There’s a $35 black velvet dress sitting in Julie McCoy’s closet that has been worn by women of every size, including her daughter, who was six months pregnant when she put it on and looked, as Julie tells it, absolutely adorable. Julie calls it her “traveling dress,” a nod to the 2005 hit movie The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Like the titular trousers in the film, this dress has a magical, everyone-fits quality that made her post about it spread like wildfire on Instagram. She found it on Dillard’s at the last minute, ordered a beaded parakeet purse from Amazon to go with it, and nearly cried when she saw herself in the mirror. That was the moment she knew she had something.
Now known as @julesmidlifestyle to 81.5K followers, Julie started creating content about two and a half years ago, but almost didn’t. She was sitting around a friend’s pool when a friend who works in marketing pointed out her outfits and meal prep strategies as content people would want to see. Julie’s response was swift and certain. “Suzanne, no one wants to see some middle-aged, mid-sized, with all my rolls…no, never,” she recalls. Suzanne disagreed. Julie took the shot anyway, and her page took off almost immediately.
Finding a community she didn’t know she needed
What started as fashion content has evolved organically into lifestyle. Julie’s audience began asking about the protein drink she was mixing, the vitamins she was taking, and her exercise routine. She started sharing more of herself, and found, to her surprise, that the more personal she got, the stronger the connection became. “I wasn’t sure when I first got on here,” she says. “I’m like, ‘I’m never sharing anything personal. No one cares. It’s all about fashion.’ And now I feel like getting on saying, ‘well, I just sat here and did nothing today.’”
That kind of honesty is the backbone of what she’s built. Julie will do a video where nothing fits and the size is wrong, and she says so out loud. Her house isn’t an aesthetic backdrop; she films in the one clean corner of a room. She shows up as a regular person because she is one, and her audience of women in the 45-to-60 range responds with real loyalty.
The body image work that made it possible
Getting started required Julie to push past something real. She grew up in a time that was, by her own description, “toxic regarding body size.” She’s always been curvier, and the pressure that came with that never entirely disappeared. What shifted was a combination of family encouragement, a handful of strong friendships, and a realization that landed with force: she wasn’t the only person her size, and someone had to show them they didn’t have to settle for oversized, frumpy clothing.
She decided to just put her size out there. “It’s a number, it’s a number,” she says. “Whether it’s a [size] 2, a 12, or a 22, it is just a number. Getting past that number for me and being able to put that on my page was probably my biggest roadblock. And then once it was out there, I’m like, it’s live, I can’t do anything about it. Just put it out there.” She posted her size, shared her dimensions, and told her followers exactly what she was wearing and why it worked. The messages started coming in from women saying they would never have thought, at 55 with a curvy frame, that they could wear that.
Solving problems, one outfit at a time
Julie’s content philosophy is deceptively simple: find the problem your audience is sitting with on a Tuesday and help them solve it. The post about a skort, which gave her one of her first viral moments, wasn’t really about skorts: it was about thighs that rub together, shorts that ride up, and the very specific relief of finding something that works. The “traveling” velvet dress post wasn’t about a dress; it was about walking into an elegant event with confidence at any size.
She gravitates toward brands in that middle range, including Amazon, Walmart, Loft, Old Navy, J.Crew, and Gap, because her audience lives there too. She keeps a personal rule about price: if she wouldn’t buy it herself, she’s not going to share it. “I am not someone who would go out and buy $300 jeans myself,” she says, “so I’m probably not gonna share them.” What she will share is what she calls “realistic.” If you walked up to Julie on vacation, the clothes she’s filmed and linked are the ones she’d actually be wearing. There’s no resort wear fantasy on her page; there’s just what works on a midsize, middle-aged body in real life.
A game changer, six months in
Julie joined Mavely about six months ago and uses the phrase “game changer” without hesitation. She describes the support she’s received from her Mavely representative in those six months as more than she got from other platforms across two years. When she couldn’t figure out how to link items, her Influencer Development Specialist, Olivia Abbott, got on a video call with her and her daughter and walked them through it step by step.
What stands out most to her is the quality of that support. “I’ve never felt alone with Mavely,” she says. “I can message, I can get on a call with someone. That is appreciative. And my questions get answered, not directed to take another class, not directed to just keep posting my links. I get a real answer to something.” She’s now recommending Mavely to other creators, including her daughter, who is in social media marketing and just launched her own page. Julie’s advice to her: start with Mavely, and figure out the rest later.
What the income has made possible
For Julie, the financial side of content creation hasn’t been about dramatic transformation. Her husband retired at 55, which happened independently of her social media work. What the income she’s built has done is give her family a particular kind of freedom: the ability to travel to Hawaii to visit her son, whose family is stationed there; to help when family needs it; to spoil her grandkids without the mental math. “This is what we get to spend on family and traveling together,” she says. For someone who started out sitting around a pool certain that no one would want to see her content, it’s become something that quietly changed the shape of her life.
Her advice for creators just starting out
Julie doesn’t have a polished system. She has a point of view, a knack for identifying what her audience is genuinely struggling with, and a willingness to show up as herself even when that means filming the mess. For creators who feel like they need to wait until everything is perfect, the lighting, the house, the size, her answer is simple: they are exactly what people want to see. “People are my size,” she says. “They do want to know: how do you fit a soft belly? How do you wear something? It’s been fun to help people. I love when I get messages where people say, I would never have thought at 55 that I could wear that. And you made it look good. Okay, then this is why I want to do it.”
Follow Julie on Instagram at @julesmidlifestyle. For more creator stories, visit the Mavely blog.
Not on Mavely yet? Join now at joinmavely.com.
