Author: The Argonaut

Luxury Travel Hackers makes vacations bookable via social media By Meera Sastry Luxury Travel Hackers is seeking to redefine the travel industry for the Instagram era. The Santa Monica-based company is pioneering a new model of travel planning by integrating the business of booking trips with the untapped gold mine of advertising material that is social media influencers. As co-founder Gary Kohn described, “80% of all millennials are choosing their next vacation on social media, but nobody was really leveraging that influence.” When Kohn, a former producer for film and television, and his co-founder, Katie Warner, noticed this empty niche in the travel industry, they sought to fill it — and thus Luxury Travel Hackers was born. “We look to these influencers to see and make decisions around where we want to go,” Kohn said. “But people are spending hours of additional research to build a vacation that was just presented to them on social media. That’s the big problem we’re solving — people wanting to purchase something they’re seeing and not being able to.” The company seeks to fold the browsing and buying processes into one by, in Kohn’s words, “Shooting and repurposing travel content with influencers and making vacations clickable via social media.” To break this down further, consider Luxury Travel Hackers as a three-pronged venture — two of which being the way their content interfaces with...

These Hands Maker’s Collective flourishes in new location By Katie Lulla These Hands Maker’s Collective is back to in-person classes with a permanent brick-and-mortar space at Pour Vida Art and Plant house on Lincoln Boulevard. Over the last year, Denise Ambrosi has not only adjusted to the pandemic but has made a thriving business that gives people the ability to make art. “(At the beginning of the pandemic), I just had to like stop and kind of regroup and think ‘people need this and I have to figure out a way to help them get it,’” Ambrosi said. “A lot of people have told me that taking my classes or being able to continue to be creative or even just having that community had really helped them through the pandemic. I’ve met so many artists and Makers, my students, since then, and I feel like this community has grown so much. These Hands Maker’s Collective was first started in 2019 and came from Ambrosi’s desire to form a creative community. Ambrosi looked for artists that she admired and rented art spaces for her classes. The workshops focus on giving Makers a foundation in art techniques. “That’s one of the main things that I tell my artists, I don’t want them to feel that someone is going to be stealing their work or learning how to do what they do,”...