Alexis Paige, a senior majoring in marketing and minoring in computer science at Florida Atlantic University, helped co-found Two Seventy, an online lifestyle and fashion magazine.
Tired of working for her university’s newspaper, Alexis and her fellow co-founders broke free and created their own creative outlet, inspiring college students in South Florida and across the nation.
We were like, “Why don’t we do more? Why don’t we do more fashion? Why don’t we talk about things other than just what’s happening at FAU, because students care about things off campus.”
There’s three of us: me, Emily Creighton and Mohammed F. Emran; we’re all three completely equal. We’re all co-founders. We don’t really split up roles.
We try to keep our focus on women just because it’s easier to focus it on one than both, but we have a lot of male viewers and a lot of male photographers. It reaches to them as well.
The three of us used to work at the “University Press” at FAU, and that’s where we met. We were kind of tired with how things were run. We felt like we were being held back and could do a lot more.
We celebrated our year anniversary on August 18th.
We all try to do everything, but at the same time we have our respective areas.
I did more of the recruiting side. I did all the marketing stuff that’s like “Start your writing career,” or if you’re a photographer “Come hang out with us.”
People come in and they need a resume builder and then they leave, which is totally fine, because we want to help as many people as we can to learn a little bit about the rules we know. Hopefully we can learn from them as well.
Emily, one of the other co-founders, she’s an English major, so she understands the writing side more. She understands journalism.
Our web guy is amazing. Two of our stories have interactive components.
With marketing, I enjoy thinking about what to do, like how can Two Seventy become a brand?
At FAU the mascot is an owl; 270 is how many degrees an owl can move its head.
All three of us are graduating at the same time, but we’re completely different ages.
We love to do social media: It’s fun to have a brand around it, compared to what you would do with your personal account.
The three of us consider ourselves editors, so we sign off on everything. Under that we have our writers and photographers. We’re growing.
We try to keep the journalistic style with the photography, so we don’t over Photoshop anything. We try to maintain integrity while still being as creative as possible.
Overall, we’ve probably had about 20-25 different writers. Right now, we have about 10 consistent writers and photographers.
People don’t necessarily want to meet at an exact place sometimes, that’s what I’ve learned. It’s sometimes more casual and less stress on them and it doesn’t feel like another assignment.
What’s great about FAU is that everyone is so different. You learn a lot of different things from different people and it’s also so much more fun to write.
You’re not just writing for 18-year-olds or just for people going to night classes; you’re writing for all of them.
Two Seventy was started by people who wanted to try it and see what would happen. So far it’s been successful.
