After 23 miles of walking, Bea Herzberg was exhausted.
Traveling El Camino de Santiago across Europe last summer, she rose at four in the morning to start the daily trek across the Spanish and French countryside. Walking every day through small cities and farmland, she sees the sun rise in the distance above the grazing sheep and wild horses, hears pebbles crunching under her feet and feels the dust swirling around her legs.
The tastes of honey, bread, chocolate and Spanish cuisine linger in her mouth as she rests in a bustling town square—her feet are sore as she talks, laughs and soaks up the culture.
These are her memories of El Camino de Santiago—a centuries-old pilgrimage trail that attracts thousands of hardy adventurers each year. And it’s these kinds of experiences that inspire Herzberg, a junior at Grant High School. This artsy student’s keen sense of style and aesthetic have attracted over one million followers and multiple companies to her boards on the photo-sharing website Pinterest.
But despite her Internet fame, Herzberg stays grounded and doesn’t let a website define her. A lover of travel and culture, she ultimately wants to use the experiences that inspire her to help others see and appreciate the world from a new perspective.
Herzberg, now 17, was born in Portland and lives with her parents and younger brother. Ever since she was little, she has been drawn to art and pictures. Her father, William Herzberg, remembers how his daughter always had a strong sense of herself as an artist even from a young age.
In elementary school, a picture she drew of a sunflower was chosen to go on the school’s bag and t-shirts. Herzberg says she was proud of the bold, colorless look she had created, but angry when a student teacher asked her to change the drawing. Bea Herzberg said: “‘I don’t care if you make this into a T-shirt or not,’” her father remembers. “‘But I will not change the words and I will not change the drawing.’”
Starting around the age of 12, Herzberg began to create collages and tear out pictures from magazines to create her own never-ending book of things she thought were beautiful. She considers herself a collector, and the beautiful images were a way to document her life, feelings and to organize her thoughts.
The stacks of ripped pages filled up her desk and covered the wall above her bed. In her bathroom, she kept a stack of faces from magazines to use for inspiration when she puts on makeup. Her computer desktop was a traffic jam of digital images she found and liked online.
Two summers ago, Herzberg’s cousin suggested a website called Pinterest as a way to organize and share her collections of pictures. “I was so excited because it just laid out everything in such an amazing way,” remembers Herzberg.
Pinterest arrived on the web in 2010 and acts as an online image filing and sharing system. Today, more than 48 million users create “boards” relating to different topics and “pin” pictures to these boards. You can follow a user’s profile or boards and “like,” comment on or “re-pin” the pictures they post to your own Pinterest page.
At first, Pinterest was just a way for Herzberg to organize her photos, but then she started to gain a significant amount of followers. “It’s so crazy, I totally didn’t ever think that was going to happen,” says Herzberg.
Whenever a person follows you on Pinterest or likes something you pinned, you receive a notification of the action in your email. “One day I came home and checked my email and I had like 300 of those,” remembers Herzberg.
She doesn’t know exactly what spurred the sudden following and guesses maybe something about her Pinterest profile was published somewhere. After the first wave of followers, the numbers kept going up. As of April 2013, she has over 1,089,424 followers.
In the fall of 2012, Herzberg’s cousin was impressed with the success of her Pinterest page and recommended that she create a separate email in case people wanted to contact her. Herzberg promptly forgot about the new email until she randomly checked it over winter break. “I had like 25 emails!” she remembers. Some of them were just people saying how much they liked her pictures, but many were business offers.
The companies contacting Herzberg offered to pay her if she pinned a photo of their product on her boards. The companies would benefit from Herzberg’s many followers who would see the picture and possibly click on the original link taking them directly to the company’s website. This new avenue of advertising is one many companies are taking advantage of considering the popularity of social media and its low advertising costs. A recent study by Bizrate Insights has shown that 43 percent of Pinterest users have used the site to “associate with retailers or brands with which I identify.”
Herzberg has been contacted by jewelry, water bottle, wig, dog bowl, clothing, shoe and even major car companies like Ford asking her to pin their products.
