How This Instagram Star Went From Broke Model to Making 6 Figures

The first time 21-year-old Janice Joostema made money off an Instagram post was a little more than two years ago. A company offered to pay her to post a photo of a tea — you've seen the likes on the Jenner/Kardashian feeds — promising to flatten stomachs. She estimates she earned somewhere between $500 and $800 for the photo. At the time, Joostema had about 200,000 followers and didn't realize she was becoming an "influencer" — that catchall term for anyone who uses social media as a full-time job.

"Nobody really had an aesthetic then," says Joostema (pronounced "yost-uh-muh"), sitting in her business partner's airy studio in Yaletown, Vancouver, backlit by an unusual amount of sunshine beaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows. She's getting ready for the day's shoot, which begins with her friend Sarah doing her hair in exchange for a mention on Joostema's Instagram feed.

"Maybe we should do slight waves in my hair," Joostema says. She's decided this will pair best with the day's outfit, which has changed from a full Gucci look to a thigh-high velvet boot from Ego Official, a dress from Revolve, and a Gucci bag. Joostema arrived for the day wearing fur-lined, studded Gucci loafers — a gift from Italian luxury boutique Luisa Via Roma — fitted black overalls, and a cream turtleneck sweater from Romwe that she admits is a knockoff of London designer J.W. Anderson.

Joostema has the kind of Instagram feed you can't help but envy: Her life looks like one never-ending fashion editorial showcasing a consistently perfect palette of neutrals, with an emphasis on anything, including iPhone and laptop cases, she can find in marble, one of her obsessions.

When she first started her feed, Joostema didn't think of it as an exercise in creative direction: "I had a photo, the photo looked good? Post it." Now, working with her 31-year-old boyfriend, James Lynch, and her business partner, Hourash Salati (both of whom take Janice's photos), everything she posts has to be part of her exacting aesthetic, which she describes as neutral but warm. She says she commands several thousands of dollars for a single sponsored Instagram post and aims to post about a dozen sponsored photos per month, which would place her annual earnings well into six figures (she also gets clothing, both fast-fashion and designer, for free).

It's not bad for a girl from Mission, a tiny town of 36,000 in British Columbia, who once assumed her career options were limited to a hostess at a local restaurant. Now, she shares a house with James in Vancouver, where free clothing fills two rooms, and spends seven days a week working on her social media accounts.

Looking at Joostema's beautiful stream of photos, you wouldn't know what her life was like before this. You wouldn't know that she moved out on her own and dropped out of high school when she was 17. You wouldn't know that she faced abuse after she moved to Indonesia to jump-start a modeling career. For Joostema, the social influence she now enjoys isn't an exercise in vanity or boredom — it's an accidental career that's followed a lifetime of hardship, and one she knows could go the way of MySpace overnight.

[pullquote align='center']I was told to lose more weight, I was told not to eat anything. I was told to throw up.[/pullquote]

Joostema's mother is Fijian and her father is Dutch. They had a difficult split when Janice was 11 years old. This was around the same time she started doing her hair and experimenting with makeup as a hobby, one that used to keep her up until 4 in the morning. It was her escape from constant stress she faced at school and home. "You can't really be thinking about negative stuff while you're doing your makeup," says Joostema, who still does her own makeup for her shoots. "Because you're focusing on a positive outcome."

When Joostema was in 12th grade, her only good friend turned on her without warning. "I asked her why she wasn't talking to me anymore and why she was being so mean, and she literally said, 'I don't want to be your friend because you're so weird,'" Joostema says. "I just didn't understand it." One day after that conversation, a group of girls threw sandwiches and rotten Easter eggs at Joostema. This was one of her last memories from high school.

Joostema dropped out with just a semester to finish and began commuting more than an hour every day to a full-time job she found as a receptionist in Vancouver, supporting herself while getting her diploma online. Around that time, she started having some success modeling by marketing herself on Facebook, and she was looking for photographers to do shoots for her when a friend introduced her to Lynch, a hobbyist photographer who works as the marketing director of a fashion wholesaler and as a mortgage broker. She was impressed by his Instagram following (100,000 at the time, though the account no longer exists).

"I was intimidated because he was shooting all these super-hot girls, and I was 18," she remembers of their meeting. They started a relationship shortly thereafter; he wouldn't end up photographing Joostema for another few months.

While Joostema looks like a movie star, Lynch is her unassuming counterpart in a black hoodie and jeans. They act like a couple who has been together for a long time: He knows where to find things in her purse, she calls him "bubba" as a pet name without even thinking about it. Though they live together, work together, and are together, they seem anything but suffocated by one another. Lynch is a trusted adviser and supporter, and though they admit to bickering about Joostema's shoots, they clearly have a friendship that sustains everything they do together.

