For an emerging athlete, that first endorsement deal often ranks as a rite of passage on par with any of the sporting victories that led up to it. After all, corporations don't lay down their cash and their brand equity for just anyone that knocks in a winning penalty kick or aces a serve on the grass at Wimbledon. The non-Amazons among us, however, must measure our progress through life without the aid of such Day-Glo-bright signals as sponsorship. Really, it's a muddle, the unendorsed life, a bad system that encourages wasted hours of wondering whether that quirky idea you've deposited your soul into is something genius, or more like its opposite. Quiksilver wants to remedy the situation. Taking a page from its surf 'n' snowboard playbook, the O.C.-based brand has marked its launch of the new Quiksilver contemporary womenswear line by opening siteLA, a shared space for six "visionaries in residence." The siteLA house in Silver Lake has its official coming-out party tomorrow night, and the young women who will be working out of it for the next year include a bicycling activist, an automotive designer, an architect developing mobile playgrounds and skate parks for inner-city youth, and fashion blogger Beth Jones, who talked to Style.com about the pleasures of getting sponsored.

So, I understand that siteLA is a work and event space for all six residents, but are you going to be living in the house as well?

No, no—lots of people hear "resident" and assume there's some kind of "Real World" thing going on. I mean, the girls are really great, and I'm sure I wouldn't mind living with any of them, but as much as we'll all be working here during the day and hosting events at night, I assume we'll be seeing plenty of each other as it is.

Quiksilver has given its imprimatur to a pretty broad range of projects through this initiative. What's yours?

Well, I write the blog The Vintage Society, and my project for the year is pretty much, you know, to figure out how to take what I'm already doing to the next level. I'm still sort of deciding what that means. What I think is really cool about the residency, and what attracted me to the call for applications in the first place, is that Quiksilver is really trying to support women with an entrepreneurial spirit—they just want to help open doors, to create a pathway for you to make your dreams a reality. That sounds so cheesy, but that's basically the idea.

What is The Vintage Society?

Like I said, it's a blog, but…OK, for years I had this daydream about opening a shop that sold redesigned vintage clothes. Very on-trend, you know, like what you'd see on the runway, but made from stuff that already existed. Anyway, I was formulating this idea and started writing this fashion blog, with vintage as a kind of jumping-off point. And I got a ton of readers. Which was surprising and amazing, and it made me realize that there was more I could do than open up some little shop. Not that I don't have any interest in that anymore, but I'd love to do more fashion writing, I'd love to get into styling, and mostly, I'd just love to develop the blog into the fashion resource it wants to be. A lot of potential directions, but those are the doors Quiksilver is opening for me.

Opening how?

By asking you what you need. What do you want to do? What has to happen to get that going? Who can we introduce you to? Stuff like that.

Were you working in fashion prior to launching The Vintage Society?

God, I wish. I was the girl in the cubicle, you know? Did sales for a while, booked speakers for events, worked in commercial real estate…cubicle to cubicle, for about five years. And I was starting to feel like, I'm this creative person, but if I don't start to make something creative happen soon, it never will. People don't just walk up to you one day and hand you the opportunity to do what you love.

No, first you have to apply.

Right, and go through a whole round of interviews, too. Not so bad, when you think about it.