Let's get one thing clear: you don't need a wedding planner certification to become a wedding planner. However, a formal wedding planning education and a wedding planning certificate can help you start a wedding planning business.
Although not mandatory, becoming a certified wedding planner can make your wedding planning business stand out. A wedding planner qualification validates your expertise. It reassures clients that you're more than capable of managing their special day.
Success in the wedding industry depends on many factors. Practical experience, a strong professional network, and general business skills are key. These topics are all covered in professional wedding planning courses. In this article, we'll discuss the fundamentals of becoming a qualified wedding planner and starting a career in the wedding industry, including:
- The qualifications you need to become a wedding planner
- What to expect from your wedding planner certification course
- The best courses available to wedding planners to earn your wedding planning certification
What qualifications do you need to become a wedding planner?
Technically, you don't need formal qualifications to become a wedding planner. However, completing a formal educational course to become a certified wedding planner will boost your chances of success in the competitive wedding planning industry.
What to Expect from Your Wedding Planner Certification Course
Wedding planning courses will teach you essential wedding planner skills. You'll learn about budgeting, timeline creation, and client communication. Advanced Certification Wedding Planning programs offer in-depth knowledge and real-world scenarios to test your skills.
Best Courses for Wedding Planning Certification
To earn your wedding planning certification, choose a course that fits your needs. Many professional wedding planners recommend online courses for flexibility. Consider programs that offer a wedding business CRM component. This tool helps manage client details and vendor contracts efficiently.
Skills Needed for a Successful Wedding Planner
Some things can't be taught. To be a successful wedding planner, you need strong organizational skills, creativity, and the ability to multitask. Here are a few must-have wedding planner skills:
- Empathy. Wedding planners with strong empathy forge deeper connections with their clients. If you can understand your couple's vision and emotions, you'll deliver a meaningful celebration.
- Organisation. Wedding planners juggle many moving parts. Solid organizational skills are essential to coordinate all aspects of the big day and maintain client wellbeing.
- Communication. Wedding planners spend a lot of time communicating ideas, setbacks, and solutions to clients, vendors, and venues. Both written and verbal communication skills are crucial.
- Adaptability. Things don't always go according to plan on a wedding day. A good wedding planner can think on their feet, come up with creative solutions, and keep the day running smoothly even when things go awry.
If you tick all the above boxes, you have what it takes to start a successful career as a wedding planner. Pursuing a wedding planning certificate will help you consolidate your skills and learn how to apply them as a professional wedding planner. Your journey to becoming a certified wedding planner starts here.
What is a wedding planner certification?
A wedding planner certification is a formal credential acknowledging your completion of an industry training program and your proficiency in executing successful weddings. Wedding planning certification programs provide a structured learning curriculum covering key areas like event management, budgeting, etiquette, and cultural sensitivities. This knowledge enables you to handle diverse wedding scenarios professionally and confidently.
How Long Does it Take to Get a Wedding Planning Certificate?
A wedding planning certification program can take between two weeks and six months to complete, depending on the complexity and format. Online courses for wedding planners tend to be shorter since they can be accessed anytime and anywhere. In-person courses follow a specific timeline.
Benefits of Becoming a Certified Wedding Planner
Becoming a certified wedding planner will make you better and more confident in your work—a bonus in itself. But you can also use your wedding planning certificate to symbolize to new clients that you are the real deal. Here are three ways to use your wedding planner certification to promote your wedding planning business:
- Display it on your website. Create a dedicated section showcasing your wedding planner certification. Include details such as the issuing organization, the year obtained, and notable achievements.
- Post on social media. Share certification achievements on your business's social media profiles. This makes great content for platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
- List your services in professional directories. Newly engaged couples often search reputable industry directories like Hitched and Bridebook to find their planner. As a certified wedding planner, you'll be eligible for listing as an approved planner.
By enhancing your wedding planner qualifications, you can become a qualified wedding planner who stands out in the wedding industry. This can help you start a wedding planning business and build a successful career in wedding planning. Enroll in wedding planning courses UK or online courses for wedding planners to get started. Advanced Certification Wedding Planning programs can further hone your wedding planner skills, including using a wedding business CRM.
Our top 6 wedding planning certification courses
Ready to start your career in the wedding industry as a certified wedding planner? Whether you're based in the UK, the US, or anywhere else in the world, we have found the right course for you!
Wedding Planner Certification Program - Certified Wedding Planner Society (CWP)
Price: $598
Type: Online
The Wedding Planning Certification Program by CWP is a 20-hour online course that covers the essentials, from effective client communication to establishing a professional online presence for your wedding planning business. The course also provides insights into the current job market for professional wedding planners. Upon completion, you will receive a lifetime membership to the CWP Society.
What you will learn:
- Cultivating strong connections with venues
- Wedding etiquette and procedures
- Creating a preferred list of vendors and a dream team
- Identifying and building your wedding planning niche
- How to create your portfolio (what to include and skip)
- Optimising your wedding planning website
Certificate Of Professional Wedding Planning, Styling & Design - The Wedding Planner Institute
Price: $697
Type: Online
This online wedding planning course by The Wedding Planner Institute is the perfect introduction to wedding planning. It covers every aspect of wedding planning, styling, and design, providing a step-by-step guide to kickstarting your career in the wedding industry. By completing this wedding planner certification, you'll gain the practical skills and confidence needed to oversee all aspects of a wedding.
What you will learn:
- Planning ceremonies and receptions
- Creating an impressive wedding planning portfolio
- Finance management
- Landing your first wedding
- Starting a wedding planning business
Wedding Planning Elite Course - The Wedding Planner School
Price: £3,449
Type: In-person (Kent, UK)
The Elite Course by The Wedding Planner School is a one-week intensive wedding planning certification program. It combines theoretical learning with practical experience in wedding coordination. Under the guidance of an award-winning professional wedding planner, students collaborate to coordinate a real-life wedding.
Upon completion, students receive an externally accredited wedding planning certificate from the International Association for Distance Learning (IADL). They also gain valuable resources such as planning templates and ongoing support tailored to their needs.
What you will learn:
- Wedding planning basics
- Marriage laws and procedures
- Researching suppliers
- Social media training
- Creating a marketing plan
- Health and safety obligations
Certificate in Wedding Planning - The Event School London
Price: £1,350
Type: In-person (London, UK)
The Certificate in Wedding Planning course by The Event School London is a transformative 5-day program curated by renowned wedding planning expert Siobhan Craven-Robins. Classes are held at the prestigious ExCel London Campus, where you'll explore every aspect of wedding planning—from understanding client needs to starting a wedding planning business and promoting it effectively.
What you will learn:
- Wedding industry working conditions and ethics
- Spotting and implementing wedding trends
- Managing wedding budgets
- Using wedding planning tools
- Contingency planning
Wedding Coordination and Design - The International School of Hospitality
Price: $3,300
Type: In-person (Las Vegas, NV)
The Wedding Coordination and Design course by The International School of Hospitality equips you with the skills and knowledge to excel in the wedding industry. From the first client meeting to the wedding day, this course offers top-notch guidance from experts in Las Vegas' wedding scene. You'll learn about cultural ceremonies, vendor relations, and more. After completion, you'll receive a Wedding Coordination and Design (WCD) Certificate, proving you're a qualified wedding planner ready to shine in the industry.
What you will learn:
- Proposal writing
- Photography and videography
- Sustainable wedding planning
- Staffing and timeline
Certified Wedding & Event Planning Course - Lovegevity Wedding Planning Institute
Price: Starting at $1,595
Type: Online/in-person (US)
Lovegevity offers a comprehensive certification programme for wedding planners. The 12-week long programme is designed to educate you on the top strategies, practices, and techniques to become a wedding planner. Take the course on a self-study basis, or add on the fast track package which offers real-life experience working on actual events guided by industry experts. As a graduate of this programme, you won't just receive a certification, but also a letter of recommendation and CWEP designation that recognises you as an industry expert.
What you will learn:
- Building your portfolio
- Mastering client acquisition
- Create standout wedding packages
- Etiquette and cultural intelligence
- Standard event planning platforms and technology
TLDR: Start Your Career as a Certified Wedding Planner Today!
In the competitive wedding industry, aspiring planners aim to differentiate themselves by obtaining a wedding planner certification. While not mandatory, certification validates expertise and professionalism, providing a competitive edge.
Becoming a certified wedding planner demonstrates commitment and proficiency. Training covers industry trends, vendor relations, and event logistics, fostering confidence in handling diverse weddings. Certification assures clients of a planner's skills in delivering seamless, memorable experiences.
Networking opportunities and community support facilitate ongoing professional growth. This certification not only attracts diverse clientele but also lays a solid foundation for a fulfilling career in the dynamic wedding industry.
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Interior designers must continually seek improvement to their creative skillset and their business management capabilities—for personal challenge, professional growth, and the success of their interior design business. Interior designers can find further education after becoming qualified via courses, workshops, and seminars to develop new, important interior design skills to attract new clients and remain at the forefront of the interior design industry. We call this Continuing Professional Development (CPD).
The British Institute of Interior Design (BIID) is the UK's preeminent professional body for interior designers. Commitment to CPD is a requirement for all BIID members, this mandate ensures British interior designers strive for continual development and helps to maintain a standard of excellence that drives the interior design industry forward.
CPD for interior designers creates opportunity for personal and professional growth. In this article we'll explore the benefits of participating in CPD to interior designers, and provide an explanation of CPD requirements for BIID members. A breakdown of what we'll cover:
- The benefits of ongoing education for interior designers
- The CPD requirements for BIID members and how to track them
- The best BIID accredited UK-based interior design courses—and why you should take them
Ready to take the next step in your interior design career? Let's start learning.
Why is Continuing Professional Development important for interior designers?
The interior design industry is constantly evolving and interior designers need to keep up. CPD keeps interior designers sharp, adaptable, and informed on important conversations happening in the design industry. Neglecting CPD is passing up an opportunity to learn and develop as an interior designer—in other words, self-sabotage.
The three biggest benefits of CPD to interior designers:
Refine your interior design skillset
You always want to be working at the top of your game, right? CPD ensures you continue to reach your potential as an interior designer and can feel proud of the level you are working at, both creatively and managerially. Plus, clients want to work with someone clued up and professional—CPD is a great way to ensure that you are always both.
Meet BIID member requirements
Last but not least, completing BIID approved CPD courses is a mandatory requirement for BIID members. Being a member of BIID opens up a wealth of opportunities and industry insights. It is said that BIID members are often preferred by high-end clients and are more frequently featured in publications.
Prove your worth
A commitment to CPD sets you apart from your competitors in the interior design space. One hundred designers might claim to be "experts" in certain topics, but how many have the credentials to back that up?
Certificates of completion for industry-standard training courses look great on your website and help prove to prospective clients that you are the real deal—display them like a badge of honour. Fellow industry professionals will be impressed by your list of educational accomplishments too, opening up opportunities for brand collaborations and partnerships.
CPD requirements for BIID members
BIID members are required to complete and record at least 20 hours of CPD activity per membership year (1st April - 31st March). At least 10 hours should be structured CPD activities, and the rest can be unstructured.
Structured CPD activities form part of a planned programme and have clearly defined goals. On the other hand, unstructured CPD activities are more self-led and spontaneous.
Examples of unstructured CPD activities:
- Attending in-person educational events such as CPD training, seminars, courses, and conferences.
- Becoming digital educational events such as webinars, recorded talks, and e-learning courses.
- Publishing articles, manuals, or books for a professional audience.
Examples of unstructured CPD activities:
- Attending interior design industry trade shows.
- Reading interior design related books, journals, or magazines.
- Becoming an interior design mentor.
- Listening to interior design podcasts.
Exemptions to CPD requirements do apply, so don't be disheartened if you are not currently in a position to commit to CPD at this scale. See BIID website for more details.
BIID-approved CPD courses for interior designers
We have rummaged through thousands of excellent educational resources for interior designers, to bring your our top pick of BIID-approved CPD courses for interior designers. Get your notebooks at the ready...
BIID Essential Business for Interior Designers
Type: Live workshop
Duration: 18 hours (31st January—2nd February 2024)
"Dive into the basics of building and running a successful interior design business."
The BIID Essential Business for Interior Designers (EBID) is a three-day interior design workshop tailored for emerging and early-stage interior designers. It addresses the unique challenges faced by pre-startup and early-stage interior designers and tackles business fundamentals including strategic planning, effective marketing, and more. The course is limited to a small group of 12 designers to ensure individual attention and interaction.
What you will learn:
- Interior design business 101: marketing, time and project management, setting goals.
- Client management: communication strategies, setting boundaries.
- Financial management: financial planning, bookkeeping, taxes.
Book a slot and learn more about the BIID Essential Business for Interior Designers.
Smartphone Photography for Interior Designers
Type: Live workshop
Duration: 3 hours (28th February 2024)
"The lenses are ready, but are you?"
High-quality photos are the cornerstone of an interior designer's online presence. They allow you to visually showcase your work, attract potential clients, and stand out in a crowded market. This three-hour interior design workshop invites designers to discover the exciting possibilities of using smartphone cameras to capture and showcase their work.
What you will learn:
- Basics of smartphone photography: tips and techniques.
- How to edit smartphone pictures.
- Put it into practice: practice your new skills in the showroom with advice from Jenny.
Book a slot and learn more about the Smartphone Photography for Interior Designers workshop.
BIID Member Tour of Collect Art Fair 2024
Type: Live event
Duration: 1 hour (29th February 2024)
"Discover new artists, trends, and perspectives."
Collect Art Fair offers a curation of work from emerging artists across various styles and mediums. Limited to just 10 BIID members, this event provides an insider's perspective on developments in design and craft to provide a fresh perspective on the artworks, ranging from textiles and new materials to glass and ceramics. Here, you'll discover unique textures, colour combinations, and artistic techniques that wouldn't be readily found in magazines or online.
What you will learn:
- Network with fellow industry aesthetes.
- Discover fresh perspectives on art and its applications.
- Spot emerging trends in the word of art and design.
Book a slot and learn more about the BIID Member Tour of Collect Art Fair 2024.
Applying Circular Economy to Office Furniture Projects
Type: Online seminar
Duration: 1 hour
"Foster sustainability with remanufactured furniture."
Timely and relevant, this course explores the industry's imperative shift toward a circular economy—a model of production that aims to keep resources in use for as long as possible. By adopting circular economy strategies, interior designers can minimise their environmental footprint and address industry challenges like carbon washing.
What you will learn:
- How furniture suppliers are reducing carbon emissions.
- How specifying sustainable furniture contributes to carbon-neutral design.
- How to identify true ecological suppliers.
Book a slot and learn more about Applying Circular Economy to Office Furniture Projects.
Instagram: How to Create an Algorithm Proof Content Strategy
Type: Online workshop
Duration: 1.5 hours (7th February 2024)
"Achieve consistent visibility, engagement, and growth on Instagram."
Instagram is an ever changing landscape, but don't let the algorithm get the better of you!
This workshop with social media strategist Bella Foxwell promises to equip interior designers with a practical toolkit to adapt to current Instagram trends and create future-proof content strategies.
What you will learn:
- The rules of the Instagram algorithm in 2024.
- How to align your content strategy to your sales funnel.
- How to approach scheduling of feed posts and stories.
Book a slot and learn more about Instagram: How to Create an Algorithm Proof Content Strategy.
Health and Wellbeing in Homes
Type: Online course
Duration: 2 hours
"Show how much you care for your clients through design."
People are now placing higher value on overall wellbeing, leading to an increased demand for homes that go beyond aesthetics. In this online interior design short course, you explore the gap between what you know about housing and health and how it's put into practice. This helps you understand how wellness-focused trends, like biophilic design and ergonomic furniture, can make residents healthier and happier.
