Media influencers are becoming highly sought after positions but few genuinely make it successful.
Company brands have made movements toward using influencer marketing with credible popular creators to promote their brands with paid endorsements.
It’s become a popular branding strategy for companies to get their product out fast with big incentives. However, big name influencers will testify that finding and staying true to a unique niche is how they win long term. It’s not about how many brands you can represent as much as it is staying true to your personal brand and values.
Soda Springs is the home to influencer extraordinaire Kenna Valdez of FlipHubb. Valdez says one main key to her success to her popular Instagram page is it started as a side hustle she loved and was able to continue making it her family’s full source of income.
Valdez’s Instagram page @thefliphubb, shares a day in the life of flipping homes, furniture and trash-to-treasures thrift store finds, as well as family life and home hacks. But she will be the first to tell you this was never the plan.
In high school, Valdez had inherited a bedroom set from her great-grandmother, Wanda Peterson of Soda Springs, and decided to refinish it. By the age of 18, Valdez had already found her courage to be a “Do it Yourself” kind of gal. She found her own creative flair to flip and refurb trash-to-treasures but her dream was to teach English and Chinese.
She started college and even spent a year in China. Shortly after returning, she met her husband, Justin, and soon got married. A series of infertility struggles changed the plan, quitting her job in sales, as the intense cost of treatments had her searching for ways to create extra income. So she went back to flipping furniture.
Two years after her ‘I do” to Justin, they welcomed their first son to the world. She soon went back to a reliable 9-to-5 job and worked for a boat sales company but still continued to flip furniture but soon realized it was a no brainer that the side hustle was making her more income, so she took the faithful leap into self-employment and started flipping full time.
They had purchased a brand new home in Eagle Mountain, Utah, in which Valdez decided to use as a way to teach herself more how-to’s, whether it was how-to create a shiplap wall or how-to refinish cabinets, or how to tile, etc. Her how-to’s soon gave her confidence in the man’s claimed world of nail guns and table saw and quickly broadened her clientele to flipping rooms, cabinets and more.
“I would be on a job site and doing this or that and people would refer to my brother as the ‘boss’ because he was the guy,” she said. “I learned to not take offense but at the same time realized women really weren’t expected or sometimes accepted in this line of work. I felt drawn to creating then sharing with the women community my how-to demos. I found it was empowering women across the country.”
The FlipHubb Instagram page was gaining traffic and Valdez was becoming busier than ever.
Just after people started to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Valdez family had a series of prompted events which led them to purchase a home in Soda Springs, Idaho, and brought Valdez back to her Idaho roots. She undoubtedly knew this is where they needed to be. Since bringing in another boy in the world and adopting a beautiful foster daughter, they moved and have found happiness in small town Idaho.
One large benefit upon moving was the FlipHubb Instagram page had grown so much; she now had two running sources of income, which allowed both her and husband to adapt their own schedules and create more personal time with their kids.
In the fall of 2023, an opportunity presented itself for both Valdez and Justin to collaborate with some investors and purchase a small fixer upper south of Soda Springs in Bailey Creek. Valdez later named the tiny home “Penny.”
Fast forward nine months and the beautiful Penny is on the market. Valdez says it was a learning experience for both her and her husband. Looking back, they are not sure they would make the same purchase choice but are grateful for where they stand today. With the help of assistant Amanda Larson, Penny is standing confident as ever with the new facelift. Everything inside and out is new and ready to be loved.
Valdez never wants her work to be overshadowed by her Instagram page.
“My heart is truly in the work of the flips and that’s what I love,” she said. “The hours of creating content for a social page is exhausting and isn’t nearly as rewarding and glamorous as many think but it’s fun to see how much it has helped so many other women and that makes the online work worth it. I keep doing the content to empower women to know their capabilities and worth, as well as show how possible a flip can be.”
Justin is a licensed general contractor as well as working on a start-up concrete business doing footings and foundations while Valdez works on the interior design. Though her name and face is well- known, Valdez and family are really soaking in the small town life while staying true to their brand.
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