Always dressed to the nines: Lena Ridder showcases the exciting projects she and her partner Holger Groß are working on as a small business on her Instagram account @natur.talente. (Photo: © private)
Read aloud:
No more #menfluencers! There are plenty of women in the skilled trades who are successful on social media. One of them is Lena Ridder. She posts professional and personal details from the life of a carpenter family on Instagram under @natur.talente.
After graduating from high school, Lena Ridder initially struggled, but she nevertheless discovered wood as a material. In her personal blog on Instagram, the 32-year-old carpenter shows the projects she and her partner, Holger Groß, are tackling, and how family doesn't have to be neglected.
DHB: When I sent you a message on Instagram that you ZEP team You were very surprised when he nominated you as your next interview partner. Why?
Firewood: Behind "natural talents"My partner Holger and I are a one-man, one-woman company. We only started on Instagram six months ago. Therefore, we're simply honored to be noticed and then recommended by such great people as the ZEP team. We follow their Instagram posts and admire how much time and effort they put into them. The whole presentation is simply a dream. We're also absolutely thrilled with their corporate culture. For example, how they treat their employees. Who wouldn't want to work there...
DHB: Do you also get ideas for your own contributions from the ZEP team?
Firewood: Yes, definitely. Of course, I look at how they structure and design their posts and what they show in their stories. But we don't copy them. We lack the time and know-how for that. If I like something from the ZEP team, I try to adapt it to our own standards. But we also incorporate a few technical aspects. As a craftsman, you have a different perspective on the posts and also learn from your colleagues. Sometimes we say, "Hey, we could try that!"
DHB: You've already mentioned it. As "natur.talente," you've only been active on Instagram for a relatively short time. You posted your first post on June 28, 2020. What prompted you to present yourselves as a family business in the truest sense of the word?
Firewood: I like to hang out on Instagram and consume other people's stories. At some point, I thought that maybe other people might find what we do entertaining, too. There are only two of us, but we still handle large, exciting projects. Whenever possible, we take our dog with us to the construction site. Sometimes our two children join us on weekends. We're a small company that has found its own niche.
DHB: Did you look at the profiles of other companies beforehand?
Firewood: No. Before we started our page, we weren't even on Instagram. I just started and designed it the way I would have found interesting for others. Completely intuitively. This resulted in a learning-by-doing process.
DHB: Are you planning your contributions?
Firewood: (laughs) Maybe I should. On the other hand, I also think that things can quickly seem contrived if you plan too much.
DHB: But you do have a certain structure.
Firewood: That's true. I know I want to produce three or four posts a day. But I don't think about what might be interesting until I'm working. That way, the photos and videos are usually current for the day. If I post at 12 p.m., the image is usually only half an hour old. I only use older images if I don't have any good subjects from the current day. That's sometimes quite difficult. Not every construction site has enough to allow you to take three or four interesting photos or videos a day and write a suitable text to accompany them.
DHB: Do you have set times when the posts go online?
Firewood: I try to post a picture or several pictures at 9 a.m., 12 p.m., 15 p.m., and 18 p.m. These are the times when our site is most visited. After all, a lot of work goes into it, and I don't want the posts to get lost.
DHB: How do you know how the posts are received?
Firewood: We have a business account on Instagram. There are the so-called InsightsThese are statistics that show how many people visited your site, which posts performed best, and how many visitors we've had in the last seven and 30 days. It's extremely interesting to see what happens in a week.
DHB: What has surprised you most recently?
Firewood: At the beginning of December, we had just under 2.000 subscribers, but between 2.500 and 5.000 people viewed our individual posts every day. This means we reach around 25.000 to 30.000 accounts a week. Incredible! Now things are getting interesting from a business perspective, too. We're now generating concrete inquiries for quotes or orders via Instagram. We're not talking about whether we can put up ten meters of fence; these are bigger projects. So Instagram is no longer just for fun and a bit of networking; we can use it as an advertising tool.