What you will learn
- The importance of health and wellbeing in the interior design industry.
- Gain an insight into the major considerations for health and well being in design.
- The criteria of a healthy home and how to achieve it.
Book a slot and learn more about Health and Wellbeing in Homes.
CPD for interior designers in a nutshell...
A commitment to CPD is integral to the professional development of an interior designer and the subsequent success of their interior design business.
In order to uphold high standards in British interior design, BIID makes CPD a membership requirement. BIID-approved CPD courses set the gold standard for professionalism, ethics, and technical competence within the industry. BIID members are required to complete at least 20 hours of BIID approved CPD courses per year.
Educational courses for interior designers can be found on a range of topics, from technical skills to business management. We encourage interior designers to participate in an array of educational activities for optimum growth.
Continuing education for interior designers is an unspoken rule. In order to run a successful interior design business, you must strive for continual progression and upgrades to your interior design skillset.
In order to remain at the forefront of the interior design industry, designers and architects must complete continuing education units (CEUs). CEU courses are not only a great way to maintain industry knowledge and important skills as an interior designer, but they are also often a mandatory requirement. For example, The American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) makes participation in CEU-accredited courses a requirement of membership.
ASID approved CEU courses come in all shapes and sizes, from online courses to in-person workshops. Topic covered range from managing risks as the owner of an interior design firm, to learning how to foster community through design. In fact, there is so much education available to interior designers, it can be hard to know where to start.
In this article, we'll walk you through the fundamentals of CEU for interior designers, including:
- The benefits of participating in further education for interior designers
- What is CEU for interior designers? And how is it tracked by ASID
- The top ASID-approved CEU courses for interior designers
Ready to level up your skills as an interior designer? Here is the what, why, and how of CEU for interior designers.
Why is continuous learning important for interior designers?
The interior design industry is continually evolving which means that in order to stay at the top of the industry, interior designers must evolve too.
Interior design education covers all facets of life as an interior design entrepreneur: business management, tactile skills, critical thinking about industry development, and more. In every format, CEU is a powerful tool for interior design career development.
Three key benefits of continuing education for interior designers:
Improve important interior design skills
Interior design clients are increasingly seeking expertise in innovative commercial design, sustainable design, and incorporating AI into the design process. Regularly completing relevant CEU courses allows interior designers to confidently navigate these frontiers and offer them to clients. In addition, further education for interior designers informs participants on changes in ethical considerations, building codes, and other legal requirements, helping to reduce the legal and financial risk to your interior design business.
Increase credibility to prospective clients
CEU certifications are physical proof that you have the credentials to support your claims. Clients are more likely to trust an accredited interior designer, and your sharpened skills means they are are more likely to be satisfied with the outcome of their project.
Fellow industry professionals will also view your ASID membership as a badge of merit, opening the doors to new brand partnerships and collaborations.
Retain membership to ASID
In order to be a member of ASID, interior designers must complete a set criteria of ASID approved CEU courses. As a member of ASID, interior designers have access to a comprehensive bank of resources essential to career maintenance and growth. For example, the ASID provides research reports on the latest developments in the interior design industry, compiles an unrivalled list of interior design jobs, and hosts regular awards to allow your interior design excellence to be recognised industry-wide.
CEU requirements for ASID members
All ASID members need to complete at least 10 units (equal to 10 contact hours) of approved continuing interior design education every two years. Certain exemptions do apply—see ASID website for details.
The ASID maintain the belief that ongoing continuing education is important for interior design professionals because "professional development strengthens the interior design profession and the Society by improving members’ competencies, knowledge, and skills in subject areas essential to the growth and success of the industry." CEU benefits the individual designer, and the interior industry at large.
What types of of CEU can I undertake?
CEU courses can be taken in-person or online and ASID approves many learning formats such as short courses, workshops, webinars, and conferences. ASID does not limit the subject matter of CEUs but instead encourages interior designers to pick the courses that best support their personal professional development.
In order to be credited, a CEU must be approved by one of the following:
- IDCEC Approval System
- State Regulatory Board
- Approved Industry Relevant Organizations:
- American Institute of Architects (AIA)
- Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI)
- International Facility Management Association (IFMA)
- National Kitchen and Bath Association (NKBA)
If an interior design course is not yet approved by one of the above entities, you may submit the course for review using the ASID Self-Reporting Submission Form.
How do I track my CEUs?
After successfully completing a CEU, interior designers should log their certificate of completion with the International Design Continuing Education Council (IDCEC). All ASID members are granted access to the IDCEC registry with their given IDCEC number.
What happens if I don't meet my CEU requirements?
After each reporting period, ASID will look at the IDCEC report to see if you met the required number of CEU for interior designers. You may also be asked to audit and present proof of completion
If you can't provide proof of having completed the mandatory CEU requirements laid out by ASID, you might face membership suspension. In case of health issues, disabilities, or other extenuating circumstances, you can request an adjustment at least three months before the current reporting period ends.
For other questions and concerns, visit the ASID Frequently Asked Questions.
Our top 5 ASID-approved CEU courses for interior designers
Ready to take on your first interior design workshop or event? Let's explore five promising CEU interior design courses.
[R]Evolution of Interior Design: Demonstrating its Power and Value
Type: Webinar (recording)
"Learn how the interior design profession is reinventing itself, breaking down barriers to develop new partnerships and new approaches to the practice and process of design."
The role of an interior designer is evolving. This webinar explores how interior designers can collectively build a better future for the industry. Explore paths to innovation from cross-industry collaborations, to incorporating new developments in health, safety, and welfare.
What you will learn:
- Review and evaluate changes in design by practice area and process.
- Identify opportunities for cross-disciplinary learning.
- Understand and communicate the power of interior design.
Register for [R]Evolution of Interior Design: Demonstrating its Power and Value.
Body, Mind, Wallet: Translating Your Values to Your Design
Type: Short course
Meet your educator: Marylena Sevigney
"Approach design decisions as an expression of your values by implementing simple, accessible strategies to support health, wellness, and sustainability."
Your designs should always reflect your personal values. This course teaches interior designers how to identify their personal values and appreciate their role in the health and well-being of their community. Equip yourself with a framework to make deliberate design decisions that reflect your values .
What you will learn:
- Draft a values statement to guide your design process and project goals.
- Identify steps you can take to improve your own health and wellness.
- Identify ways in which you can build a more sustainable design practice.
Register for Body, Mind, Wallet: Translating Your Values to Your Design.
Managing Risk in Your Interior Design Business
Type: Short course
"Learn how to effectively protect your business from risk exposure and expensive lawsuits."
A creative mind is not enough to run an interior design business. Sometimes, you need to pull up your boots and tackle the serious stuff. ASID-approved CEU course that breaks down legal matters such as contracts, intellectual property, liability to ensure you are up to date with different regulations and licensing requirements and feel confident in your work. Resources include downloadable PDFs and educational videos.
What you will learn:
- Common legal claims against interior designers
- How to recognise and address potential problems
- Importance of liability insurance
Register for Managing Risk in Your Interior Design Business today.
Build Your Brand Identity Beyond Logos
Type: Short course
"How Interior Designers Can Use Branding to Build a Successful Business."
Branding is the best investment you can make for your interior design business. The Build Your Brand Identity Beyond Logos course is not just about creating a good logo; it's about developing a unique identity that resonates with clients. This material for continuing education for interior designers revolves around consumer behaviour, types of branding, brand strategy development, and more.
What you will learn:
- The true definition of branding and its influence on business growth.
- How to create a brand strategy document.
- Alternative ways to look at branding.
Register for Build Your Brand Identity Beyond Logos.
Planning for Your Firm's Future - And Yours!
Type: Webinar (recording)
"Learn how to plan for your future at key stages in the business lifecycle."
At all stages of your interior design career, you want feel secure in the future success of your interior design business. This ASID accredited course teaches interior designers about the life cycle of an interior design business and the best approach key decision making.
What you will learn:
- Recognise the importance of planning for transition.
- Describe the possible advantages of selling your firm.
- Identify the ways in which partnerships can ensure your firm’s legacy.
Register for Planning for Your Firm's Future - And Yours!.
CEU for interior designers in a nutshell...
Staying at the forefront of the interior design industry requires more than just creativity, it demands a commitment to continual education and improvement.
ASID has made it easy for interior designers to access CEUs that interest them and contribute to their professional development. In order to retain membership to the ASID, interior designers are required to complete at 10 units of CEU every two years.
Continuing education for interior designers is beneficial to the interior designer, the clients, and the interior design industry at large.
Jeffrey Ampratwum is a creative director, stylist, and educator specialising in menswear. I met Jeffrey in March of this year and was immediately drawn to his abundance of energy. In his own words, Jeffrey is "the guy who will dance at all your parties (and drink all of your champagne)." Having got to know him better, this description fits.
Outside of his obligations as life of the party, Jeffrey is dutifully committed to his work. He is passionate, admirably so, and he approaches styling with a respect and ingenuity that is rare in an era of trend-mania and throw-away fashion.
I am unable to define Jeffrey's personal style—something I think he'll be pleased to hear. Jeffrey's outfits are spirited but always smart, influenced by tradition but never predictable. He certainly has style trademarks—"some people know me as ‘Babushka Boy’"—and his influences—"Renaissance art, Parisian art deco, and contemporary New York"—are evident in equal measures but still a definitive descriptor eludes me. I come to realise this is because there is far more to a Jeffrey-ensemble than the clothes. The context in which an outfit is seen in, is as important as the garments themselves. One must set the stage. "The surroundings, the look, the delivery, the conversation. For me, that is style."
Jeffrey is intriguing. His style turns heads. But, it is his understanding of fashion's pivotal role in how we interact with both ourselves and others that I am most fascinated by. I ask Jeffrey to dial in from across the pond to talk me through his perspective, his process, and the origins of his signature style.
Raised in New York
Jeffrey dials in from a park bench in the centre of his city, unfazed by the incessant traffic, ambling onlookers, and an inquisitive pooch that joins us mid-call—a true New Yorker. After all, New York is the city that raised him. And it is the city that continues to inspire him.
Jeffrey sets the scene. "I'm sitting here, my birthplace actually: the Bronx, New York. There is an extremely creative atmosphere." The Bronx is also the birthplace of hip-hop. Jeffrey grew up apace with the Hip Hop movement, his childhood soundtracked by new funk-inspired beats. "We wanted to emulate what we saw. So during our downtime, it was basketball or it was hip-hop music. [This is] before we had the phones. We were forced to come outside and do things!"
Jeffrey credits his environment growing up with nurturing his creativity. But perhaps the biggest influence of all came from even closer to home, his mother. Jeffrey's mother took pride in her appearance, despite being a single parent she would always find the time to make an effort. Jeffrey started paying closer attention to his mother's morning routine and realised that the ritual was about more than hygiene or habit. He realised she was creating a look. And that it was really important to her. Observing his mother allowed Jeffrey to draw the correlation between getting dressed up, and feeling good about yourself. "I knew that when my mother put on certain things, it made her feel better. I think that's where my first love for dressing women came from."
Jeffrey reflects, "I was melting into this creative being, but I didn't necessarily know it. As I started high school, I began to express my creativity in my wardrobe and by drawing on things." And yet, a career in fashion—or a creative career, full stop—never felt like an option to Jeffrey. "Being from West Africa, Ghana specifically, you're not encouraged to go into the arts. It's either you're going to be a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, or… just go back into the womb!" When Jeffrey attempted to marry his innate creativity with a family-approved profession, he got dentistry. "I'm left-handed, but I think with the right side of my brain. I coordinate well. I'm artistic. I can draw. I need to appease my family. I love a great smile. I love to smile. I like to be around people who smile. It made sense." Jeffrey packed his bags and set course for dental school in Tennessee.
Jeffrey has never lost his love of a great smile but, as one may have already assumed, his dentistry career was short lived. After graduating, Jeffrey admitted that his heart was still elsewhere and so returned to New York and found work at a non-profit. After three years, Jeffrey came to the realisation that "the American passport is a thing of luxury" and decided it was time to take advantage of that. To figure out his destination, he looked back to his roots. "I'm nostalgic. I love my past and as such I have always loved vintage. I wanted to feel like I was living back in the '80s." He settled on Paris.
Paris, the city of dreams
Many become enamoured by tales of Parisian romance but complain that Paris never lives up to expectations. For Jeffrey, the beauty of Paris never became an illusion. "The imagination of Paris made me feel like I was living in another life. Or, even living a life that I had lived before. Paris is very different after dark. A lot of the characters start to come out when the sun goes down, you get to experience the great and the raw of Paris."
In Paris, Jeffrey was finally able to pursue fashion, and he took no hesitation in doing so. Almost immediately after touching down in this foreign city, Jeffrey slid into the DMs of an art curator and built a partnership that allowed him to find his feet as a stylist. The pair collaborated on a fashion editorial shoot outside of the Louvre—Jeffrey acting as stylist, art director, and production manager. I note that many aspire to this level of proactivity, but Jeffrey does not indulge in self-praise. He shrugs, "My attitude has always been, I'm gonna get up and go do it." Simple.
Paris was just the beginning. Jeffrey also nestled his way into the fashion scene in Stockholm, and then London. He recalls his travels by the outfits that defined them, his style evolving and adapting based on the vibe of his surroundings. For Jeffrey, fashion became a way to document the stories he encountered along the way. He tells me of his collection of lace dresses that became a travelling canvas. Jeffrey dressed models across Europe in the same dresses and after painted each individual's story upon the dress in red wine and acrylic. Each dress a documentation of the people he had met and the stories they had told. More than just a keepsake of his travels, the dresses helped Jeffrey to recognise himself as a 'real' stylist, "It was a confirmation of my ode to fashion. I realised I was good at what I was attempting to do and people appreciated it." Upon reflection, Jeffrey, pinpoints this experiment as the catalyst to his becoming a creative director.
Jeffrey's rite of passage into the industry was not an easy journey. He explains that there was a time when Paris really beat him up. "You can't be a poser in the arts. The French are tough. When you come in from the outside saying you're an artist, they say 'prove it'." Jeffrey rose to the challenge.
The student becomes the master
Jeffrey returned from Europe armed with a new found self-belief and a clear sense of direction. He enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and completed a fashion styling programme. At college, Jeffrey set up a mentoring programme for younger students. In his own words, "I made it cool to be smart, I made it cool to get all As. And I offered a new perspective on how to obtain information." Jeffrey speaks the language of menswear, but more importantly he knows how to convey it to others. His evident enthusiasm for education, accompanied by his command of the subject set him on a path which culminated in landing the role as lead educator on the menswear programme at FIT.
Jeffrey continues to teach Menswear Styling at The Fashion Institute of Technology, a role in which he takes great pride. "I think I'm really good at what I do. I'm probably one of the best in the menswear teaching space, in the way that I teach it." And that is because Jeffrey's criteria for success deviates from the traditional A-F grading system. Jeffrey sees his course, and fashion more generally, as a vehicle for young people to explore their strengths, express themselves, and find their true calling. "I've always been big into education. I think that stems from my childhood, being the only child and always feeling like I needed mentorship. We all have some form of innate creativity. My job is to help my students tap into that and then find out where they can excel best. By doing that, we can find the best you. I have a lot of students who are now in PR, design, hair and makeup—nothing to do with styling at all." Jeffrey's own tough journey into the industry means he is committed to not letting other young people walk in blind. He explains, "As we all know, most of the time we go to school and we come out doing something totally different from what we thought. My students are no exception. Logistically, I think it's good to talk about industry practices and where you can have a career in other areas. It's important that they know they have options. I want the next generation to enter the industry with accurate expectations."