Herzberg doesn’t do business with every company that contacts her. It’s important to her that the pictures she pins stay true to her aesthetic and look natural on her boards. “Sometimes I follow people who have really beautiful looks and then all of a sudden they are pinning 300 pictures of Toms (shoes) and it’s like ‘OK, I know what happened here,’” she says.
The integrity of the company is also important to her. “I don’t want to support something that I don’t believe in or that I don’t like their practices,” she says.
Herzberg describes her aesthetic as a mixture of funky, edgy, classic and feminine. When looking for the beauty in a photo, it’s usually something that evokes emotion or a memory.
At first, Herzberg says her parents didn’t really understand what Pinterest was. Now, her dad says he’s “happy that she’s doing it, and I’m also happy that she’s not identifying herself around this one thing. It’s just part of her life.”
Her younger brother Harry’s opinion? Bea Herzberg smiles and says teasingly: “I think he’s a little jealous. He really wants to work with me; he wants to be my business manager…I’ve said ‘We’ll see.’”
Although she feels a responsibility to her followers to keep up with her Pinterest boards, Herzberg also tries to limit the time she spends in front of the computer screen. “I don’t think that’s fulfilling to me and I don’t think that’s a good way to spend my high school life,” she says.
When she’s not on Pinterest, Herzberg enjoys exploring her artistic and adventurous sides through other mediums. She is taking an art class at Grant and also enjoys collaging, weaving fabric on a loom, traveling and experiencing different cultures.
The Pinterest board Herzberg gets the most comments and positive feedback on is the one she dedicates to her trip walking El Camino de Santiago.
El Camino de Santiago, which in English means, “the way of St. James,” is a trail that spans hundreds of miles through France and Spain. It is a pilgrimage that started during medieval times and is still traveled by people from all over the world.
After seeing a movie about El Camino de Santiago called “The Way,” Herzberg and her mom knew it was something they had to do. They spent two and a half weeks walking part of it last summer and will return in June to finish the trek.
The sense of freedom Herzberg experienced while walking El Camino de Santiago she calls life changing. “When you’re walking and you just have your backpack and you don’t have a room…yourself and your mind is your own because you don’t have anywhere else to contain it,” she says.
While walking El Camino de Santiago, Herzberg had ample time to reflect and notice the beauty in the world. She arrived back in Portland feeling rejuvenated and inspired. She felt like after walking El Camino, she could now conquer anything. She knew that when she got home she would take down all the magazine pictures on her wall and instead put up pictures of El Camino. “What’s above my bed should be what I care about most and what I honor most and what I believe is important,” she says.
Herzberg’s dedication to her senses and aesthetic have paid off. This spring, her Pinterest page was featured in InStyle magazine, but she feels awkward taking all the credit for her Pinterest fame.
Grant junior Claire Floyd-Lapp has known Herzberg since middle school and respects her friend for her honesty. “She doesn’t change her opinions to fit in or be popular,” says Floyd-Lapp. “Her Pinterest is like a branch of that honesty. She has a strong aesthetic that’s truly hers and she doesn’t follow the trends.”
Even though her Pinterest earnings and fame sometimes make her uncomfortable, Herzberg says she is just enjoying the ride. “Who knows how long it will last, I have this opportunity so I should take it.”
For anyone looking to find success on the Internet, Herzberg notes that sometimes it’s the opposite mindset that gives you the best results. “You can’t go into it wanting followers,” she says. “You have to go in just loving it; if you’re passionate about something, it will happen.”
Herzberg’s dream is to combine her love for pictures, art and cultures into a travel guide filled with crafts, recipes, and cultural details. She says it would not only be for people who are traveling, but also for those who can’t leave their homes; using her guide as a way to transport someone without a means of transportation—with all the different senses—to another world. It would be her way of compiling the memories and experiences she holds close at heart while also sharing them with others.
“I think that travel really does broaden the mind,” says her father William Herzberg. “We get too comfortable in our own lives… and when we see that different people do things differently it shakes us up a little bit and you realize you don’t need as much of the stuff that you have with you all the time.”
As a cautious parent, William Herzberg has wondered if a future in the arts for his daughter would be stable, but is reassured by her current success and dedication. “She could be a writer, she could be a traveler, she could be a businesswomen,” he says. “I’m confident that she will succeed and maybe the best advice I should give her would be to follow her passions.”
