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Case study · Ju.en.vie

Turning a travel habit into brand deals.

Ju.en.vie is my sport and travel brand. It started as a way to document what I was living, and it now brings in accommodation and activity partnerships that I find, pitch and deliver on my own. Here is how it works, and what it has not solved yet.

2023A video about climbing Mount Fuji performs. I keep going.
3 yearsAlmost one piece of content a day, alongside Julien Invest
15,500Followers across TikTok and Instagram
7 dealsHotel and activity partnerships, pitched and closed myself
2026Sydney Marathon, then documenting the working holiday in Australia

Why I started a second brand

Julien Invest had to stay serious. Personal finance does not leave much room to play, and I wanted somewhere I could actually make things.

Sport and travel gave me that. I have always cared about filming and editing, and this is the niche where I get to do it properly rather than in service of a lesson about index funds.

It began as a habit, not a plan. In 2023 I posted a video about climbing Mount Fuji, it performed well beyond anything I expected, and the reason was obvious once I saw it: people want a first hand account from someone who actually went. So I kept making those.

What actually works: the practical guide

The format that carries the account is not the cinematic travel edit. It is the practical guide, a genuinely useful answer to a question someone is already asking.

That matters because it gets found. Instagram and TikTok have become search engines, and a video that answers a real question keeps surfacing for months after it is posted, long after a pretty montage has stopped moving.

My best video is a guide to trekking in Sapa, Vietnam. 82,000 views, and not because it was beautiful. It answers a question honestly, so people ask more in the comments, save it for their own trip, and send it to whoever they are travelling with. The saves and the shares are what did the work.

I do not research topics in a keyword tool. I make content about what I am living right now, which is why it holds up. Today that means documenting a working holiday visa in Australia, because that is what I am actually doing.

The partnerships, and how I get them

This is the part that took the most work and the part I would point a hiring manager to first.

I approach hotels and activity operators directly, by email or Instagram DM, with a media kit I built myself. No agency, no intermediary, and no inbound. By my own rough count I have sent something in the order of a hundred approaches to land seven agreements.

7partnerships closed from roughly a hundred cold approaches, found, pitched, negotiated and delivered without a team

What I deliver depends on the deal. Usually video and photography, sometimes stories, sometimes work on their own website. I scope it with them, then produce and hand it over.

Worth saying plainly: so far these have been paid in accommodation and activities rather than in cash. That is what a 15,500 audience can command right now, and moving those deals to paid is the next thing I want to solve.

Production: one person, start to finish

I shoot, edit and publish everything myself. There is no team and no outsourcing at any step.

The kit is deliberately small enough to travel with and run alone: an iPhone 16 Pro Max, a DJI Mini drone, a DJI Osmo Action 6 and a DJI Mic. It is chosen for what one person can carry and operate while also being the one on camera.

From the first shot to the published post, a piece takes me around two hours. That covers filming, the drone work, the edit, the caption and posting it.

Two hours, one person, no handovers. That is the number that matters, because it is what lets me publish almost every day for three years across two brands at the same time.

The relevant point for an employer is not the gear. It is that a brief does not need to pass through four people before anything reaches an audience.

Results

What I would do differently

Everything on Ju.en.vie is in French. That was the natural choice when I started and it is now the ceiling.

The audience I can reach is limited to French speakers, and so is the pool of brands that will work with me. Publishing in English, or at least subtitling properly, would have widened both from the start.

I am fixing that here rather than in theory. Australia is the first chapter I am documenting with an English speaking audience in mind.

Contact

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Working Holiday Visa, subclass 417, full working rights to August 2027. Based in Sydney.