Jeffrey is teaching the future of the fashion industry, but his syllabus is rooted in history. "I go through the whole history of menswear in my class. An understanding of that history has been important to me as a personal reference, and I think it is a great checkpoint for all." By teaching students to appreciate the value of dress through time, Jeffrey hopes his students can find their own respect for dress. "My dad's generation would never go to a dinner without a jacket. Think about your dad, granddad, great grandad in their overcoats and their ties." To Jeffrey, inheriting a generational hand-me-down is a great honour. "Not only are these quality pieces, but they also tell a great story." The idea of storytelling through dress is integral to Jeffrey's teachings at FIT.
Jeffrey is conscious that his classes are equal measures challenge and fun. Jeffrey talks me through a go-to exercise in his curriculum: a pile of random garments is laid out on a table and Jeffrey gives his students 3 minutes to rummage through and piece together "the key look". Once the students have presented their outfits of choice, Jeffrey will announce that nobody made the grade and instead show them the look he would have compiled. At that moment—and this is his favourite part—he can guarantee a flurry of objections. I can see Jeffrey's genuine delight as he narrates the scene that follows. Naturally, the students begin to defend and justify their looks and Jeffrey is often forced to admit that they have a good point. "Fashion is subjective and it's open to interpretation. So I often leave the classroom thinking, 'You know what? That person was kind of right.'"
These teachings then move with Jeffrey into his work in the industry. When someone offers up an idea he hasn't yet considered, he is conditioned to respond with, “Let's try it!” Jeffrey also credits his students with helping him keep pace in today's ever-evolving digital landscape, "My students are utilising platforms like Pinterest and TikTok more and more. I can't continue to use PDFs and PowerPoint presentations and gradually become outdated. I'm always welcoming new technologies and new conversations from the students. It helps us all to grow. It's always good to get different perspectives, and I get that from my students."
Building a brand
Jeffrey is always searching for the new approach. In his work as a fashion director, he is keen to pioneer new visual narratives. With his own fashion brand, he is pushing the possibilities of what it means for fashion to be an experience.
Jeffrey is the co-founder of luxury goods brand Ken Jeffreys. "A buddy that I met in college and I made a vow to both become dentists. He saw it through, I didn’t. But more importantly, we stayed friends. He's Kenny, and I'm Jeffrey—KenJeffreys. The brand is built on the idea of appreciating and elevating the experience of travel—undoubtedly informed by Jeffrey's own experience travelling at the start of his career. Now, the KenJeffreys product range includes a unisex fragrance, bespoke shoes for women and men, and a collection of handbags. All is made to order, in line with Jeffrey's commitment to sustainable practices.
Ever a connoisseur of trends and culture, Jeffrey set out to build a luxury brand with lifestyle at its core. The products are not simply practical accessories for use when travelling; they are emblems of the beauty of travel itself. Jeffrey explains, "The act of arriving at the airport and settling into your business class seat, what does that feel like? When you get to the hotel, what are you wearing? When you open the door to your room, what is the fragrance? What is your experience getting ready for dinner? Foggy bathroom mirrors wiped with a fresh cotton towel—these are the moments that we want to capture. That for us is a luxury travel brand."
The journey with Ken Jeffrey's has just begun. Bottling the essence of travel and capturing the mood of exploration has endless possibilities. Jeffrey envisions it as so, "I believe in the near future I will be incorporating more bespoke wear and suits to my collection. The levels of customisation will be endless and allow me to play in various areas of menswear aesthetics on the highest level. I’m excited for that!"
Ken Jeffreys exemplifies the same simple principle that has guided Jeffrey's interest in fashion to date. In his own words, "We want to look good and smell good. Because if you do, then you feel good. And then you perform well. All these things are important."
Put on your best shoes
Teaching the next generation of fashion enthusiasts and heading a new-wave lifestyle brand are mammoth tasks in themselves. But what about conveying the value of style to a seemingly fashion-averse generation?
Many emerged from the pandemic happy to roam the streets in their sweatpants, but Jeffrey is not too keen on the trend. "There's been a shift in dress culture. The pandemic and the rise of working from home have been taken by some as an excuse not to groom, not to get dressed up." Flip-flops have become a staple at cocktail bars and sports shorts have found entry into jazz clubs.
Jeffrey attributes this to a lack of understanding of and appreciation for dress culture. "I think some men are using it as an excuse; not knowing how to dress for an occasion, versus not knowing how to dress at all."
In an attempt to combat this style epidemic, Jeffrey compiled his style philosophy into a Menswear style guide—a ‘how-to’ on dressing for a metropolis: New York, London, Stockholm, Paris etc. A physical style guide could be deemed superfluous in an age where a majority seek quick style inspo on social media but it aligns perfectly with Jeffrey's appreciation for presentation, quality, and story. The guide is certainly not a rule book—Jeffrey doesn't abide by fashion rules—but it does enforce just one: enjoy it. "I love to have good fun with fashion. That's my thing. The most important questions: Is it fun? Is it enjoyable?"
What Jeffrey teaches in his book is more than the intricacies of matching a tie to a blazer. Instead, Jeffrey repositions the act of getting dressed as a manifestation of your attitude to life. It is not so much about the shirt you choose, as it is the fact you consciously chose it. In doing so, you have displayed a willingness to put in effort for yourself and others, and will find more fruitful connection and opportunities as a result. Jeffrey explains, "You don't have to be in a three-piece suit every time you leave your house. But certain events are important: dinners, weddings, galas." Jeffrey reasons that that if we lose the art of, or care for, dressing for these events, then we lose our chance for allure, enchantment and sexiness. Without that, what do we have to look forward to? How do we as individuals feel about ourselves? And how are we being perceived by others?
Jeffrey doles out a harsh truth: "Whether we like it or not, people judge you based on your appearance." As a society, we spend a lot of time trying to deny that fact. But in doing so, are we leaving young people ill-equipped to navigate the world of work?
Jeffrey is very aware of the barriers to entry imparted across all industries—"I look back now and think, 'Hey, I'm from the Bronx, how does this even work?'"—but he is determined to not let appearance be yet another barrier to entry for young people who grew up in the same place he did. So, he has made it his mission to educate the young men of New York on the importance of style. "You can't be sloppy if you're going for the interview. You have to put in some effort in order to get to a certain place in your life, and that can start with getting dressed."
Jeffrey and his partner, Ken, set up a social programme to help young people understand the value of being well-groomed—and how to do it. The pair visit colleges across the US and deliver a taste of the KenJeffreys experience, including style assessments, dressing for work tutorials, lessons on general grooming, and even a dental screening. Because, as Jeffrey explains, "It's an entire package. Think about it; you can't be dressed smart and looking great but chatting with food in your teeth—oh God!" Jeffrey's outburst is both a nod to his dentistry days and evidence of his understanding of style as a whole package, not just a choice of clothing.
With his teaching, his book, and his social programme, Jeffrey wants to offer young people a helping hand in making their way in the world. Style holds the same value today as it always has. Jeffrey explains, "Things change. Music, beauty, communication, everything changes. But we cannot go outside naked. That's never gonna change. Well, maybe we might come to that one day…" But for now, putting on your best suit still goes a long way.
After an hour chatting to Jeffrey I am left with a renewed energy, a new found pride in my appearance, and a reluctance to slip back into my hoodie. I have just one question final question before we part ways, one that is over-worn but interesting when posed to the right person: Does fashion change lives? Jeffrey smiles, nods, and says, "I'll start with me. Fashion gives me both the energy to want to create and the physical space to do so. Fashion also gives you the capacity to leave a mark, a legacy, if you will. Creating something that continues to give. When both your passion and your purpose marry, I think you've satisfied your hunger. That is where I am now, and that is what I am trying to build for the students. My leadership role is about helping them find their passion and then seeing where it fits into the lexicon of fashion because there are a plethora of roles that they can apply their greatness to. Fashion gives me an outlet to continue to create. They say when you love what you do, you don't work a day in your life."
Connect with Jeffrey on Instagram. Learn more about his work on his website.
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When you first ventured into the wedding planning business, what was your dream? What vision of your future motivated you to start your career as a wedding planner?
Those long term goals for your wedding planning business are still in reach. You just need a plan to help you get there. Goal setting is a crucial practice for establishing a successful wedding planning business, playing a significant role in both personal well-being and business strength.
Introducing a system of short term and long term goals to your wedding planning business contributes to a clearer pathway to success. Ready to stop dreaming and start doing?
Why is goal setting important for wedding planners?
Whether you have been planning weddings for over 20 years or have just begun, it is vital to have a clear vision for your wedding business. Setting yourself clear goals is the key to achieving this vision.
Like any effective business, high-level and well-thought-out goals should be implemented as a strategy to track progress. Every goal you achieve contributes to the execution of your long term vision for your wedding planning business.
There are a lot of moving parts to a high-functioning wedding planning business. Without a clear strategy, you may find yourself in a difficult position—setting goals will increase your motivation and keep you from getting lost.
How to use short term and long term goals for your wedding business
In order to set aspirational yet attainable goals for your wedding planning business, you should first understand the difference between short term and long term goals.
Short term goals are mini goals that you can tackle in the near future—think a few months to a couple of years. Setting short term goals as a wedding planner will keep you motivated with small-wins, improve your focus, and help you to manage your time.
Long-term goals are your long term aspirations—the big dreams you hold for the future of your wedding planning career. Having solid and clear long term goals sets a strong foundation for your wedding planning business (and short term goals keep you on the right path for reaching these grand plans).
Long term goals for wedding planners
First things first, what do you want to achieve as a wedding planner and as a business owner? You must consider your overall long term goals and aspirations when it comes to wedding planning. What is the purpose and motivation behind your business?
Your goals can span financial, professional, and personal areas of interest. For example, a personal goal might be to be able to take one extra day off a week to spend with your family. Aligning your goals with your values and what holds the utmost significance to you will provide increased motivation for their long term accomplishment.
It is easy to feel overwhelmed and develop a doomsday tunnel vision whilst figuring out ambitious long term goals. To prevent this, try working backwards. Start by defining your wildest dreams—if anything was possible where would you love to see yourself and your wedding planning business in 10 years time? Then, work backwards. What three goals can summarise this dream vision? And what milestones will you need to achieve over the next 10 years in order to get there? Reversing the process enables you to experience a sense of achievement in advance, providing valuable insights into the steps needed to attain it.
Once you have defined your ultimate vision, breaking down your long term goals into short term goals will further help you to avoid burnout and remain on track (more on that to come!)
It is important to remember that over time, your aspirations might evolve. Regularly reassess your goals and be open to modifying, refining, or even discarding them if they no longer align with your vision. Implement monthly check-ins as a way to ensure that your goals are moving you towards your vision of success for your wedding business.
Examples of long term goals for wedding planners
- Grow my Instagram following to >10,000. Whilst following isn't everything, a notable online presence increases your reach and client trust. It also helps you to establish a name for yourself amongst fellow wedding professionals such as vendors and wedding venues.
- Establish myself as an industry leader with a feature in Vogue Weddings. A feature in one of the most highly respected wedding publications solidifies your work as truly unique and of the utmost quality. It also advertises your services to thousands of new clients and connections.
- Book 35 couples in the year 2026. A full calendar is every wedding planners dream—how can you make it your reality? Diversifying your offerings, improving your branding, and lots of networking are good ways to start.
Short term goals for wedding planners
Congratulations! You've set out a clear vision of success for your wedding planning business. The next step is to work out a plan to make that your reality. Dissecting your overarching objectives for your wedding planning career into smaller, more manageable goals enables you to progress step-by-step towards your ultimate destination.
Short term goals act as checkpoints on the journey to achieving your long term aspirations. In order to set effective short term goals for your wedding planning business, use the SMART formula. The SMART goal setting formula ensures that all your goals are:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable/Attainable
Relevant/Realistic
Time Based
Following this formula will ensure your short term goals will be effective in helping you to eventually achieve your long term goals. Goal setting in this manner will not only benefit your career as a wedding planner, but also create a more organised and healthy system for your own mind.
Examples of SMART short term goals for wedding planners
Let's work with the long term goal: Book 35 couples in the year 2026. In order to make that possible, here are three short term goals to keep you on the path to success.
1. I will give my About Me page on my wedding business website a makeover to be more personable and make myself stand out.
Deadline: 10 days
2. I will research 3 influential wedding planners who I admire and make notes on their brand positioning and the services they offer. I will reflect on how I can implement aspects of this into my own wedding planning business.
Deadline: 1 month
3. I will attend 3 wedding industry networking events (trade shows, seminars, industry mixers) to bolster my professional development and grow my network. More industry contacts = more referrals.
Deadline: 6 months
How to track the progress of your wedding planning business
There are countless ways to keep track of the progress of your wedding business, but what is really important is to recognise your development and congratulate yourself at every step of the process. Careful thought and reflection on your progress towards your goals—even if less than you'd hoped for—can help motivate you and invigorate your passion for your wedding planning business.
Three ways to track your progress as a wedding planner:
- Keep a daily/weekly journal to document your progress towards your goals, the problems you are facing, and anything you have learned along the way.
- Track and analyse metrics for all quantitative goals (things that can be measured in numbers).
- Meet with a mentor, advisor, or friend at least once a month to discuss your progress and ask for advice or constructive feedback.
Setting goals for your wedding business: the summary
Goal setting in the wedding planning business isn't just about setting directions; it's the roadmap to success. From distinguishing short-term wins to sculpting grand, long term dreams, each step contributes to the ultimate success of your wedding business.
By aligning personal values with clear-cut goals, carving out distinct pathways, and implementing SMART strategies, you pave the way for your wedding planning business's growth. Regular reassessment of your goals, allowing flexibility in your approach, and consistent goal tracking ensure you stay on course—transforming aspirations into accomplishments.
Whether it's through journals, consistent check-ins, or seeking guidance, each move propels you closer to the envisioned success story of your wedding planning venture.
Designing beautiful interiors is an intricate skill. Many spend years studying the craft before entering the world of work as an interior designer. But what if there was an alternative way to start a career as an interior designer?
From innovative layouts to experimental colour palettes, these three interior designers turned their personal spaces into laboratories of creativity and leveraged their newly made-over spaces as launchpads for their interior design careers. Learn how these industry experts transformed their living spaces into stunning reflections of their design philosophies and set the stage for their success in the interior design industry.
Ksenya Malina
Ksenya Malina is the founder of Time & Place Interiors, a New York-based design studio specialising in combining vintage with modern decor.
Ksenya's story
Ksenya's journey into the interior design industry began with the gut renovation and furnishing of her own pre-war apartment in Manhattan. Being mindful of the building's Art Deco architecture, she sought to juxtapose her apartment flat with her love for Mid Century style design. She began to dive into the interior design and architecture world by salvaging vintage doors, hardware, antique grille covers, original bath fixtures, and vintage lighting.
Throughout the renovation, Ksenya was working a full time corporate job. She recounts, "My work paid the bills, but I began realising how a career in the visual field would be a much better fit for me. I didn't intend to become an interior designer, but I started some side projects before eventually taking the leap into a full-time pursuit of my own business. As luck would have it, I landed my first big client project the day after I left my office job!"
Now, Ksenya's projects involve broader scopes of interior design for both modern and older spaces, but she continues to prioritise vintage and antique fixtures and furniture in her designs. Ksenya explains, "[Antiques] not only make a space feel special by bringing a unique history and style; they’re also the greenest way to decorate."
Ksenya's advice: phone a friend
"Don't delay in documenting your work with professional interior photography. It's critical to building your portfolio and winning new projects. My own home was the primary source for my portfolio, but I made sure to document other small projects I was doing for friends and family to round out my website. I also began a blog to educate prospective clients about my design philosophy and approach.
Start requesting Google reviews from family and friends early on to build up your client feedback ratings and online presence. Finally, even when you work with friends and family, follow your professional process to set expectations for both yourself and your client."
Find more of Ksenya's work on her website or on Instagram.
