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The Dirty Truth About Starting Our Creative Business

We had a problem.

In case you haven’t heard (or read somewhere online), I am currently building a new company called Seeing Beauty. After almost 6 years as a small business consultant living in Berlin, I recently relocated to San Francisco and decided to join forces with the incomparable Karina Louise. Karina was actually my first client so we have both been working together since “the beginning” of our respective businesses. A beautiful combination of talents, I am SO excited to be working with this amazing woman to build something we both really love!

So, back to our problem. After working for half a decade together remotely, we were finally in the same city. And in the natural collision of industry and nature that “The City” was offering, we had an idea for a new creative business. As women entrepreneurs we had found that there were many conflicting resources out there for small business growth, most of which seemed to swing for the fences of business extreme. Neither of us jived with either the “Boot Camp” or the “Goddess of your own bliss-ness” movements. We wanted balance- a combination of trusting your own intuition and actually getting things done. It also seemed that most business resources targeted at women focused on “outside marketing techniques” and often included some variation of a pyramid scheme. This seemed to be creating empty, often dishonest business models for well-meaning people that are ultimately neither enjoyable or sustainable because they have nothing to do with each woman as an individual. So, ditching the cookie cutter “empowerment” BS, we set out to create a practical educational and inspirational resource for women that presented authenticity and doing good work as its core values. And we wanted to, somewhat brazenly, introduce the idea of true collaboration over competition, even and especially in the context of marketing.

But every business needs a logo and at the end of the day, while we were running back and forth setting up this account and writing up this piece for the website, we still didn’t have the basic design skills needed to fill this gap.

Networking to the rescue- I did something rather extreme. I went through my email address book- the one that I have had for the last 15 years of working in different companies in various capacitates- and decided to purge. Over a couple weeks time I went through the somewhat painful but liberating exercise of taking 1300+ contacts and narrowing them down to a little over 500! It was an exercise in releasing the past and honoring my intuition about who should be with me in this next phase of my personal and professional development. I then, hand picked some people who I thought might know a fabulous female logo designer that fit our need…

That’s when something strange happened.

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