Influencer
“I Strive To empower Women To Be More Confident With Their Selves:” An Interview With Conner Lundius
Joining a wheelchair dance team became Conner’s bridge to becoming a content creator. From sharing videos showcasing her dance in her personal accounts, she now holds several roles in The Rollettes, all essential in the team’s content creation process and online presence.
Joining a wheelchair dance team became Conner’s bridge to becoming a content creator. From sharing videos showcasing her dance in her personal accounts, she now holds several roles in The Rollettes, all essential in the team’s content creation process and online presence.
In this interview, we’ll learn more about Conner and her journey in the content creation space.
What inspired you to become a content creator?
Conner Lundius fell into content creation through dance. She joined a wheelchair dance team four and a half years ago in Los Angeles. She started showcasing her dance on various social media platforms and then started sharing her life and other passions online.
What type of content do you create to empower women, and how do you decide what topics to cover?
Conner Lundius creates content based on dance styles and her lifestyle. She strives to empower women to be more confident with their selves and their bodies. Most of Conner’s content displays confidence through dressing and just being body confident.
Besides organic content, have you done any brand partnerships and collaborations?
Conner Lundius has worked with several brands in the past and makes sure she chooses brands that align with her personal vision and values. If something doesn’t feel right to her, doesn’t stick, or isn’t something she stands for, she opts not to work with those brands. But she has been very fortunate to have worked with companies that have similar values as her.
Conner Lundius recently worked with a campaign for Aerie, which was one of her bucket lists. She loved working with Aerie because of everything they stand for, and she loved the brand for years. She also valued how the brand gave her creative control and let her take the reins on the kind of content she wanted to create and the message behind it.
Working with brands that Conner Lundius feels will come back or support her in other ways are also her favorite. She cites that she has been working with Aerie for about four years, and they continue to sponsor a women’s empowerment event she produces every summer.
What kind of impact do you hope to have through your content?
Conner Lundius hopes to have as big of an impact as she can as she strives for authenticity in her content. She adds, “I never want my content to feel forced or unrealistic as to what you can look like, achieve, or can do in your day-to-day life.”
Because of this strategy, Conner regularly receives a lot of DMs and comments from disabled women and mothers who have young daughters who are disabled. They expressed how challenging it is to navigate the world as a woman with a disability and hold their head high every time they leave the house.
As long as she can help women and touch women’s lives, Conner will continue creating content.
What challenges have you faced as a content creator in this space, and how did you overcome them?
Conner Lundius says she struggled to keep up with the algorithm as it changes rapidly all the time. It decides what it likes one day, and the next day, it could be completely different.
She expressed her challenges in creating content as she wears different hats simultaneously. Conner is the director of content and marketing for The Rollettes, a women’s wheelchair dance team and empowerment group. In this role, she has to run all of these socials, marketing, and other events for the group.
Conner Lundius plans ahead when it comes to creating and batching content to ensure that she gets to finish as much as she can one time. This strategy also helps her become more consistent and have longevity with her content but admits it’s not always easy. She says, “Sometimes, that also burns me because if there are certain trends, I will film a lot of times.”
Besides filming, editing content usually takes a backseat because she has to want to make sure that it’s attached to a trending sound. Often, she can’t edit content for a week as she waits for whatever’s trending.
In short, trying to stay on top of the algorithm and creating as much content with the amount of time she has are some of Conner’s challenges as a content creator.
Talk to me about your role with The Rollettes. What exactly do you do? Do you also create content for them?
The Rollettes is an all-women’s wheelchair dance team based in LA. Their mission is to empower women and girls with disabilities to live boundlessly and shift perspective through dance. The team was founded in 2012 and started solely as a dance team. It evolved over the last decade and has grown and become more adaptive.
Today, dance has become the core and foundation of The Rollettes. But their mission stays the same — help women and girls with disabilities. Aside from dance, they also create and post content on social media about women’s empowerment and educating the disabled and non-disabled community about certain misconceptions. The team also loves making funny skits.
Conner Lundius is the content and marketing director of The Rollettes. This job requires her to plan out all of the team’s content and come up with ideas for content creation. She’s also the team captain and choreographer. She currently wears a lot of hats, which is why making content for her own social media platforms has become part-time.
What type of content works best for you in terms of engagement in your personal account and in The Rollettes?
“The shorter, the better across both [accounts],” Conner says. She always tries to highlight something that’s eye-catching within the first second and a half of her content to catch people’s attention. She understands that people nowadays have a shorter attention span — about three seconds or less — which is why she finds content less than 15 seconds long performing well than others.
When editing videos, Conner makes sure that they move fast. She doesn’t make clips more than one and a half seconds long and strives to trim them down to half a second whenever possible.
Have you done any brand partnerships with The Rollettes’ account?
A couple of years ago, The Rollettes helped promote Abercrombie’s activewear line, YBP. Conner recalls it being a seamless partnership for everyone on the team because they wear activewear every day during rehearsals.
Another reason why the entire team loved working with Abercrombie is because everyone got to be part of it. This doesn’t always happen all the time, as some brands only ask three or four members of the team to represent them.
The Rollettes also collaborated with Reebok for their new adaptive shoe. Since the team doesn’t regularly posts content about fashion, they integrated Reebok’s shoes into their account by wearing them as they filmed a dance video. The first five seconds of the video show the entire team coming together and lacing or zipping up the shoe.
What advice would you give someone interested in becoming a content creator within the same niche as you, which is about empowering women with disabilities?
Conner Lundius has talked to many aspiring creators and suggests the same — focus on one platform first. Throwing photos and videos to more than one platform usually means one or two of these platforms will suffer.
While using two platforms is great, Conner advises focusing on one, especially for those who are still starting in the industry. She also believes that focusing on one platform at a time makes it easier for the creator to plan what type of content to make.
Conner also suggests sticking to a schedule. For example, if posting every day becomes too overwhelming, aim to post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday instead. Having a schedule helps creators plan content and keeps their audience engaged because they know when to expect brand-new content.
Conner’s third tip is to find one thing you can consistently do. For her, it’s “building an outfit with me” videos. So even if she has nothing to show, she just goes through her closet, puts an outfit together, and films.
She says, “Find an easy theme you can repeat with a different spin on it every time. This will help you when you get into creative ruts and don’t know what content to push out.”
What’s next for you? Are there any exciting news or upcoming projects?
Conner Lundius has a few exciting brand partnerships in the works, with one this spring. Conner says these brand partnerships encourage her to continue as a content creator as the industry never sleeps and stops, and creators don’t take any holidays. These brand partnerships are her wins and feel rewarding, especially when the brands directly align with everything she loves.
The Rollettes will have a women’s empowerment event called Rollettes Experience in July, which will take place in LA. Presently, Conner isn’t creating content for her own platform but for The Rollettes to help promote the event.