Alessia Lamonaca
Alessia Lamonaca is an interior decorating and home staging expert from Barrie, Ontario. She holds a Fine Arts degree from Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) and began her early creative career in film and marketing before moving into design.
Alessia's Story
Growing up, Alessia created room mood boards for fun and spent her free time flipping through home décor magazines and pinning interior design inspiration to Pinterest boards. Yet, it wasn’t until the purchase of her first home that she truly started putting her passion for interior design to work.
In 2020, Alessia started an Instagram account to document her home renovation journey along with photos of interiors that inspired her. The account garnered interest from friends, family, and new followers—many asking for help in their own spaces. Alessia recalls, "I had a friend who had just purchased a house as well. After seeing my mood boards, she reached out and said, 'You have to help me!'" The friend then referred Alessia to her friend, and so on, and so on. And the rest is history!
At first, Alessia found it challenging to achieve the elegant, luxury design looks she loved on a tight budget. However, she soon figured out that the formula came down to knowing where to pinch pennies and where it was important to splurge. Though Alessia grew up loving design, she'd never heard of anyone in her circle hiring an interior designer before and felt the service was typically perceived to be a luxury reserved only for a wealthier, older crowd.
As a result of her experience, Alessia decided to leave her successful career in marketing to set up her own interior design firm called New Mode Home. She set out to disrupt the industry by offering more affordable, virtual design packages in hopes of making beautiful, luxurious spaces more accessible. New Mode Home has since flourished into a thriving interior decorating, styling, and staging firm offering remote and in-person services to residential and commercial clients globally.
Alessia's passion for storytelling and design has always been evident in her work, whether helping businesses convey their brand message through marketing and creativity or assisting homeowners in telling their personal stories through their home décor. She is driven by her tremendous ambition and an unrelenting desire to challenge the status quo and bring big, creative ideas to life.
Alessia's advice: overcome imposter syndrome
"My advice to new designers who don’t yet have a portfolio of their work is to just start. Build your online presence, get involved in the interior design community and start making a name for yourself. I remember wanting to start for a while but wanting everything to be perfect before I launched things. I wanted the brand to be perfect, I wanted all of my services to be buttoned up, and I wanted stunning portfolio photos. It was overwhelming to think about. But one day I just started Instagram from my couch. I didn’t launch my website until months later. And guess what? Nobody cared but me. Your brand will evolve and you figure things out as you go. The hardest part is just getting started.
There are many challenges to overcome when transitioning from a hobby to a business. I had to determine a process that worked best for my clients, develop a contract, determine my services and pricing, and figure out a system for taking payment. As a one-woman show, I had to wear all the hats. I also had to overcome imposter syndrome. I was self-taught, and even though I had soaked up a ton of information over the years and had been designing mood boards as a hobby for a long time, the stakes felt so much higher when I started charging people money. But as soon as clients confirmed that they loved something as much as I did and told me I had a great eye, it gave me the confidence I needed to keep going.
To get portfolio photos, start with your own home. You can also consider working with a close friend or family member for free with an agreement that they’ll let you take photos of the space once it's finished. If you have the skills for it, designing digital mood boards can also show potential clients how you can put a space together.
Some designers feel strongly that you shouldn’t post other designers’ work on your Instagram feed but I strongly disagree; plenty of people do it, even big accounts. When you’re just starting out it’s difficult to have enough content to post to socials—reposting others’ work allows you to curate a vibe and help potential clients see what your style is before you have a portfolio to show them. It also gives them a place to go and get inspired by images that match your aesthetic. It’s just important that you give proper credit to the designer (and photographer, stylist, etc. if that information is available)."
Find more of Alessia's work on her website or on Instagram.
Debbe Daley
Debbe is an experienced interior designer helping homeowners in New England and beyond. Debbe is also involved with the Designer on Call programme at Boston Design Center.
Debbe's story
Ever since Debbe was young, she has had a passion for interior design. She learnt to sew scrap fabrics on her mother's sewing machine as a child, would regularly rearrange her bedroom furniture, and, during her preteen era, she even asked for a a wicker peacock chair for her birthday.
Despite her passion, Debbe was never exposed to the idea of interior design as a career. Instead, she pursued business but continued to sew and design pillows and clothes. But at the age of 22, Debbe had the joy of decorating her own home, from the flooring to the wallpaper. The creative freedom unlocked her passion and rekindled her relationship with interior design. Debbe proudly declares herself as a "DIY-er before it was even a thing!"
Debbe began assisting friends and family with redesigning their living spaces and soon felt a strong pull to join the interior design industry. She pursued this passion by enrolling at the New York School of Interior Design, balancing her studies with online classes in the evenings alongside her daytime job. Her goal was to expand her knowledge to eventually establish her own interior design business.
In a strategic move to broaden her expertise, Debbe took on a part-time role at a flooring store. There, she immersed herself in learning the intricacies of different flooring options. This hands-on experience not only enriched her understanding of design but also empowered her to assist homeowners in selecting the perfect flooring for their spaces. Her growing expertise led her to offer comprehensive home design consultations, allowing her to guide homeowners in making informed design choices.
All of Debbe's experiences culminated in her opening a boutique studio where she sold hand-sewn window treatments, antique furniture, and hand-picked wallpaper. Today she has expanded her footing in the industry, as a full-service interior designer, published author, and interior design educator. In Debbe's own words: "Interior design is my life. Being able to help others create beautiful, sanctuary spaces that they love is my goal."
Debbe's advice: think outside the box
I began building my portfolio with photos of my creative projects and work in my own home. I would rearrange furniture and create tabletop accessories to showcase collections. I started with a sofa, table, and mantle, and an array of arranged pictures forming a wall gallery of art. I would rearrange candlesticks, stacked books, pillows, rugs, accessories, and window treatments to demonstrate my creativity.
Ask family and friends if you can practice your design skills on a room in their home. In return, you want to be able to take professional photos of the spaces for posting on your website and on social media. Tip: take photos in portrait mode on your cell phone, this will focus on one item and create a blurred background that gives the image a high-quality feel.
Another creative way to attract clients is to have an event in your own home (or a friend’s home). Offer a wine and cheese night and invite friends to bring a plus one. Throughout the evening, give a demonstration of redesigning a room in the home. Start the evening in the room that is going to be transformed so that your guests can see the before. Then, have the guests mingle in the kitchen whilst the space is being transformed. Once the space if completed, invite them back into the room for the reveal of the redesigned space. Explain the changes you’ve made and talk about the services you offer: paint consultations, room redesign, shopping services, etc. Encourage the guests to take photos and share the event on social media. Be prepared to book appointments and ensure you have a fee and service schedule ready to offer your guests.
Nowadays, video is also very important. For new designers, explaining your design process on social media and even creating a YouTube video with a shareable link is a great way to attract potential clients. Get in front of your dream clientele and show them your personality and your knowledge as an expert. The design world is visual. It’s all about showing your work.
Aaina's journey is best described as a series of sojourns—from New Delhi to San Fransisco to London—with something collected at each stop: a passion for photography here, a deeper understanding of mental health there, and all along which there has been one underlying message: take the world as your oyster.
One of the key topics of our conversation was inspiration: what inspiration means, how to capture it, and—sometimes—what to do when it’s just not there.
For Aaina, mental health and inspiration go hand in hand—her passion for photography provides a map of her mental health from day to day, telling her when she needs to rest, and take a break.
We also chat about her love of graphic—and then product—design, and her journey all the way from discovering InDesign in high school, to her current role in design leadership.
Finally, our conversation covers her current project, Dear Genie: how it began, finding inspiration to write, and how it helped her deal with the emotions of losing a loved one.
Let’s start at the beginning... Where did you grow up and what do you remember of it?
I grew up in a very small town near New Delhi in India. I lived there until I was about fourteen and then I moved to the Bay Area. My upbringing was typically Indian in the sense of the food, the friends, the school life.
Creativity was always encouraged in my household, so it was a really interesting way to grow up. “The world was your oyster” was the messaging that I got, so that was really liberating and exciting. I could explore whatever I wanted to do.
I remember doing a lot of doodling, painting, and chalk art as a very young kid. I mean, I didn't know what lettering was at the time, but that's what I was trying to do.
What was moving to the Bay Area like?
When we moved to the Bay Area near San Francisco, I began going to high school and that was a whole new experience. As you can imagine, coming from a different country with a completely different background, it was intimidating. I’d watched those movies about high school in America and I didn't know what to expect.
Luckily, all my classmates were really nice and welcoming, so I think I lucked out there.
I got interested in a lot of creative things in high school, including photography. I was in a yearbook class and that's when I was like, this is actually a lot of fun. I was put on layout duty, so I was doing a lot of photography and layout for the yearbook in my junior year.
That's when I got interested in design because I was in InDesign almost every day doing layouts, and I wanted to explore it further. That's when I really got interested in finding out more about design, and specifically print design and graphic design.
I read that you studied graphic design at the San Francisco Academy of Art. What was that experience like?
I love San Francisco so much. I used to visit San Francisco with my family every once in a while and it was a fascinating city. It's small enough so it feels very homey and small, but still has this big larger than life vibe to it—at least it did back then back when I was 16 years old.
I visited the Academy of Art to explore what my options were. I wanted to explore Parsons and a few other universities, but the Academy of Art really stood out to me.
I wanted to go into graphic arts and the programme there was amazing. I talked to a few teachers, did a little tour, and fell in love with everything that I saw. I could not wait to get started.
It didn't feel like school in the typical sense of going into university to go to classes, I felt like I was just having fun. A lot of my friends who went to other schools would talk about their classes and I could really tell that my experience was drastically different from theirs in terms of the practical knowledge that I was getting.
That was one of the things that drew me to the Academy of Art: they really lean on designers who have their design practices, and bring them on as faculty. You get that real life practical experience of what it’s like to run a design agency and how to talk to clients, which I don't think a lot of universities or colleges necessarily offer.
You’ve always loved the creative arts, even since you were a child. When did you realize that you wanted to pursue that as your career?
In high school, because I was exploring so many different creative directions.
I was in journalism class, photography class, and involved in the yearbook. I would do anything creative that I could find.
If I reflect back, there were a lot of cultural nuances that I didn't know about, because I was coming from a completely different country and coming into this culture where everything's done differently.
I think I leaned on the mindset of, “I'm just gonna find creative things to do and not worry about those cultural differences.” At the age of fourteen, everything is confusing anyway. My coping mechanism was to see what I could do in terms of learning different languages and being part of all of these clubs.
That's when I was sure that I have to make this my career somehow. I was exploring journalism, which I felt was creative, but then I discovered the visual part of the creative industry and that's when the light bulb went off.
Do you still have any of those creative influences from high school?
Even now, I'm a huge fan of photography.
I am an amateur photographer, definitely not professional in any way, but I've kept that going.
A lot of those ideas that I had in my mind of what I could do when I was fifteen or sixteen years old have actually come true, which I'm extremely fortunate for because that usually doesn't happen.
I've taken my career in a different direction now in terms of being more of a design leader, but that has some different creative challenges.
I feel extremely fortunate that I've been able to carry this through.
Were you at all apprehensive about making a career out of something that you love so much?
The messaging that I got from my parents was that the world is your oyster, so I never had that limitation of, “don't go into this because you're not gonna be able to sustain yourself” or “you're not going to be able to make a certain amount of money.” For me, it was, “I will figure it out.”
I think I was very naive at the time.
I didn't know what graphic design was at all until I came across the Academy of Art. I was like, “bingo, I didn't even know this existed.”
I will say, in all honesty, I was never apprehensive about it because it never crossed my mind to be.
Was your family a family of creatives?
Not really, honestly.
My dad is an accountant, so he was quite the opposite. He was creative with numbers, but you can only be so creative with numbers. He was always very encouraging about me choosing my own path, though.
My mum is very creative. She has had a few different careers, and at the age of fifty she decided to go to school to become an aesthetician, which is incredible. She's such a huge inspiration. She always had that creative side to her. She had side businesses that I saw growing up, so I always got the example that you could pick something up and just do it from her, so that's been a huge inspiration.
What about your brother?
My brother and I started a Bollywood website when we had first moved to the US, when I was about fourteen.
It was basically all of the content we could find, rehashed and rewritten and presented in a very different light. That was another place where I saw that you can come up with an idea and just do it.
Since then, my brother's always tinkered with something or the other on the side. I think that gave me the spirit of, ‘always keep doing something.’ It's exciting.
Do you see that as being quite unusual amongst immigrant families coming from Asia?
Absolutely.
I thought it was a normal thing back when I was growing up. But talking to a lot of my friends whose parents were pushing them into medicine or law or engineering, I found that there are those kinds of stereotypes.
Even with my brother, for example, things were quite different for him. It could be that I always showed signals of being creative, so my parents knew that I was obviously going to become a creative person.
I feel fortunate that I wasn't thrown into a path that I didn't feel passionate about, because if I was doing anything else I feel that I would have to backtrack a little bit and rethink my life a little bit.
I didn't recognise it then, but reflecting back on it years later, I'm like, “Thank you, mum and dad!”
I want to talk a little bit more about photography. That's something that you've been doing for a long time. I guess you can say it’s one of your first loves. What do you love most about photography?
So much.
In this fast paced world nowadays, you don't get opportunities to slow down and admire something in front of you as much as people probably used to, fifty years ago.
The other thing is that you can capture so many emotions in one shot. If somebody were to look at a photo that was really well crafted and the composition was perfect, you can dissect so much from that one snapshot. That's a pretty exciting challenge to have.
I always think of photography as a challenge and that's what gets me excited.
I normally don't take photos unless I feel inspired—so on the days I don't take photos, I know that I'm not inspired inside. If that happens too many days in a row then I know that there's something wrong within me, that my mental health is affected in some way. Photography is a big, big thing for me in that way.
Music is another thing. If I don't feel like listening to music for a few days, I know there's something wrong and I need to fix it.
On your Instagram, you've got a hashtag for your travel photography called #sojournym. What does that mean?
It was something that I created many years ago, because I started traveling a lot and wanted to give my photographs an identity.
Sojourn is a word centered around traveling, so everything around that word was already in existence.
There's that risk that anybody could use that word—it's not proprietary to me— so I decided to make up a word and added the Y and M to it!
Speaking about travelling, when did you move from the US to London and what prompted that?
We moved about four years ago. My husband and I had been in the Bay Area for a long time. I had been there for sixteen years and he'd been there for fourteen years, and we were looking for someplace new to explore.
We love Europe and we thought—we know the Asian culture quite well as we’re from that part of the world; we've explored the US quite a bit as we’ve lived in California for a long time—so we wanted to explore a very different side of the world.
We’ve now lived in three very distinct cultures, which is great.
Also, I was a bit jaded by the constant need to talk about technology and acquisitions and raising funding rounds. I think that's great—the Silicon Valley and Bay Area are all about that—but I was a bit tired of that.
I wanted a change of pace where people talk about something different and the work-life culture is very different.
It's been four years now, and we love it here in London.
Where do you call home now?
That’s a very good question. Home is London now, but we are actually moving back to the Bay Area later this year! So I've now started thinking about home as being closer to family and friends.
Where I grew up, that doesn't feel like home anymore. When I go back to visit, it feels foreign. I don't relate to the culture as much as I used to. Even though London is home right now, that also feels foreign because all of our friends and family are in the Bay Area.
I've been moving around so much that I've lost that sense of definitive identity: ‘this is who I am, this is where I belong,’ and I quite enjoy it to be honest with you.
I don't really need to feel like I belong in one place. I can belong in multiple places, which is great.
You started your design career with roots in graphic design, and you talked earlier about your progression into being a design leader. What does being a design leader mean to you?
Design leadership to me is, first of all, making a case for why there needs to be a presence of design within a company, within an industry, and within an organization.
