later, Jinkee has more than 70,000 followers.
“@LifeOfJinkee was never meant to be a ‘thing’, let alone an income stream,” says Levin. “But working in social media meant that I could capitalise on the growth.”
Levin also runs Word Salad, a copywriting and content-marketing business. Being able to write as a journalist as well as for brands made it easy for her to portray Jinkee’s personality through the tone of her captions. “I’m not too shabby with a camera either,” she says. “Which definitely helped.”
When @LifeOfJinkee approached 20,000 followers, brands started sending Levin products for Jinkee to promote. That’s when she came up with the idea for her second passion project, Pinstapals.
“There’s only so many custom leads and collars you can have before your storage space runs out,” she says. “So I decided to create a product of our own with a charity bent.
Levin chose five popular dog breeds and designed five enamel fashion pins based on each one. She incorporated them into food items. One has a pug inside a doughnut, another a Pomeranian wearing a pizza. The Jinkee lookalike peeks from a bucket of fried chicken.
“I paid an illustrator to make them presentable and found someone who could turn them into pins,” she says. Levin then sold them through Shopify. “We market entirely through Instagram,” she says. “Two dollars from every pin sold goes to the Lort Smith Animal Hospital and its associated programs.”
Sticking to a nine-to-five job clearly isn’t for Levin. How does she juggle her writing responsibilities with being the personal assistant to a famous poodle? Levin sees multi-tasking as an inherent part of her interests.
“If I’m not doing at least three things at once I become bored,” she says. “My jobs and passion projects feel like they overlap a fair bit. Writing, relatability and an eye for detail is fundamental in everything I do.”
Levin’s advice for those who want to pursue their own passion projects won’t surprise you.
“Just do it,” she says. “It’s not always going to be easy. But anything worth doing never is. Also, don’t lie to yourself and say you don’t have time, because I guarantee there are people out there doing 20 times as much as you are with the same amount of hours in their day. You can always make time.”
This article is presented in partnership with Hostplus, superannuation you can take with you throughout your career.
Photography: Miles Ruge
