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 BACK TO PRESS CLIPPINGS
Former model started her first online business at 15
March 25, 2002
by Judy Steed
This is the cutting edge of the Canadian family, circa 2002: Everyone has a Web site.
Playing around with being a model, she thought it would be a good idea to create a site for up-and-coming talent. Thus newfaces.com was born - the first online portfolio site on the Web.
A clever girl, Hilary quickly outgrew the modelling scene and by 17 stopped posing for cameras professionally and focused on newfaces.com. Its revenues enabled her to buy her first condo at 19. (She subsequently sold the condo for a healthy profit and bought her second.)
She also expanded her corporate presence, with Supermodelguide.com, eClickinteractive.com - a Web design firm - and hilarymagazine.com.
But it is newfaces.com, with listing fees ranging from $115 (U.S.) for six months to $360 for one year, that provides her base income. It receives 5 million hits a month (an average of 162,000 a day) for its listings of 200 to 250 actors, models, photographers, makeup artists and children, whose photos and resumés can be accessed by agents looking for talent - or anyone else interested in models.
"This is a very popular topic," she says, explaining the incredibly high rate of Internet traffic newfaces receives. "It's linked to virtually every model-related site on the Web, and if you're searching for Cindy Crawford or Claudia Schiffer, you'll end up on one of my sites."
Most of Rowland's online clients are American; others come from as far away as Germany, Switzerland and the Caribbean. The advantage of the site, she says, is that "if you live in Chicago, agents in Tokyo can see you. It gives people exposure to a wider market."
For Rowland, now 22, life on the Web comes naturally.
It's a truism nowadays that if you want to comprehend the Internet, ask a child. Whereas baby boomers grew up with archaic technology such as typewriters and Dictaphones, children of the '80s and '90s absorbed computer skills by osmosis.
Ask Rowland how she learned to do the programming for her various Web sites and she shrugs. "It's easy. I just learned it. I went to other sites and 'viewed source' and figured out how they achieved the effects."
(Because the Internet is "open," anyone can view its underlying hypertext markup language (HTML) code - "viewing source," as she puts it.)
She gives me a wondering look, as if to say, "Never viewed source? How weird."
Get her going on the technical aspects of her work and she talks techie language like a true geek - though she has no formal training in computer programming.
Undeterred by the machismo of "hacker culture," she recently talked to a class of women at the DeVry Institute, telling them to ignore obstacles.
"Of course, it's easier for me, I guess," she says, "because I started when the Web was new. I've never felt intimidated.
"But then, I work for myself. And I don't meet most of my clients - contact is by e-mail and telephone." (Says her mother: "Hilary doesn't see barriers.")
Ask Rowland where the Internet is going and she's full of opinions.
"The trend in the last few years is away from pages of text to more multimedia, lots of video broadcasting and Flash animation. It's more transactional, banking online, business to businesss.
"It's a more immersing experience. But advertising is not succeeding. It annoys people."
The downside is that "Flash sites tend to have a lot of glitz and not a lot of information." The worry is that the Internet will turn into a theme park, full of gaudy things, devoid of content. "Information is what the Internet should be about. It's a great resource and it would be a shame to see it overpowered by all the glitz."
At the very least, the Internet generates enormous amounts of garbage. Private e-mail addresses are flooded by pornography and what Rowland calls "spam fax and e-mail," some of which is sent by "truly depraved people," as her brother puts it.
Then again, the Internet enables activists to organize protests against globalization. And gives people worldwide access to an extraordinary wealth of information.
Which the Rowlands, as a family, tapped into early.
"My husband and I are both entrepreneurial and self-employed," says Hilary's mother, Christine Rowland, on the phone from the Port Hope home she shares with Wade Rowland, a former broadcaster and now non-fiction writer whose 15 books include Spirit Of The Web: The Age Of Information From Telegraph To Internet and, his most recent, Galileo's Mistake.
Christine met Wade when they both worked at CTV. She was an art director, he an editor for CTV national news. They married in 1978, spent the first few years on a boat, planning to sail off to the Mediterranean, "but then we had two babies in diapers," she says.
They moved to Port Hope, where Christine eventually designed their dream house, drew up the blueprints, and acted as contractor and on-site building supervisor.