That was my first order of business when I joined HelloSign back in San Francisco, and now Unmind in London. My job is to make a case for why design is one of the most important things that we should be focusing on as a company.
The second thing would be to embed design into every single touch point. I come from a branding background, but I moved into product design and then into leadership, so I understand both the worlds quite well: the user experience side of things, as well as the branding side of things.
For me, the entire end-to-end user journey has to have a touch point that relates to design. Branding doesn't only mean a logo or a website or a brochure that you see. It’s the way a salesperson or anybody on the team talks about the company. That is branding, that's part of the brand.
Spreading that message across to the leadership team and having that as firm messaging to the company is very important to me.
There are also more tactile things like building up the team and making sure the team feels supported on a daily basis. All of that is extremely important as well.
From branding to product design: how did that move come about?
My first job as a visual designer was at Zendesk, which was a relatively small start-up back then.
I was working on the brand side and I would talk regularly to my product design colleagues and became interested in what they were doing. I attended a few user research sessions to understand how users were perceiving our brand and our product, and that’s when my interest really grew. I was trying to understand what product design was and how product designers worked.
When you moved into product design, did that come intuitively to you?
It took a lot of learning in the beginning.
I knew I was interested in it, but I didn't know if it was something that I wanted to explore seriously or not. I talked to a lot of product designers and people who had made a similar transition to me. At that point, ten years ago, there wasn't too much in the way of formal education around user experience design, so it was a lot of figuring things out along the way.
It was more about working on projects. I did my own side projects. I'd redesign certain user experiences on my own and show them to friends, asking for feedback.
I slowly started learning what the process looks like. It took some time to get there, but I had the support internally within the company to be able to explore, so that was extremely helpful.
What did you find interesting about product design?
One thing that I found really interesting was the difference between branding and user experience design.
With branding, a lot of it was very art based and very opinion-based. If I put a poster out there, it was a case of: great if the users or the consumers like it, too bad if they don’t. There wasn't an iterative process, necessarily.
With product design, it was quite the opposite. It was all about that iterative process of, ‘learn something from the users, apply it to your designs, see how it performs and then do the whole thing over again.’
You actually take control in your hands as a designer, as a product manager, as an engineer to iterate on it constantly.
That's when I started really enjoying UX. I asked my manager if I could take on some product related projects, and he was incredibly supportive.
I remember there was an onboarding project that I took on. It was very much at the cusp of the branding world and the product world. From there it was obvious to me that that's something I wanted to explore.
I still say that branding is at the heart of what I do. I love it, so that’s why I do side projects. Part of the reason is that I get to explore that side of my roots.
You mentioned that branding is an artistic process, whilst product design is more iterative. What about photography?
This is going to sound very harsh, but I don't necessarily care about opinions there. It is very much an art form for me.
I put something out there because it resonates with me. If it resonates with others, great. If it doesn't, that's fine too.
Anything that has business goals attached to it automatically becomes something that has research backing it up and data science. There's a lot to it.
But with something like photography, it's my way of being inspired and exploring something from my own viewpoint.
That's how I see a lot of my favorite photographers, just exploring their own points of view, and that's how I see photography.
What kind of photography do you enjoy?
I love any type of street photography, whether that's photographing architecture or even people. I'm slowly getting into people photography, I find it a bit intrusive so I tried not to go that way, but it can be pretty exciting to shoot people as well.
This is why I love traveling as well. Going to places, shooting architecture and other elements of that place and presenting your own viewpoint. Even shooting Paris, which has been shot millions of times, your perspective can be that unique perspective. It's pretty exciting.
Do you share your photography online? What does that mean to you?
I have a bunch of my photography on Unsplash. I love the comments that I get on there, as well as people using the photos. If they were just sitting in my hard drive it would be a very sad thing.
Putting photos up on a platform like Unsplash and giving people access to it means that the photos live on and people can use them in different contexts, and that's exciting to me.
It's not about the number of likes or anything - it's when I get comments from friends saying, ‘oh, that was really cool, I loved how you captured that thing.’ It makes me feel appreciated and excited.
You talked about getting inspired. What does inspiration mean to you?
Inspiration for me is feeling excited about something and wanting to take it forward, whether that's something as simple as getting up and listening to some music or working on a big project that absolutely needs to be done, breathing some inspiration into it and getting excited about it.
There are times when I'm really interested and I'll take a lunch break and go out and photograph things, versus there are days when I don't feel like it.
I can see it when there are those really inspiring days. When that happens I can see that translate through to my work, to my life, to everything throughout the day.
It's very binary for me. When it's the opposite, it's the opposite in all of those areas. I feel stuck that day, and I hope that tomorrow is different. If I'm feeling like that for multiple days in a row, that's usually a red flag that I need to make some changes.
I've now implemented some coping strategies around that. I try to meditate more often. There are still days when I'm stuck, and that's fine. I'll do admin tasks and things that don't necessarily need a lot of inspiration.
How do you recognise those telltale signs?
Fashion is a big part of it.
I never pick my clothes the night before, because I want my fashion choices for that day to relate to how I'm feeling on that day.
If I'm wearing something big, heavy, and black, I'm in a receded mode and want to be by myself and introverted that day. If I'm wearing something colourful, I know that I want to go and be a little more out there, so that's usually my first sign.
Another thing is that I'm very much a morning person. I'll wake up between 5:30 and 6 am, and I don't need coffee, I'm just ready to go.
Most days, I’ll make my to-do list and get ready to go in and drop my son off to nursery in the morning. I get 45 minutes of walking in the morning, so that walk is my indicator of whether or not I feel energised. If I am, I take photos sometimes in those 45 minutes along the route.
Then there are days when I can't wait to be over with the morning routine and dive straight into work.
For me, it's very clear.
Sometimes it'll happen multiple days in a row and that's when I know that I need to really do something. Two weeks ago, I took a whole week off. In this pandemic world, we’re dealing with a lot of burnout and dealing with mental health issues, so that was amazing. Coming back into work and feeling that I have my fire back and I can go again was a great feeling.
Fashion is one of the earliest markers in your day of how you’re feeling. Is it colours? Is it materials? What is it that symbolises how you feel?
Colour is a big one. That's the most obvious one. If I'm wearing something super bright, it makes me feel brighter and lighter and happier.
Another thing is whether an outfit looks well put together to me.
Sometimes, I’ll throw on a sweatshirt and call it a day and not put a lot of effort into it because I can't be bothered.
Other days, I’m accessorised, put together, look a lot more polished, which is always nice. With a toddler, that becomes increasingly difficult to find the time to do, but I still try.
What colours do you have in your wardrobe? Is it the whole rainbow?
It is pretty much the whole rainbow. I don't do too many super bright fluorescent ones, there's a lot of pastels and stuff.
It's a whole gamut—I've never subscribed to the idea of ‘this colour doesn't look good on me.’ Again, that could be being naive, that's fine.
It's an art form for me. I think with fashion, it's about expressing myself more than how it resonates with others. I dress for myself.
Have you always been able to recognise those signs, or is it a more recent discovery?
It happened a little bit later on, probably in my mid-twenties. That’s when I got into the routine of going into work.
I think when I fell into a proper routine and also got more self-aware of what a good successful day looks like versus a not-so-successful one, I started to recognise that. Even then, it wasn't crystal clear to me what was going on. It was like, ‘some days are great, why can't every day be like that’. That's when I realised where mental health comes in.
Mental health is not a topic that we necessarily talk about, especially in Asian cultures. I did not grow up with that understanding of what mental health means and that mental health is something that we have all the time.
It has a certain taboo and stigma attached to it. It was when I started exploring some of these subjects with my friends that everything started clicking, but I wish it had come sooner.
You talked about routines a lot. Are you a big routine person?
I'm a big routines person. If I have that routine, I really thrive in carrying that through.
At the same time, I am also somebody who likes change. It's a weird dichotomy for me. Some days if it [my routine] is thrown off, I actually welcome it. You don't want to be stuck in the same rut and same routine every single day.
As much as I love routines, there are times when I do things differently. I'll sleep in some days and it's fine. No big deal.
What happens when your routines get messed up?
There are days when things don't go the way you want in a negative sequence, and that's when you have to practice that inner calm and tell yourself that everything's going to be fine. I used to get very anxious about it, but now I’ll stay calm and see how things go, and usually they turn out fine.
You work at Unmind now. Did your awareness of mental health come prior to Unmind, or was it something you learned more about through your job?
My awareness came before Unmind, but not in the same way as what I've learned in the past four years.
I never gave it that much thought. I knew mental health needed to be nurtured and cared for, but I didn't exactly know the mechanisms around it.
Unmind has accelerated that thinking for me, and now I'm a huge proponent of mental health practices. Being more proactive and preventative about it, as opposed to reactive, which is how the world really sees mental health.
The world sees it in a way that puts a lot of stigma to it and in a very negative light, where a lot of the imagery is centered around this black and white imagery of somebody holding their head in their hands, sitting in the corner of a room. That's not necessarily what mental health looks like. It's very much about celebrating the most complex organ in our bodies, which is our brain.
We often make this argument that we go to the gym to take care of our physical health all of the time in that preventative and proactive way, yet we don't do that with our brains. A lot of that awareness came much later and I'm so glad. It's going to stick with me for the rest of my life.
And finally, let’s talk about your side projects which you’ve alluded to above. I read about Neem. Can you tell me about that?
When I was still at HelloSign, I decided that I wanted to bring Indian drinks to the world. Coming from an Indian background, I always loved chai and lassi. There are so many interesting Indian drinks out there.
At that time there was a lot of talk around why social events in start-ups centred around alcohol. It's still a huge thing. For me, it was a very simple idea. What if there were social events that were centred around these drinks that I have come up with?
It was this one-person operation. It was absolutely insane. I would find myself awake at three o'clock in the morning, making the product, marketing it, being the support person, doing everything on my own. But it was a great learning experience.
I did it for a little over a year and a half and then we decided to move to London right after.
I felt good about it because I didn't have any resentment or any regret around it. I tried it, I did what I wanted to do and got it out of the system.
What about DearGenie, your newsletter? I know that it's named after your dog who sadly passed away this year.
It's been an incredibly difficult year, generally speaking, and then Genie... She's our first child, that's how we usually introduce her, and she was so close to us.
She was with us for ten and a half years and she was our everything—our entire lives focused around her. We planned our travels around whether she was coming with us.
She started not feeling too well in January, and we had to say goodbye to her in April. It was extremely difficult, to say the least.
I didn't, at that moment, know what to do to get out of that feeling of helplessness. It made both my husband and I rethink a lot of things in life because her loss was pretty immense.
I’m so sorry to hear that. After that happened, how did the newsletter come about?
It was more about figuring out how to channel all of this negativity and helplessness I was feeling into something positive and productive.
I thought about what I could be doing, and I sketched up a lot of different things that revolved around rescue dogs and shelters.
I still want to do some of those things that I've planned out, but they're long-term projects and they're not going to happen overnight.
My thinking was that I've been a dog owner, I grew up with dogs, I've been a mum to Genie for the past ten years and I've learned so much from that experience. What can I give to the world from that experience?
I was approaching this from a perspective of: I'm not the authority; I'm not a dog trainer; I'm not a vet. But I have had this amazing pup and I’ve been fortunate enough to have her in my life and all the learnings from that I can share with others, and also learn a bit about other people's experiences along the way.
The shortest route to getting something out there was a newsletter. I thought it was a very effective way to put something out.
The last thing was honouring Genie. My biggest fear was that we're going to forget her. I don't think that's ever possible, but I wanted to hold onto her and her memory, and so this is a good way for us to do that.
It's been an emotional process for sure.
What is your schedule like, running DearGenie?
Every other week I send out a newsletter that has different sections and there's a theme to every newsletter. I talk about house-training dogs; I talk about life after lockdown with your dog, which is especially relevant for all of those who got dogs in the last 18 months.
It's a really great way for me to learn more as well and inject my own experience into it and share it with the world. I didn't want all that we've done to sit in my head and me to mull over it and feel helpless.
I have received some comments in the last few months saying, “Keep going, this is great and I've found value in this.” It's a great way to build a community around something that I love and feel strongly above.
Just hearing you speak about it, I’m getting so emotional. Writing a newsletter is a pretty big undertaking. Do you ever not feel inspired when you need to write?
Absolutely, and that's when a change of scene comes in. This is something that I do feel sometimes, because of having a full-time job, having a toddler at home and everything else that's going on. It is difficult to put this on the priority list.
Over the weekends, I'll have a change of scene, like I may go to a café.
It doesn't take more than two to three hours to put an issue together. It's more about finding that motivation to think of new, interesting ideas.
Now I have a running list. Every time I have an idea, I'll log it and make some notes, which makes my life easier. There are times that I’ve run out of inspiration or ideas for a particular issue, but that's when research comes into play and I find other ways to cope with it.
It doesn't happen too often. I’m usually pretty motivated about sending the newsletter out.
You’re definitely a designer. Do you consider yourself a writer?
No, I don't.
I'm slowly getting into it. When I started taking some of those creative writing and journalism classes in school and at the Academy of Art, I thought I was good at it, but then I saw other people in my class and it was mind-blowing. People around me were so much more talented.
It was more of an awakening that I'm really good with visuals, and I can confidently say that. But with words, I still have a long way to go.
I want to approach this with that sense of curiosity. A friend of mine gave me the advice to approach it with that curiosity and some authority. It's not about being an authority figure in this industry. It's about writing what comes from the heart and your shared experience. That's what I try to do.
I'm still learning a lot about writing, about words, about editing paragraphs in a way that is engaging. Sometimes I tend to go on and on.
Are your physical conditions the same when you're writing versus when you’re doing visual design?
I would say so. I need to be in a place where it's comfortable, it's exciting, it's inspiring. This is why I surround myself with things that excite me and inspire me.
Now, everything has gone digital, but I do have a notebook where I try to write as much as I can on a piece of paper, and that helps as well. I love the art of actually writing.
I have a selection of ten different types of pens. I’ve always been fascinated by stationery, so I’ll pick a different pen to write with.
Anything that gets you excited, right?
To finish off, do you have any other side projects that you're working on?
No, with DearGenie and with my day job, that’s quite a bit.
I would like to do a lot more with DearGenie, and I'm constantly thinking about what else and how else I can make that happen.
There's only so much time in the day, so I have to be very specific with what I'm doing and how I'm doing it.
For the time being, no, but if I do explore anything further, it will be DearGenie.
Learn more about Aaina's work on her website.
Justin has felt the urge to create—whether it was creating websites and apps, or, more recently, building start-ups—since he was in middle school; a tendency that he partly attributes to his entrepreneurial father.
His sense of adventure has seen him move from Oklahoma to San Francisco to New York—and even on a 3-month RV trip travelling around the US to promote his latest (and recently acquired) start-up, Avenify.
Justin’s burgeoning interest in architecture has also seen him undertake some new adventures—including starting a newsletter, beginning to design his dream house and falling in love with Palm Springs.
In our chat, we discuss the overlap between product, design and architecture, finding relaxation in sailing, and letting hobbies be hobbies.
To start off, I would love to learn more about your interest in architecture. How did it come about?
Yeah, definitely. My interest in architecture is a fairly new one. It was only over the past year and a half that I got interested in it—but I've always been a student of design.
I've always been really interested in bits-and-atoms digital experiences in the real world.
I think there's something really energising about seeing things come to life, and architecture was the perfect blend of both of those, where I got to learn more about design and lean into that creative edge.
It sounds like architecture is a recent interest for you. How did design or creativity come into your life before then?
It really kicked off for me when I was in middle school. I grew up in a fairly entrepreneurial family—my dad was running his own software business and, through that I picked up coding. I would work with him on side projects and weekend projects starting from when I was in middle school. At that time, learning things like databases or APIs was out of reach for me, so I leaned into the other part, which was designing what the website would look like or learning how to use various CSS frameworks.