Both admit they were attracted to one another's looks at first — she to his green eyes and tattoos, and him to her generally ("she was hot," he says). But she was also attracted to Lynch's stability. She used to date guys with DUIs whose dinners she would pay for. But Lynch "had his shit together," she says.

Several months after meeting Lynch, Joostema decided to move to Indonesia to pursue modeling. A friend had set her up with an agent in Toronto who got her work in Jakarta, and Lynch extended his full support, even having his sisters, who are lawyers, review her contracts. But Joostema describes her experience there as "terrible."

"I was told to lose more weight, I was told not to eat anything," she says. "I was told to throw up." Joostema, who is 5-foot-7, got down to 96 pounds with an 18-inch waist.

One day, while she was exercising, Joostema dislocated her knee. She was sent to a sketchy doctor who rubbed "bee sting" ointment on her knee until she couldn't feel anything. She fainted during her treatment because she was so scared. Her agency paid the medical bills, including weekly follow-ups with that same doctor, with her modeling earnings. Broke, injured, and miserable, Joostema decided to leave Jakarta at Lynch's urging. What was supposed to be her big break had turned into a complete nightmare. "Unless you're Kendall Jenner, there's not really a point of being a model," says Joostema. "You're basically an object."

When she returned to Vancouver, she moved in with Lynch. Depressed and unsure of what to do next, she took a few months off before once again finding escape in doing her hair and makeup. She would photograph the final looks and post them to Instagram. Taking her own photos with a timer was onerous, so Lynch started helping her with the photography, which enabled her to more easily do full-body fashion shots.

[pullquote align='center']Unless you're Kendall Jenner, there's not really a point of being a model. [/pullquote]

Her first regram from a major account came from Anastasia Beverly Hills, which regrammed a beauty shot featuring an Anastasia Beverly Hills product. At the time, Joostema was enrolled in LaSalle College to study fashion design. "I had a heart attack because I was just so shocked that my makeup was good enough to be on this page," Joostema says. She gained 8,000 followers from that regram alone. From there, half the photos she posted were with the aim of getting regrammed. After just a semester in fashion school, she left and made Instagram her full-time career.

Now, Joostema's process goes something like this: The day before a shoot, she'll plan everything out with the help of a mood board. She looks at the thumbnails in her feed to ensure that one photo seamlessly flows into the next. If she knows she has to do a sponsored post of a red lipstick next week, for instance, she'll start working red into the six photos leading up to that post for a flawless visual integration.

On shoot day, she wakes up, eats a big breakfast while doing her makeup, and then goes out to scout locations with Lynch or Salati. If there's an ugly orange car in their preferred location, they'll have to find another spot to shoot. The shoot itself typically takes under an hour, then Joostema edits the images using FaceTune, VSCO, and Darkroom.

When I go out with Joostema in the Gaslight District of Vancouver, Lynch has his shots in less than 20 minutes. Joostema crosses the cobblestone street, pulling on a strand of hair and demurring for Lynch's camera, with almost no direction, aside from his occasional instruction to wait for a pedestrian or unsightly motor vehicle to clear her shot.

Joostema would never tell aspiring social media influencers not to try to do what she does for a living but admits she had two clear advantages when she started: a photographer boyfriend with a marketing degree who was happy to help her get started ("It's a little bit impossible to do it by yourself," Joostema admits) and an early entrée onto Instagram. Now it's harder than ever to gain a following even if you can commit to posting three times a day. "The algorithm has messed up Instagram so much," Joostema says. "Unless you're a super-famous person already or you're someone famous's kid, then how are you going to get famous? Look at Cindy Crawford's daughter. She's blowing up now because she's Cindy Crawford's daughter."

Joostema, Lynch, and Salati know that if Joostema wants staying power in the hyper-fleeting environment of social media, she'll have to find a way to turn @JaniceJoostemaa into Janice Joostema, Inc. She's working on diversifying her platform, and maintains a YouTube channel and website on top of her Instagram feed. She also wants to find revenue streams outside of sponsored content, perhaps in the form of a fashion or beauty product line.

Though her job is glamorous, she and Lynch will remind you that it is, in fact, work. "Every single shoot, you have to amp yourself up," Joostema says. "The other day, I was like, 'You know what? I'm too tired.' I was not motivated. I just was like, 'Screw it.' But I had already filmed [a YouTube video] so I was like, At least I did something today. If I don't do anything for a day, I go mental."

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Though she gets recognized at the mall and has a bigger social media following than many celebrities, she doesn't see herself as one. "I don't feel like if you have a large following on Instagram, it makes you famous," she says. "Instagram can be deleted, and then what are you?"