Camille Gribbons

UX designer at Booking.com, Camille Gribbons reveals how she first got into the industry

- Oliver Lindberg

Camille Gribbons had always pictured herself on Broadway. At 18, she had done musical theatre for six years, performing in community shows in her home of Phoenix, Arizona, and had become a local celebrity. She auditioned for acclaimed theatre programmes all over the US but failed to get into the big universities, so she entered Arizona State University to pursue an exploratory major.

“It’s for people who have no idea what they want to study,” Gribbons chuckles. “For the first couple of years I switched my major probably every six months. I started out with Mandarin because I wanted to travel the world but it turned out the programme at my school feeds people directly into the CIA, and I didn’t want to spy on people! Then I looked into political science, global studies, psychology and teaching, but none of them could really hold my interest. Then, one summer in between semesters, I quit my student job as a housekeeper and came across this get-rich-quick scheme online. The basis was to create a website for a niche audience, get a good amount of traffic, and integrate it with Google Ads or affiliate marketing in order to make a nice monthly income.”

Being a fan of The Bachelor franchise, Gribbons decided to build a simple site on Squarespace and took some classes online for how to advertise on Facebook. Needless to say, she didn’t get rich but she discovered she really enjoyed the creative aspect of designing the website and customising it with basic HTML and CSS. So she switched her major once more, this time to graphic information technology, which covered web and graphic design, photography and animation.