She and Wade inculcated a striking fearlessness in their children. They limited Hilary and Simon's TV viewing - with such success that today neither watches much TV - and made computers available to them since they were 3 or 4 years old.
We forget how quickly Internet technology has become essential to modern business, Christine says.
"In 1994, Internet Explorer didn't exist and Netscape had just come out. It was at version 0.9. It wasn't even version 1. You couldn't specify a colour background."
Young Hilary worked for her mother part-time and was "one of the best Web designers I've ever used," says Christine, who was not keen when her daughter expressed interest in modelling. "The superficiality of it is the opposite of everything Wade and I stand for."
Wade worried that "modelling would damage Hilary's self-esteem" and drove her to all her castings "to chaperone her, but somehow she grew through it," he says. "She recognized very quickly that it wasn't about her as a person."
Ultimately, the Rowlands trusted their daughter. They knew she was sensible, opposed to drugs, and not the type to succumb to peer pressure. Indeed, Hilary says she didn't have many friends during her teen years because she didn't fit with her peer-group culture.
Maybe that's why she was so adventurous. At 16, she accepted a modelling job in Taipei, where she was exposed to all sorts of potentially dangerous situations, ranging from a typhoon to a cocaine-pushing promoter who tried to get her into a back room.
Hilary emerged unscathed - and much the wiser. By the time she completed high school, she'd experienced first-hand the pitfalls of modelling and wanted to share her insights.
"How realistic is it to want to be a supermodel?" she says. "Most girls have no plan B. Most of the stuff you hear about modelling is true. James King (a supermodel-actress) was a heroin addict from her teenage years and it was considered almost chic."
Hilary makes a face. "Same with Robert Downey Jr. He got so much support because of his addictions. It's ridiculous."
Hilary's tips tell us that legitimate agents do not advertise and do not provide photographic services or give classes. Agents cannot guarantee work. They are not casting directors. If they try to enrol you in classes by promising lucrative contracts, beware. Children and extras do not need professional photos.
Her supermodelguide.com site warns that you have to learn to take rejection, to spend a lot of time alone, to be a canny businessperson. And to resist drugs.
Ask Hilary's younger brother Simon, 21, how he sees his sister, and he says: "It's pretty remarkable that at 15 she identified a business opportunity and created newfaces.com, which does not prey on girls and which alerts them to misleading tactics."
A gifted student like his sister, Simon is currently developing a convergence device that he says "will integrate the functions of a cellphone, a pager and other communications devices."
At 19, he ran federally for the NDP - becoming the fourth person in his family to run for the New Democrats. (His uncle, Douglas Rowland, was an MP from Winnipeg and parliamentary assistant to NDP leader Tommy Douglas in the 1960s. The Rowland children are proud that Uncle Douglas voted against invoking the War Measures Act to deal with the 1970 separatist crisis in Quebec.)
In terms of education both younger Rowlands have taken university courses, but neither has a degree.
"If you want to be cutting edge (in computer programming), you have to teach yourself," Simon says. "Universities can't keep up." But university education is important, he adds, "to learn how the world works, to get involved with other students."
Hilary is currently taking a government-sponsored course for young entrepreneurs on how to create a business plan and build a business.
Newfaces.com is mostly self-generating at this point.
"I can work as much or as little as I want," Hilary says.
New clients fax a form with their credit card number that must be processed before their portfolio goes online. Personal information is not listed on the site. Agents click on a link for booking details and fill out a form with their company name and details about the job. The form is e-mailed to Rowland and to the client. Clients get to assess all the information before they decide to make contact.
Her next corporate incarnation is Hilary's Own, a natural skin care line she is developing with a chemist, a lab and an ad agency.
"It's not makeup," she insists, and it will be launched later this year in health food stores, eventually moving into department stores.
Ask her parents how they see her career evolving, and Christine responds: "There's no end to where Hilary can go."
"She thinks big - and that's what it takes."
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Hilary Rowland - hilary.com, daughter of waderowland.com and of bluecatdesign.com, sister of simonrowland.com - started working on the Web at 15. That was seven years ago, a long time in the life of an Internet prodigy.
Another concern is "the huge loss in privacy" that the Internet entails. "I don't like that. As an individual, I don't like the way personal information is so easily available. You can find out pretty much anything you want to know about a person through the Internet. It's disturbing."
And so newfaces.com expanded to include tips and advice on "recognizing a scam."