Now, I've doubled down on that as what I like doing and where I like to fall into projects—mostly on the digital side of things and the product design side of things.
With this interest in architecture, I started trying to sketch buildings and figured, if I can look at a website and figure out where the lines go on the website, maybe I can do that on a physical piece of paper. So I just found buildings that were inspiring or interesting to me and started sketching those.
When you start sketching, you start noticing things that you hadn't noticed before. That led me to learning more about why those columns were there or how people did interesting things with the shape of a building.
Ah, that's interesting. You’re interested in desert architecture at the moment—how did that start?
My interest in desert architecture really kicked off when I took a trip out to Ojai, California, and stayed in a really pretty house there.
It was a really interesting style of architecture that I stayed in there, and I ended up visiting Palm Springs with a couple of friends later on. Also, the desert is an environment that I never had any exposure to, so I'm drawn to the surrealism of the desert—it's so different from anything else I've experienced.
Let’s dive in and talk about your background in product. You mentioned that your family's an entrepreneurial family. How did you get started?
Yeah. We built these apps and websites on the weekends, and similarly to architecture, I was really energised by seeing them come to life. Instead of going outside and throwing the ball or playing catch or something, we'd be inside working on our laptops. I'm sure my mom hated that.
We would build these things and I’d get to see them be usable. At the beginning, it was obviously something that looked like it was built by a middle schooler and his dad—so it didn't have very far reach outside of my mom who used it once before she went to the grocery store or something, I'm sure.
I did that long enough that I always felt this urge to keep doing it—to keep building something new. As my former employers can attest, I'm very impatient and always wanting to leave my job and go start something on my own again. I'm always hacking on something.
Wow. Then that translated into you founding your first start-up, Kite?
I went to the University of Oklahoma for a little bit studying Management Information Systems, which is this blend of business and computer science, knowing that I either wanted to go and work in tech or in start-ups.
We attended this hackathon in Atlanta, and we had 36 hours to build something. There was an award there for the best solution to online harassment. We decided that the easiest way to combat that would be to build this service that developers or website owners could integrate into their platforms that would automatically be able to detect this kind of abuse or harassment and classify what kind of abuse or harassment it was and who it was targeted against.
We built that into this developer API, piloted it with a couple of apps and companies, but we didn't get very far. It's a really hard problem to solve. But it was the first project that I had built that I felt like had a lot of potential, and so while we were working on it, I ended up leaving Oklahoma. I transferred out to a business school in San Francisco, where I got even more exposure to investors and start-ups. A little less than a year later I would raise money to go full time on my most recently sold start-up.
Amazing. What did your friends or your family say when you left to move to San Francisco?
It was certainly a big change. It kicked off the first in many events that I would do something out of the norm that didn't quite follow the traditional path of going to Oklahoma, staying in the area, getting my degree after four years.
After I got an offer to join Product Hunt I FaceTimed my dad first. I told him that I was thinking about leaving college, taking a year off and joining Product Hunt full time. It was obviously shocking to him. We figured out the game plan on how to tell my mom about it and told her. I think both my family and my friends would all say that at this point it's expected. If I FaceTime them out of the blue, it's probably that I've either quit my job or I'm moving somewhere else to go and do another startup or something.
Nice. Did you know since you were a child that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
I knew that I wanted to work in tech and create things as early as middle school. Part of that was a side effect of being around my dad and his business for so long. I was always exposed to tech conferences or meetings that he was going to.
I don’t think I actively considered the idea of what being a start-up founder would be like as kind of a job until later in high school—and even then I was still leaning towards the classic, going to work for Apple or Google or as the roadmap. Even now, I think it's interesting to have the drive or the desire to be a start-up founder. I don't think that you can just quit your job and decide that you're going to be a founder someday.
It’s more of a hammer in search of a nail. In my experience, the most success I've had as a founder has been when I'm doing other things I enjoy and letting my curiosity run wild until I find something that's worth working on—and then I go and commit to that full-time.
Tell me more about your most recent start-up, Avenify. How did that come about?
Avenify enabled nursing students to pay for school through income share agreements, which meant that they got funding up front in exchange for a percentage of their future income—and then once they graduated and earned more than $30,000 a year, they would start making payments as a percentage of their income—and those payments would pause if they lost their job or became unemployed.
We saw it as a really safe, affordable and flexible solution—especially compared to traditional private loans today. We didn't require a credit score or a co-signer, we'd underwrite it based on their academic performance and future earning potential.
And then on top of that, we tried really hard to build a brand around being invested in these students—not like the other more corporate or predatory lenders that we see on the market today.
It started in 2018 when my co-founder and I saw the rise of income share agreements at coding bootcamps like Lambda school—and it was frustrating to us that, as recent students, that this option wasn't available for us or our peers. We had friends that had worked four jobs to pay their way through school. I knew that if I didn’t have to take out student loans, I probably would have been much less likely to do things like leave school or move across the country or go and work for startups.
What was the start of that process like?
We raised a little bit of money for it. We moved into an RV, and we set off on this 10,000 mile road trip around the U.S. where we literally went and knocked on doors of financial aid departments with our pitch deck, asking them what they thought of the idea and if they were interested in using it.
We very quickly learned that it was difficult to sell financial software to financial aid departments when you're a young looking twenty year old living out of an RV. We also learned that it would take much longer than the four months of runway that we had in our bank account to actually get the solution up and running and make money. So we took a step back and thought about what it is we're actually trying to solve and what our core competencies were.
We figured out that the real problem we wanted to solve was that students needed access to funding, and we thought one of our core competencies was that we had this insight from this young person's perspective.
And so, in mid 2019, we launched our direct to consumer product, where students could apply directly for funding. And then on the backend, we allowed investors to buy shares, in students' future income—so we had this marketplace model that enabled investors to bet on that earning potential and fund students more.
Amazing. I want to rewind back to the RV part of things. Whose idea was it? And what was the thinking behind living out of an RV?
When we had started the idea of raising money to go full-time on this my co-founder, Timo, was still in school, and I was at another job. We were looking at what apartment rent would be and how much money we would have to raise to support ourselves. We were thinking, wow, that sounds really expensive—especially if we signed a 12 year lease, that's really long term.
We also didn't want to take any risks in terms of sales that our cold emails wouldn't work or that they wouldn't pick up the phone, and decided that if there was any risk of them not responding to our email, then we should show up in person. He and I had also talked about this idea of living in a van more broadly with what these people are doing with their converted sprinter vans, or just travelling around to these different national parks.
We were faced with this opportunity where we had no job other than the one that we'd given ourselves, we have a little bit of money to do something with, and we're also in a position where we're going to be talking with potential clients all around the U.S., and decided it would be a fun opportunity to do that.
We started in San Francisco and knew that we'd spend three months on the road. We wanted to do a loop around the U.S., and from there then we started driving and stopped where we wanted and would talk to schools in between.
Wow. What were some of the most memorable parts of the trip?
We stayed up on this big mountain that was at 9,000 feet elevation. It was this super pretty campsite, and of course it was the middle of the week and we were staying there for a week and a half, so it wasn't that busy. We had the place to ourselves. I think the highlight for me was just getting to see that scenery—and especially the change in scenery. I don't think a lot of people get to experience that many places in that short amount of time.
We also got the benefit of having hours on the road to just talk about the business or work on the business. I often joked to our investors that if you can survive the first three months of your business in an RV with your co-founder, the rest of the road is going to be pretty easy.
At the start of our conversation, you called yourself a student of design. How does that impact your start-ups and entrepreneurship?
Yeah. I think something that I've realised is how much the experience matters to the customer.
It's not just about how it looks, but also how it feels—whether it's encouraging messages throughout a long application process or whether it's creating moments of joy and delight in a process that typically feels like paperwork.
The more that I've worked with start-ups I realised how important that was to me and how much priority I placed on that. When I think about the design of start-ups, it's really about how you make your product feel to the customers. Just having a better experience for your members and really showing that you care about them and you're building an empathetic product that serves them.
That's really interesting. How do you think your recent interest in architecture and design has influenced the way you look at product or tech?
When I look at houses now, I find myself putting myself in the shoes of the architect, thinking about the flow of the building or what purpose that building is trying to accomplish.
I don't think that there's a huge difference in whether you're designing a building or whether you're designing a website. You’re still dealing with the idea of space. You're dealing with the idea of constraints, and the idea of attention or focus. The only thing that really changes the medium of that message or the scale of that message.
You also have a newsletter. Do you consider yourself a writer as well?
I definitely enjoy writing. I haven't done it as much recently as I want to, which is part of the reason that I put a newsletter out this week. I’m trying to get back into the routine of things.
Writing gives me the ability to kind of formulate the thoughts that I'm having or synthesise those thoughts that I'm having and get them down on paper. If I had an idea for a house, I might sketch it out so I could see it more clearly—writing gives me the opportunity to clarify some of the thoughts I'm having.
It gives me the excuse to go and learn either from interesting people or about interesting topics that I might not have learned about on my own—so you create this web of insights and learnings that you connect later. So even though I didn’t really intend on learning about a new architecture or somebody through the newsletter, it often happens that I'll learn something new that piques my interest again.
You've mentioned looking at magazines for inspiration—are you a visual person or a word person?
Despite me spending a lot of time in the visual world, I think I spend a lot more time on the word side of things. I’m on Twitter 24 hours a day. I'll throw a bunch of books in my Kindle app and I'm always on my phone reading something.
Especially in architecture and design, it's really interesting to read what people write and their insights.
It’s really important to get that additional perspective, even if you don't agree with their perspective or their thoughts. It helps to become a more well-rounded critic of design. It's really important to have that informed growth.
What does your dream home or property look like? Do you have an idea of that?
I have a couple of things in the works. The thing that I often come back to most is this idea of a friends and family compound. What does it look like to have your ten closest friends or family members live on this property with you? Are you all in the same building with other buildings with amenities, or do you all have your own house—or is it spread out like a little neighbourhood or village?
Here in Brooklyn, I'm living in a co-living house. Our entire building has 21 people that live in it. I really liked that idea of community, and want to explore how to do that most effectively.
How far are you into that process? And what is your process like?
Right now I'm trying to create this mental model or this testing framework to think about. I'll put myself in the place of whatever I'm looking at and go, “If I had nine friends living in these little tiny houses around the woods, how would that work?”
Obviously nobody wants to spend their day in a tiny house all together—and if you have nine people and everyone has a tiny house it’s going to be hard for everyone to get together. Maybe you'd actually need a central house.
Trying to create this framework of—much like design or start-ups—what it is that I'm trying to accomplish.
In your Twitter bio, you mention that you’re a sailor?
I grew up sailing on lakes in Texas with my dad and my grandfather. I didn't appreciate it as much when I was a kid as I do now—there was so much involved that kids don't like doing. You’ve got to set up the sail or take it down or clean or do whatever.
Now, where I'm focused so much on work—and I also have these side projects or hobbies that can feel a little bit like work sometimes—there's a really big tendency to get overwhelmed or burnt out with those things. So last year I decided that I needed something that was away from my desk, out of my house.
I decided to go and get my actual sailing certification and ended up joining one of the sailing clubs, here in New York. It was really great. There's something really meditative about being on the water and being in control of the boat. It’s a great excuse to get outside.
You use a lot of words like meditative and gaining energy from things. What do you do to recharge or give yourself energy?
I'm certainly trying to get better at recharging and calibration. I might be in tune with how I'm feeling and what gives me energy or takes it away, but I have not been the best at acting on those insights.
That's one thing I tried to get better at last year.
Especially during the toughest year that we had at the company and with everything going on. Right now, I'm trying to get better at kind of doubling down on those things that work for me, whether it's realising that I'm burnt out and sitting down and reading a book or going sailing.
I've often found that the things that help me re-centre and refocus are more passive activities, like sailing or sketching—activities that allow me to sit and be still, without having to actually sit and do nothing. I'm awful at sitting and doing nothing.
Anything that allows me to reduce or remove that stimulation from Twitter or texting or meetings or managing my calendar has been really healthy.
How do you ensure that your hobbies stay as things that give you joy and not things that stress you out?
I'm a bad person to ask about that. My hobbies stress me out and get away from me. My dad was one of the first people to point this out, where I came up with this idea for something and he said, yeah, that would be cool—and then a few minutes later I sent him a logo I had made. He said, maybe you should focus on making it an actual thing before you go and make a logo for it.
With my architecture hobby, I start off just reading about them or looking at photos and then it's like, “What are your plans for this weekend? I'm going to design a house.” It’s like, “well, why don't you take it slow?”
I'm working on getting better at it. Part of that is appreciating why I do it, whether it's to relax and recharge and get away from business or whether it's to do something that I enjoy without the profit motive involved.
To finish, going back to your interest in architecture—where do you see that developing?
I was thinking about this the other week—especially thinking about where I wanted the newsletter.
There's one idea that it could spin into a broader newsletter. If you think about what Morning Brew did to newsletters, I could do for the Architectural Digest of the world and build something that is more appealing to young people and people like me who are not architects.
I was daydreaming about what it would look like if I started an architectural design firm with somebody, or worked with a designer to go and build some of these projects at some point—and I reminded myself that all of those options would be great and it would be a lot of fun, but wouldn't really be possible if I didn't have that audience for my newsletter.
I reminded myself that, especially for the hobby, it doesn't really matter what my long-term goal is—this is a thing that I enjoy doing today.
Editor's note: Since we last spoke, Justin has announced a new iteration of Clean Lines: Linear Magazine. We look forward to seeing this take shape! Keep up to date with Justin's work on X.
What happens when you have a social media following of almost 100,000, and that gets suddenly wrenched from you?
Pearl was working as a social media influencer, alongside her day job as a chef, when her Instagram account was hacked.
That led to a complete reset—in more ways than one. She started from scratch again in building her following. But that also afforded her the opportunity to reassess her priorities and refocus on her burgeoning culinary career.
Today, Pearl still takes on modelling jobs as a side hustle, but her eyes are firmly focused on her day job—and true passion—cooking. If asked to pick between modelling and being a chef, she’d choose cooking, “in a heartbeat.”
We chat about how her two worlds intersect, and how one has fed into the other. Being a model, she says, has helped her to become more confident and overcome her natural shyness. Being a chef, especially in a male-dominated environment and working 12-hour days, has helped her to develop a strong personality that she carries with her into the modelling world.
A self-professed ‘island girl’ from the Philippines, Pearl is a long way from home now as she carves her own path in Los Angeles. It’s been a trying year as well, and we share several heartfelt moments as we talk about her experience with depression, and her path to overcoming her mental health struggles. Whilst Pearl is still active on social media, her attitude towards it has evolved. The desire to be an ‘influencer’ has now taken a backseat. Social media has become a platform to spread positivity and encourage female empowerment. (Plus sneak peeks of her culinary prowess.)
Hey Pearl, we’re rooting for that food truck dream, and perhaps a cooking show someday too.
Tell me about your love for cooking.
My grandfather was a chef.
I grew up watching him cook everyday. My mom wasn't really a good cook, so it was always my grandpa who would do the cooking for us.
I remember one time I was 10 years old and my neighbour had a wedding. My grandpa was the chef and I just watched him butcher a whole cow.
To me as a 10-year-old kid, it was just really, really cool. How can you do that? That is amazing. It blew my mind.
I remember reading that you actually wanted to be an actor when you were growing up. Where did that dream come from?
My mom was into acting, and when I was a little kid, she always pushed me into school contests and talent contests.
As I was growing up she trained me in acting, she was my acting coach and she was really good at it.
I did acting until I was 15, and I did voice, piano, guitar lessons, but I realised it was not my passion. My heart wasn’t in it but I was just doing it because I wanted to learn.