DHB: You just said that you have a business account. But your profile says you run a "personal blog." I find that a bit contradictory.
Firewood: I was thinking about this myself recently. However, Instagram makes various suggestions when setting up an account. "Content Creator" or "Public Figure" seemed inappropriate to me. I could identify most with "Personal Blog," because ours isn't just about the company; you sometimes see the dog or children, too. I find that a shame with other tradespeople, by the way. There are so many great pages, but you don't see any face to the person at all, and you can't tell who's behind them.
DHB: At the beginning of December, you hit the 2.000 subscriber mark. Wouldn't the category "public figure" be more appropriate now?
Firewood: Subscribers, reach, comments, rankings – the numbers behind them are hard for me to grasp. I'm still not quite sure what to do with them. Many people are amazed at how quickly our subscriber count has grown. But I can't explain why, because we haven't done anything significantly different than before. There are weeks when we reach 25.000 accounts. Shortly after, there are 5.000 fewer. Why is that?! Or why did 150 subscribers suddenly leave us? Unfortunately, there's no one nearby I could talk to about it. If the ZEP team lived 20 minutes away from us, I would have driven there and talked to them long ago.
DHB: Between the beginning of October and the end of November, your subscriber count quadrupled. There must be a reason for that.
Firewood: Sure, but I don't know him. We were stuck at under 100 followers for a long time. The magic mark was 400. We reached that at the end of September, three months after launching our page. Since then, it's more or less taken on a life of its own. At times, we had 100 new subscribers every four days. But I can only repeat: We haven't changed anything significantly—we haven't posted more stories, nor have we completely restructured our posts. Maybe we seem more natural now, because at first, you do feel a bit awkward walking around a construction site with your phone in front of your face. It's much more natural these days.
DHB: It took a month for you to reach your first 100 subscribers. How did you experience that time? Don't you look at your phone expectantly every day?
Firewood: Not at all. We just did it and saw what happened. If one or two new followers came along a day, we were happy. You think: The first 100 shouldn't be a problem. But most of our friends and acquaintances aren't even on Instagram. So they were almost all strangers who liked our stuff. So every new subscriber was an absolute highlight. This expectation of "Hey, there has to be more going on here!" and worrying about whether the post will be well-received only came later.
DHB: Your account is called "natur.talente." I wouldn't immediately assume that it's a carpentry business. Why did you choose that name?
Firewood: It's deliberately constructed from two parts. We chose "Natur" because our main material is wood. The "Talents" refers to us and the people we work with. The two of us can't handle everything. That's why we rely on other colleagues. Many of them have so much potential, so much talent. Under the name "natur.talente," we want to bring together all the freelancers we permanently integrate into our projects for a certain period of time. They should be visible not only on Instagram, but also on our new website.
DHB: "Website" is a good keyword. Is it possible that you don't have a website at all?
Firewood: That's right! We used to have one, but eventually we took it offline because no one was taking care of the content anymore. Our old website was simply a disaster. At best, the address and name were still correct, but everything else was from 15 years ago. It was incredibly time-consuming to upload images or text there. Instagram, in comparison, is much easier to handle.
DHB: But you just said yourself that only a fraction of your friends have an Instagram account. Not to mention other people who need a carpenter or a timber construction engineer. Isn't having your own website a must?!
Firewood: Absolutely. Holger and I have been talking about it a lot lately. Anyone who wants to have a hall or a terrace built googles "carpentry" and the respective city. So far, we haven't been found there at all. Absolutely. That shouldn't be happening.
But we wouldn't have been able to create a presentable website on our own. So we enlisted professional help. A completely new website is currently being built for us in the background. The web designer is also setting up the homepage to link to our Instagram account. We want to let everyone know in our Christmas mailing that we'll be back online by the turn of the year, if possible, and that we've changed our legal form—from a partnership to a limited liability company (GmbH).
DHB: Let’s come back to your Instagram account. I noticed that since October you have been posting more short films, so-called Reels, produce. What do you like about this format?
