Journey into the Online World

Mega-influencer Sisters Build Namesake Digital Agency

Alicia McCarthy

Amra and Elma Beganovich started their journeys on a very traditional trajectory path — one was an economist working on World Bank projects and the other was an attorney studying to obtain her LLM in Securities and Financial Regulations at Georgetown Law. At that time (in late 2012), the social media landscape was just beginning to unravel, with Facebook planning the launch of its Pages.

It was late evening on a weeknight in December 2012 when Amra, after talking with her friends about how traditional lifestyle media no longer related to professional women, decided to stay up all night and figure out HTML and CSS coding to take their first blog live. Three months into blogging, the Beganovich sisters saw their site take off, garnering over 100,000 unique monthly visitors. Shortly afterwards, brands like Rodial, Deborah Lipmann, and Paris Hilton (who had her own line of purses) approached the sisters to work with them on an exchange basis. This was the turning point when these young women entrepreneurs understood that blogging and social media stardom could very well be a business.

“I remember thinking that if the companies were willing to expend their resources, both labor and the cost of product, to work with us and be published on our blog, there must be monetary compensation in this,” says Elma.