I’m not sure if it’s just a thing in Asian culture with every Asian parent forcing their kids to learn instruments and be smart and talented.
When did you begin to consider becoming a chef?
When I was 21, I just felt lost. I was asking myself, “What am I going to do? I’m already 21 and I don’t know what course to take.” I hadn’t found my passion yet and I had seen all my friends going to college, while I was just sitting on the sidelines.
My grandpa said to me, “Oh, why don't you try culinary school? Because you love cooking.”
I always wanted to cook, but on the island, there were not a lot of options of schools to go to. I went to a private college and they offered a hotel and restaurant management course. I did that for around a year thinking that I would learn cooking, but they told me I would only learn cooking in my third or fourth year.
I thought, “I don’t want to waste three or four more years without learning how to cook.”
So I dropped out of college and I decided that I would have to move to the city and be at a real culinary school if I wanted to learn how to cook.
At the time, I wasn’t really good at cooking.
On my first day of culinary school I remember I had no idea what the ingredients in front of me were. Growing up on an island, I was used to only seeing fresh produce from my backyard. I remember seeing parsley and thinking, “I’ve never seen parsley before!”
Apart from being exposed to spices and food that you had never seen before, what was it like transitioning from the island to the city?
It was scary at first because I had never been away from my family. I had always lived with my family and suddenly I had moved away to the big city by myself and I had to figure out everything on my own.
I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t have any friends, I was just there to go to culinary school. It was hard because I’m not really a people person and I’m really shy. It was hard for me to adjust to a big city and meet new people.
What did your mum say when you went to culinary school?
She was really supportive about it, but she never stopped telling me, “Oh maybe you’ll change your mind in the future and you’ll want to pursue acting,” because there were a lot of auditions in the city.
But I said, “It’s ok mum, I’ll just focus on cooking right now. [Acting] is not really what I want."
When you decided to focus on cooking, did you feel sad or apprehensive about leaving the acting world?
No, not really. I felt like I could always go back to it if I wanted to. I always think, “I can be a celebrity chef one day," "I can be on TV and do cooking shows.” It would be the perfect balance of being a chef and being an actor if I wanted to be.
What did you do after culinary school? Did you open a restaurant?
I did. After I graduated from culinary school, I opened an American restaurant with one of my classmates.
We were fresh out of culinary school and we were like, “We can totally kill this! We can open up our own restaurant and we’ll be successful.”
We opened up the restaurant in 2014, I think I was 23 at the time. And then I moved to America in 2016 while still having my restaurant back home.
What made you decide to move to America?
Even though I had my own restaurant, I felt like I wanted more and more and I felt that I still had a lot to learn. Having a restaurant doesn’t suddenly mean that you know everything as a chef or restaurant owner.
I’m always eager to learn and experience new things, like trying out different food from different cultures. That’s how I learn. It doesn’t have to be at an expensive restaurant, you can eat from a taco truck and learn something from it.
When I moved to America, I started working as a chef in Miami. I worked at the Ritz Carlton hotel for two years and I loved my whole experience of working in a hotel, but in Florida there’s not much of an Asian community so I always felt homesick.
I decided that it was time for me to move somewhere else, so I moved to LA because the food scene here is very vibrant. There’s so much culture here — Latin, Asian, European — everything is here. It’s so easy to try different cuisines if you want to.
I didn’t know anyone when I first moved, but I’ve been here for around four years now and it feels like home. There’s a big Asian community in LA and so many Asian and Filipino restaurants here. When I miss home I just go to a Filipino store and I feel like I’m already home.
Do you see your family much in the Philippines?
Ever since I left my country, I’ve never had a chance to go and visit. So it’s been a really long time. Thank God for Facetime!
How does your mum feel about you being a chef in LA?
She’s really, really proud. She sometimes still says, “I can’t believe that you’re a chef now.” Growing up, I wasn’t the brightest kid in the class and I never felt smart enough.
But having the skills that I have now and being a chef and being a model at the same time, I think it’s a really good skill to have because not a lot of people can do that.
Speaking of modelling, how did you become a model?
I had a friend whose older sister did photography when I was in high school, and she was looking for a model for her portfolio.
She said to me, “I think you have a pretty face, maybe you could be my model.” I didn’t have any modelling experience at the time, I was only fifteen, but I said, “Yeah, we can try it out.”
So we did photo shoots and all the photos came out great. I posted them on social media and other photographers started reaching out to me and were telling me I was good. I was loving it!
What did you love about it?
It made me feel confident about myself. I’m a really shy person, but when I’m in front of a camera, I become a different person. I change from being shy to feeling like a beautiful and confident woman. It’s like acting.
I also love meeting talented, creative people. Like I said, I’m shy and I’m not good at socialising with other people, but being a model helps me be more open to making new friends. It helps me be more friendly and become more comfortable with people.
And I can say that I’m really getting good at it! Modelling helps me a lot; you’ll go to a photo shoot and you don’t know who you’re going to work with, you haven’t met the photographers before and then they turn into friends. It’s really, really nice.
And you were also working as a social media influencer on the side?
Yeah.
I used to have a large following on social media and then last year someone hacked my Instagram and they asked for money.
I reached out to Instagram but they didn’t really help me. Some influencers tried to help me by sending emails to Instagram but I never really got help from Instagram.
I had almost 100k followers and I was working with big companies, from clothes to hair products to shoes.
This company reached out to me and they said that they were a startup clothing company and they wanted me to be an ambassador for them. They sent me a link to check out their products and I thought, “This is great, another opportunity for me.” I was reading their email and then I clicked their website link and my Instagram just got hacked.
I had to start from scratch and I was really sad. Because of the pandemic and the restaurants shutting down, I had lost my job as a chef and [being an influencer] was the only thing that helped me pay my bills.
It was my livelihood. And someone took it away from me. I was so heartbroken and I took a break from social media for a few months after it happened.
What did you do during those months?
I started looking for a job, even though a lot of restaurants were not open at the time. The restaurants I had worked at were completely shut down.
I was like, “I'm just going to focus on my career as a chef,” because social media is not a stable career and it can be taken away from you anytime.
I told myself I could still do modelling as a side hustle, but I was not going to focus on social media anymore.
If your account hadn't been hacked, would you have made the decision to focus on your culinary career?
At the time, I was working as a chef and a social media influencer and a model at the same time. I remember thinking it’s crazy how you make more money just by posting on your Instagram and being a model than by being a chef and working eight hours in the kitchen, which is really stressful.
It came to a point where I just wanted to quit being a chef and do full-time modelling because I made more money from that. But at the same time, it wasn’t my passion. My heart is with cooking, so it’s a good thing that I didn’t quit!
Wow. What’s your schedule like as a chef?
I start at 9:00 AM, sometimes earlier, and sometimes I stay until 10:00 PM. It's around 12 to 14 hours of working in the kitchen. I work weekends too, weekends are my busiest time. You’re lucky if you get weekends off and I rarely get weekends off.
Your schedule is obviously very demanding. How do you keep yourself motivated?
Cooking makes me physically tired because of the long hours, and it also makes me mentally tired because you’re always under stress and pressure. But at the end of the day when I finish my list of tasks it feels like a relief and I'm proud of myself.
I’m always up for a challenge. When I come to work, I look at the long list of things that I have to do, and at the end of the day, I think, “Ok, let’s see how I challenged myself today.” I always challenge myself to be faster each day and become better at my job.
And if customers like the food, they come into the kitchen to compliment my cooking and that makes me happy because that’s what I do.
I make people happy with the plate that I make. It’s like an expression of who I am on a plate. If people like it, it really means a lot to me.
Is cooking an art or a science to you?
To me, cooking is an art. When I go to photo shoots, people always ask me, “Why did you want to become a model?”
And I always say, “Well, I work as a full-time chef.” My real job is being a chef.
I express my art in a plate that I make or in the food that I make. When I go to photo shoots, that's a different form of art. You pose, you wear make-up, you do your hair, the dress that you're wearing, it's a different kind of art.
So with cooking, it's like, hey, this is me on a plate. And when it comes to photo shoots, this is me dressed as a model. I'm not dressed in a stained chef’s jacket, I'm wearing a nice dress and have nice hair and colourful makeup. So it's different but it’s the same: it's art, but in two different worlds.
I love that. If I asked you to cook something that expresses yourself, what would you cook?
I would say seafood pasta, with white wine and butter and fresh herbs and spices. I’ll say seafood pasta because I came from an island and I’m an island girl.
I love pasta a lot, I can always eat pasta. I’m really good at cooking it, it’s one of my specialties. For every staff meal, I cook pasta and all the employees love it.
On your days off, do you cook for yourself?
Because I cook for 12 to 14 hours a day, when I come home I just don’t have the energy to cook for myself. So most of the time I buy takeout food. I get Asian food, pizza, burgers, and I go to food trucks sometimes.
Most people think that chefs eat like a king, but that's not how it is. We don’t eat good food every day, we just cook for other people, 12 to 14 hours every day. We don’t have time to cook for ourselves, and it’s really sad. [laughs]
But when I'm working, I always make meals for everyone. Other chefs don't really care about their employees, but when I go to work, no matter how busy we are, I make food for all of us.
We're going to eat. The customers are eating and we deserve to eat too. If our food takes a little bit longer to be cooked, it’s ok. It's important that we can eat too.
The restaurant that I work at now is a family-owned restaurant and it’s a really small community. I consider my co-workers to be family, they’re really close to me.
That’s lovely. You work long hours and weekends. When do you fit in the modelling?
Usually when I get projects, I tell them I need to know the date first, and I have to know at least two weeks in advance so I can work around my schedule as a chef.
I just tell my boss, “Look, I can't work on this weekend because I have a photo shoot,” and they're very understanding and considerate about it because they know that I've been working a lot. And they know that I do modelling as my side hustle.
When you’re on a photo shoot, what emotions go through your head?
Sometimes being a model is kind of stressful. Usually, I do group photo shoots and work with other models. So when you show up and you see these other beautiful girls, sometimes you can feel insecure and think, “She’s taller than me, I wish I was curvy like her, I feel like I’m too skinny and I wish I was a little bit curvy.” So sometimes it makes you feel insecure.
But I think it's just part of being a model. One time I went to this photo shoot and I was working with models of different colors and different sizes; all beautiful women. And we're all in the dressing room and you see how confident they are. We were trying on our outfits and there was nothing that fit me; I was too skinny and I felt like I just wanted to go home. But other models were telling me, “I wish I was skinny like you, because I’m curvy and it’s so hard to find clothes that fit me.”
That’s when I realised that no one is perfect, even models have their own insecurities too. I feel like you just have to be confident and accept who you are and what you are as a person in order to be happy.
Was there a turning point when you stopped feeling insecure or stopped comparing yourself to other models?
I used to always compare myself to other beautiful models. I wished that I had bigger eyes or a smaller nose or Kylie Jenner lips.
But I just woke up one day and looked at myself in the mirror with no makeup on and I thought to myself, “Yeah, she looks pretty without makeup.”
When I go to work as a chef, I don’t wear makeup at all. I went into the bathroom one time and I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought, “I'm actually really beautiful without makeup! I'm actually loving myself right now."
To me, beauty doesn’t have to be about your physical appearance. I think beauty is more on the inside, I’ve always believed that. To me, having a beautiful character is more important than having a beautiful face and not being beautiful on the inside.
Do you feel like you’re two different people when you’re in the kitchen with no makeup in your chef’s clothing, compared to when you’re modelling?
Maybe I look different, but for me, I don’t feel like different people.
Being a chef gives me this really strong personality in the kitchen because I'm surrounded by men every day. Most of the time I'm the only girl in the kitchen and I have to deal with guys all the time. So I have to be more firm to be respected.
People will say, “Oh, she can't do it because she's a woman.”
And I say, “No, you're wrong. Just watch me, I can do it.”
The restaurant industry is a male-dominated industry, and being a woman is tough.
Have you brought any of that personality into the modelling world?
Yeah, I have. Most of the photographers are male and you hear stories from other models of male photographers who make them feel weird.
So far, I've never had a really bad experience working with male photographers and I feel like I already know how to work with them because I'm used to working with a lot of men in the kitchen.
Every time I do photo shoots with them, they'll be like, “You're so easy to work with, you walk in and you’re the one running the show.” I know what to do as a model and for them, it just makes the job so easy.
You said earlier that being a chef is your full-time job and modelling is your side hustle. Has that always been the case?
Yeah. People always ask me, “If you had to choose between cooking and modeling, what would you choose?”
And I always say, “I’d pick cooking, in a heartbeat.”
It’s sad because in our industry right now, we are underpaid. Some people want to go to culinary school because they think that chefs make a lot of money, or that when you own your own restaurant, you make a lot of money, but that is not true.
Most of us do it because it's our passion, it's what we love to do.
Yeah I do it for a living, but it also makes me happy and satisfied in my life at the same time, knowing that I’m living my dream, I'm doing my passion. I go to work every day and I don't feel like I'm going to work. I just show up and I'm happy.
What do you do when you need to recharge? Do you have routines and rituals when you have time off?
I go out, see my friends and catch up with them because I’m always so busy. We try new restaurants that we haven’t been to before. I go hiking; I’m an outdoor person so I go hiking or go to the beach or the swimming pool and recharge.
I call my family too; I always call them on my day off, I have to make time to call my family.
And I spend time with my boyfriend because I barely have time to see him while I’m working. It's about spending time with the people I love and care about on my day off.
Quality time is really important to me.
You joked earlier about becoming a celebrity chef in the future and being on a TV show. Is that something that you see yourself doing?
It used to be a dream.
Sometimes I still think, “Well, one day, what if I have my own cooking show?” Or people tell me I should start YouTube or TikTok. It's not really my main goal right now.
I feel like I'm still young and I still have a lot to learn. Right now I'm more concerned with preparing myself to be the best version of myself as a chef, I still have a long way to go and so much stuff to learn.
If you were to meet a young chef just out of culinary school and she wanted to open her own restaurant, what would you say to her?
I'd say, go for it and take the risk. I love taking risks; it gets scary sometimes but sometimes it leads you to great opportunities. It gets scary, but it's worth it. And you learn a lot.
What's it like as a chef, when you go out to other restaurants and you try what other chefs have created, their expressions of themselves. What goes through your mind?
Some people think that I must be picky when I eat out, but I am not picky at all. I go to restaurants and I try their food and sometimes I get inspiration out of it.
For example, I’ll go to a really nice fancy restaurant and I try the food and sometimes it blows my mind. I’m like, “Oh my God, how did the chef do this? How did they come up with this idea?”
And then I come home and I think, “I have to figure out how they did that.”
As a chef working behind the scenes, what’s it like when something gets sent back to you because the guests didn't like it?
It makes you question, like: What did I do wrong? Why didn’t you like it? It makes me think I need to improve and it can keep you up all night.
Sometimes you end up not liking the food or they mess up your order. For example, I eat out with my boyfriend a lot and sometimes we don't like the food, but he always feels so embarrassed about returning the food to the kitchen. And I always say, “No, you don't have to feel embarrassed about it if you don't like this food.” If you pay for the food but you didn't like it and they didn't make it the right way that you wanted it, you have the right to return it."
For chefs, satisfying our guests is really important. So I'd rather have my guests telling me that my steak was a little bit well-done, I’d be happy to change it to make sure they’re satisfied with the food I make.
When it happens I always say I’m sorry and I'll make it right. I always say, “You can come back next time and I'll make it better. It’s chef's compliments, you don't have to worry about anything, it's on the house."
What about photo shoots? When you’re not nailing the shot, is that the same feeling?
It's hard because sometimes I have a photo shoot and I’m just having a rough day. I still have to show up no matter how I feel. I have to do the photo shoot and it’s hard because it shows in the photo.