Firewood: If I'm completely stuck for what to write, I occasionally make a Reel. They're quick to create, and the content is often self-explanatory. However, I find they still have relatively poor commentary. Also, you can see from the "Insights" that the posts perform better than the videos. I'd love to do so much more on Instagram, but I still have to work a bit in between. I'm not exclusively a social media content creator.
DHB: I thought the time-lapse reels were pretty cool. Do you edit the videos on your laptop or PC using a specific program?
Firewood: No. It all runs on my phone, a three-year-old Huawei P20. The video function has a slow-motion and time-lapse function, panoramic images, and other such things. It's super easy and quick to do: set up a tripod, select time-lapse mode, and you're done. And the response is sometimes huge; even if I just set up a blue bag and break up Styrofoam sheets, I still get tons of messages. I also like watching time-lapse videos myself.
DHB: Even your choice of music for the Reels has been receiving positive feedback. You accompanied one of your posts with a song by "The Cure." Apparently, your visitors seem to be captivated by the way you ring in your end-of-day work at the construction site while listening to "Lullaby."
Firewood: It's interesting that you mention the music. We get few comments directly under the posts, but a lot of compliments via direct messages. Choosing music also takes me the longest. This applies to Reels and Stories. I like listening to music and usually have two or three songs in mind that might fit the posts. I then pick them from the selection on Instagram.
DHB: Hashtags play a big role on Instagram. You often post #womenincrafts. Is it important to you that more young women take up carpentry, or what's the idea behind it?
Firewood: I'm happy for everyone who learns a trade. Whether they're a man or a woman. There was once this super-cool commercial for the image campaign that brought everything together. It was meant to show: If there are no more tradespeople, there will be no bread, no houses, no cars. Without the trade, nothing works!
DHB: How did you get into the carpentry profession?
Firewood: A roundabout route. I had already worked at a farm during school. So after graduating from high school, I traveled to Australia and worked on gigantic farms there. Agriculture has always fascinated me. When I returned to Germany, I enrolled in the agricultural science program at the University of Bonn. I started out highly motivated, but quickly realized that my math skills wouldn't have gotten me anywhere. Following the motto "Better an end with horror than horror without end," I dropped out of college after a year.
DHB: And then you started your apprenticeship as a carpenter with Holger?
Firewood: Not exactly. I'm a multi-jobber and, among other things, worked a bit for Holger. After university didn't work out, I wanted to become a gardener and landscaper. I sent out 80 applications – but I didn't get accepted. None of them wanted women as apprentices. But then I finally found a nearby company that wanted to train me. But Holger didn't give up. He'd asked me several times before if I could imagine becoming a carpenter. I always replied, "Uh, no, I'm really bad at math and geometry!" But he found so many arguments in favor of training with him that I finally agreed. I started my apprenticeship in 2012 and finished in 2015.
DHB: A very interesting career, but we still haven't figured out why you use the hashtag #frauenimhandwerk...
Firewood: Back then, I was told: "Don't go to the construction site! It's so exhausting, and you'll just wear yourself out. Why don't you go to the office, finish your studies, and do something sensible, girl!"
That's ridiculous! Sure, it's often exhausting; we get wet or it's hot. But I also find it exhausting to sit in an office chair for eight hours staring at a screen. So, the term "exhausting" is relative. My message is: It doesn't matter whether you're a woman or a man if you choose this profession. There are many tools that make everyday work on a construction site easier. We use a forklift, we use a crane. No one has to prove how strong they are by lugging lumber around on their shoulders. Those days are over!
DHB: Who would you like to nominate as your next interview partner?
Firewood: The @dienaturstammbauerThese are the one and only chainsaw cowboys who will build you a carport that could easily accommodate a mammoth.
Name: Lena Ridder
Age: 32 years
Conclusion: journeyman
Trade: Carpenter
Business: GSGmbH
Location: Grevenbroich
Influencer in the trades #004,5 Click here for the interview with Eugen Penner.
Influencer in the trades #006 Click here for the interview with Bruno Bauer.
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