Kamiya Jani, CEO of Curly Tales, is a food and travel blogger. She is Influencing the digital world through one blog at a time. She is reinventing digital coverage of food and travel. She recently joined NewsX for an exclusive conversation as part of NewsX Influencer A-List series. In the conversation, she spoke to us about the Curly Tales, her passion and enthusiasm for food and travel, her social media influence and much more.
Speaking about Curly Tales platform’s origin and how it caters to viewers ranging across the age spectrum, Kamiya said: “Curly tales is a food and travel platform and thankfully all age groups enjoy these two categories. That’s the whole intent of reaching out to various age groups. How it originated is an interesting story. 4-5 years ago, I was a news anchor at a business news channel but after a good 10 years of corporate job in media industry I decided to listen to my inner calling. I quit my job, started travelling, documenting my travels and culinary journeys, made videos posted on Facebook and boom I saw some really good response coming from all age groups. So that’s how Curly tales was born back in 2017, cut to 2021 we are now with 2.1 million followers on Facebook.”
Sharing about how social media platform like Facebook helped her, she said: “I think social media is great space to be in if you want to reach out to people. People have got addicted to social media which is a good thing for creators like me to showcase our talents and stories. We want to put out one story every day to give them a bucket list which can motivate them to move out of office or homes to discover and explore hidden gems. Our formula is not to give exclusive luxurious experiences but more of something which is achievable and relatable. So we covered mostly neighbourhood stories. Facebook is a great platform to kick-start and where we are today is because of Facebook.”
When asked about the process of recognising and recommending good food and travel places, Kamiya responded: “The beauty of social media is that it’s so interactive and once you begin your journey, you have so many suggestions and comments coming in from your community. When we started it was just me, my phone and selfie stick. I used to go around create videos, edit it myself and I saw a great response. Currently we are a team of good 20 people. That’s the whole process. We have come a long way.”
Talking about how the pandemic affected her work, she said: “It affected us as much as restaurants and hotels owners. The biggest hit was on tourism industry. So we used this time to organise ourselves and look at multiple avenues for revenue. It has of course impacted us majorly. We have been relying on online interviews and keeping our community engaged. We still talk about food and more so home cooked food.”
Giving advice to young people who are just starting out and look up to her, she said: “I will just say be consistent in whatever you are doing. Of course it’s going to be a long journey with a lot of hard work, so you have to pick up a string you’re extremely passionate about. You gotta love your job so much that money shouldn’t be a motivation at all.”