You’re trying to smile and do your job but when a photographer takes your photos, they notice there’s something wrong.
They’ll say, “Your eyes are not speaking to me, or you're smiling, but your eyes, they look sad.” It’s hard to pretend.
You mentioned being depressed and really upset last year when your social media account was hacked. How did you get through that really tough period?
It was tough for me because I’d been through a lot. I got married and then during the pandemic we got divorced.
I was very depressed for this whole year and I'm just slowly recovering. I’m still in the process of healing.
It was tough, but that's life, you have to deal with it. Some people say, “Oh my gosh, you've been through the ringer and back, with being in a different country, away from your family during the pandemic, you get married and then eight months later you get divorced.” It was tough.
What does social media mean to you now?
Before, I was using it like a social media influencer, I was doing promotional ads and being a brand ambassador for all different brands.
Now I use it to spread positivity, especially through female empowerment. I've been through a lot and I just want to encourage other women. I want to say that it's okay if you’re insecure sometimes and that if you’re down, that’s okay. But you have to put yourself first before anyone else because self-love is important.
My goal right now is just to spread self-love and empowerment.
Is the ultimate goal for you to have your own restaurant in California?
Yeah, it’s one of my goals.
Or not even a restaurant, I was actually thinking of getting a food truck. A food truck is cute and you can travel anywhere in it!
There are not that many Filipino restaurants here and most of them are not really fine dining places, it’s more of a home-cooked style and it doesn’t look that appetising.
I want my own restaurant that is more fine dining so that when people from other cultures try it, they’ll think: Filipino food is not that bad, it’s actually good!
Keep up to date with Pearl's latest endeavours on Instagram.
Stephanie’s journey has taken her from San Antonio to New York, LA, and Atlanta—and from College to the Letterman Show, the Olympics and to the realms of interior design.
Stephanie is a self-described ‘hobbyist’—she’ll try anything once—and our conversation ranges from theatre to ballroom dancing to gymnastics—going back to when, as a child, she dreamed of competing at the Olympics (‘despite never having taken a gymnastics class!’), which slowly morphed into a dream that came true—working behind-the-scenes at Tokyo 2020.
We discuss making up for lost time, the myth of make-it-or-break-it moments, and her accidental fall into interior design—spurring her love of ‘all things vintage’ and spawning her business: Redesigned Classics.
Stephanie’s story is one of exploration, fearlessness, and taking leaps—not just strides—into unknown territory, and emerging better for it.
I’d love to know more about your childhood. I know you studied at the University of Nebraska. Where did you grow up, and what were some of your interests?
I was born in San Antonio, Texas. I lived there until right before middle school and then we moved to Nebraska. I was always really involved with choir and drama and the theatre arts. I've done swimming and figure skating and I tried fencing and diving and ballroom dancing, but never was an elite athlete at any of them.
I always love trying new things. I joke that I've tried a lot of sports, but I've never been particularly good at any of them. [laughs]
I think that my background in theatre and drama is kind of what led me to my degree in broadcasting when I went to college.
I started out thinking I was going to be a news producer. Then I got an internship on the Late Show with Letterman my senior year of college, and from there I naturally transitioned into reality TV projects and documentaries and it’s grown from there, so that's how I got my start in producing.
I noticed that on your Instagram that you call yourself a hobbyist. What are some of your hobbies now?
I love trying new things, and I think that's where the hobbyist comes in. I'll look at random Groupons or search things on the internet to do around town, and anything that I think looks particularly interesting I'll try.
I've looked into painting and ceramics lately, that’s something that interests me. I always say I'll try it at least once. If I like it, I'll continue with it. If not, then I'll try something else.
I read that you started a ballroom dancing club when you were in college?
I did! My best friend and I had a ballroom dancing club.
You could take it as an elective and she was like, we should do this. It'll be fun. And it was really fun. There were a couple of us that really enjoyed it, and so after the class, we thought that we should continue.
At the club we would get together and dance, and around town they'd have Salsa night or Latin night and we'd go to these dances and it was fun.
I taught for a little bit after college as a part-time job, but then I got busy with life and work and I haven't done it since.
Do you do any sports?
I still like to go swimming, but I don't do it competitively or anything. I have taken an adult jazz dance class recently, that's been fun.
With the Olympics, I was looking into adult beginner gymnastic classes, but I haven’t found one yet. I'm not going to be the next Shannon Miller, but I could learn to do a cartwheel.
I tried diving in college for a little bit. It was absolutely terrifying and it was so painful! You don't think about it, but when you're hitting it from like a ten meter board, it's like hitting a brick wall. I would come home with bruises all over. I did it for a summer, and then I was asked if I wanted to train to be part of the college team. They needed members obviously, or they would not have asked me. [laughs]
I tried it for a couple of months and I was like, this is not for me. I'm done. I'm not any good. There's no joy in that for me.
I'm going to talk about your day job a little bit. You just worked on the Olympics. What was that experience like? Have you always wanted to work on the Olympics?
When I was little I remember watching the Barcelona Olympics with Shannon Miller as a gymnast, and I knew I was going to be the next Shannon Miller. I've actually never taken a gymnastics class in my life, so that dream had to be modified a little. [laughs]
I've tried lots of sports, but I've never stuck with anything long enough. When I got into TV and broadcasting, I thought that this is a great way to still get to be a part of that history without being an athlete.
That's how that dream started. I’ve wanted to be part of the Olympics since I was five, but the dream of working at it in the TV background came during high school.
What was your day-to-day life like during the Olympics?
It wasn't too hectic, which was nice. I was working on a show that dealt a lot with highlights, so we were clipping a lot of material and looking for the big moments like Simone Biles and Caeleb Dressel, Katie Ledecky in swimming; looking for those gold medal moments and putting them together into packages. That show, we had airing yesterday, actually.
You mentioned earlier that in college you got to work on the Late Night show with David Letterman. How was that?
That was a dream job. I applied and thought that I’d never hear back. I got a call—I had applied for the summer internship—and they told me that due to the massive amount of applications they weren't able to get to me that year, and that they were rolling my application over to the Fall. I thought that was their nice way of saying thank you, we’re not interested. [laughs]
Then I actually did get a call for an interview and it was great. I interviewed with every department—it was a couple hours long. I got to see all the different areas of the studio, so the interview itself was so exciting for me. Then I ended up getting the internship and it was great.
I hadn't lived in New York before, and I fell in love with the city. I fell in love with the show. It was amazing. Then it was 2008. The economy took a hit and there was the writer's strike and the show shut down. I came back to Nebraska and wasn't able to continue with the show. But it was a great experience and it was a great resume builder.
You've been interested in so many different things all your life. How did you settle on majoring in communications?
Part of the reason that it appealed to me so much is that I got to work on so many different shows, especially as a freelancer. It kind of scratches that itch of, one week I'm working on a DIY show for HomeDepot and the next week I'm working on the Olympics and the next week I'm working on a show about felons for reality TV.
I get to do a lot of different things. I'm not necessarily stuck in one genre or one specific job, and I'm not in a cubicle every —so that's part of why I don’t feel restless.
How do you decide what jobs to take? Do you try to avoid being boxed in?
I love getting the opportunity to travel and getting to try new things, and as a freelance producer, once a gig ends, I'm unemployed again—so I'm always looking for the next job. I base it off of what sounds interesting to me at that moment.
I wouldn't say I'm actively pursuing not to get boxed in. I'm just pursuing what I think appeals to me at that moment
How long have you been freelance and how did you prepare yourself for that transition?
I graduated from college in 2008 and then I ended up at a marketing job for about four years. That wasn’t what I had gone to school for, and it's not what I want to pursue.
I had gotten married at that time, and I talked to my husband and told him that I really wanted to try this path and pursue it a hundred percent. I moved out to LA in around 2015, and I've been freelancing since then.
I felt like I had not been pursuing what I had wanted for that last couple of years, so by the time I hit that point, I was so ready to make that leap and go. I was so ready to go out there and do it. I wasn't necessarily nervous, I was just ready to start this new transition.
I was so excited about it that I didn't have the hesitation or the nervousness that maybe I should have had. I did know a couple people out in LA already, so that was comforting.
Did you feel like you were making up for lost time?
Yes, absolutely. I felt like I was starting behind maybe my peers that I had graduated with.
It gave me an extra drive— an extra inner fire that I was five years behind my peers. I felt like I didn't have time to waste, so every day that hustle was there.
I want to talk about one of your earliest production projects, To Love and Support. How did that come about?
I've grown up around military bases in San Antonio, and then in Omaha, Nebraska. My dad is a big history buff. I always remember watching war movies with him as a kid. I was always fascinated by that lifestyle. Then once I got married, my husband joined the air guard.
That was my first time experiencing the military lifestyle up close. I'd always viewed it from afar, but I'd never actually lived it—and when my husband joined it was very different from how I had perceived it. I wanted to explore what the spouse goes through.
As an air guard spouse, my experience is also very different from full-time service member spouses as well. You hear a lot about the service members and what they go through, there's a lot of documentaries about that, but you don't see as much from the spouses side.
I wanted to explore that for my own selfish reasons of being put in this role and wanted to hear from other women and men—that's how it started. I was living in Omaha at the time near the base, so I had access to a lot of great service members and their spouses and I started from there.
We interviewed members from World War II to present day, because I wanted to see how the role of the spouse has changed and how the military has gone about its services towards the spouses. In the beginning there really wasn't a lot of concern for them, there weren't a lot of programs for the spouses. That's changed a lot now and there's a lot more services and programs.
The spouse has changed too. We now see men that are spouses, and their wives are in the military. There’s a lot of different scenarios now that we didn't necessarily see before.
It was interesting to see and go through the generations and hear from the spouses.
Oh, wow. What are some of the most memorable projects that you’ve done recently?
I feel very fortunate, I've gotten to work on some really great projects. I got to work on a documentary on the inauguration of Barack Obama, which was great. We went down to DC and got to see the inauguration live, which was a great experience.
I got to do the European championships in Glasgow, which was a wonderful opportunity. I was the festival producer for that, so I got to see all the artistic acts that came through on the festival stage. Then of course, getting to be in Glasgow in Europe for two, three months. We did a lot of prep work for that and we went over for several weeks beforehand to get everything ready.
Most recently I helped with a documentary on adapted athletes about a wheelchair basketball team from Alabama. It was so great to see those athletes, they were so inspiring. That was really fun.
I've had a lot of great experiences. I feel very blessed.
Your experiences are so diverse. Do you have a favourite genre to work in?
I think that it mainly depends on the show. For the most part I like comedy, I like lighthearted things. I always say that I don't like scary movies. That's not a fun emotion, why would I want to pay to feel that way?
You've been in TV for a long time now. What do you think is the biggest thing you've learned about yourself from working in TV?
In TV and the entertainment field, it's easy to lose sight of who you are and your morals and what's important to you. A lot of times it can be very superficial. It's not real life, and it's easy to get wrapped up in it and think that this is the norm and it's not.
I've learned that you have to stay grounded. It's good to have people around you who know you for who you are and not for what you do, and are able to bring you back to reality.
It's a difficult field, and sometimes it's easy to feel like, ‘This is my one chance. This is my one opportunity. If I don't say yes to this, then I'm going to lose my chance.’ That's something I struggled with early on, so I took some jobs that were not a good fit because I felt that if I didn’t then I wasn’t going to have a career and I wouldn’t be able to go onto the next thing.
You're given lots of opportunities in life. I don't think there's one big chance, make it or break it moment. There are lots of moments along the way, and so you have to know that it's okay to say no, sometimes, to projects.
What was the process of moving away from home like?
I had a very supportive husband, which helps. He actually stayed in Nebraska because his job was there and I was out in LA.
For five years we lived in different states, commuting back and forth. When I first got out to LA, we thought that I'd give it six months. We'd see if I could even find a job. Then I ended up getting work and then I got another job and another one.
It ended up progressing, and six months turned into four or five years. About a year ago we were reassessing before COVID happened and agreed that we should probably live together again. He wasn't thrilled about the idea of LA. He had just decided to transition into real estate investing, and he was like, ‘it's a terrible market in LA, everything's upside down.’
He had allowed me to go and pursue my dreams, and I wanted to be able to help him be in a market where he could pursue his. We decided to move to Atlanta about a year ago, and now we're living together again and both pursuing our passions, which is great.
What are your thoughts on living in LA?
I think you have to have a certain personality to love LA. I don't have anything against LA, I just feel like for me, it wasn't the right place. The industry is very prominent there and I felt that sometimes LA felt very one-sided to me, it felt like it was just the industry.
That might have been true too because I work in the industry, so that's where my surroundings were—but coming to Atlanta, it was more like, ‘Do they make movies here? We didn't even know!’ So it feels a little bit more rounded.
What made you choose to move to Atlanta?
I feel like LA, New York and Atlanta are the three big major cities in the U.S for film, and I was ready to leave LA. I love New York—that's hands down my favorite city in the world, I would move there tomorrow—but my husband was over winters. He didn't want to see snow ever again. [laughs] So that left Atlanta.
I'm originally from Texas, so I like the south. We had friends here and they were very encouraging and welcoming. I think it's been the right choice for us.
You lived in New York previously. What did you love so much about it?
It has such a unique energy and vibe and there's nowhere else like it. It's a huge melting pot, there's just so many different cultures and generations.
Every time I'm there, I feel successful and something about the city makes me feel energised.
I want to talk about how you got into interior design. You've obviously got a creative, artistic background, doing drama and theatre, but interior design is in another realm. How did you get into it?
That was actually because of my husband. Like I mentioned, he has recently started getting into real estate investing and he's acquired some properties, and we've gotten a couple of Airbnb's.
When we were starting out, we didn't have the funds to hire all these contractors and decorators. He asked me if I could stage the places and decorate them for him and I said, ‘why not?’ I had no idea what I was doing but I ended up liking it and enjoying it.
I thought that I should probably get some training, so I got certification in it and started doing it on the side—not just with my husband, but doing it online.
I found that I could do a lot of design consultation online, which is great, because if I'm traveling for work I can do it from anywhere. It's a great way to fill those gaps. That’s how it started and it’s grown from there.
What kind of joy does doing interior design give you?
It's a completely different field. It's not like TV, so it's great to have something that's completely separate from that. It's a break and a different creative outlet.
It's a lot more artistic. I get to look at patterns and colours, which is very different. It’s not like what I'm normally doing and that's fun.
Do you consider production a creative outlet?
It is creative, but in a different way. You're dealing a lot more with stories. I deal a lot with reality TV and documentaries, so you're dealing a lot with personal experiences and finding that storyline and getting welcomed into people's lives. It's more of an emotional aspect of the creative world.
The interior design is a lot more textural and visual; it's a different kind of creativity.
Is there any connection between them? Does one fit the other, or are they completely separate in your mind?
It's interesting because I found that they have actually fed each other. Once I started doing interior design, I started getting into more home-reno type stuff. Right now I'm also working on DIY videos for HomeDepot, which feeds a lot into the interior design aspects—it’s a mash of both worlds.
What's your creative process like as an interior designer? Do you have a fixed time and place that you need to be able to work on something creative?
It depends. When I'm doing the design, the first thing I like to do is get to know my client. What makes them tick? What do they like, what don't they like, and then trying to kind of immerse myself in their style.
That can be anything from looking at magazines to Googling—trying to get myself in that world, especially if it's not a style that I personally am drawn to. I want to make sure that I'm understanding the client and what they want. Their personality speaks a lot about them.
Then as far as the workflow, I try to set scheduled times, but I feel like anyone who works in the creative field knows that sometimes you're not feeling it. Sometimes you don't have the inspiration. Some days you hit the ground running and you're on fire and you have great ideas and flowing, and some days you're sitting there and the design is not coming together.
When you have these creative blocks, when you feel that inspiration doesn't hit, what do you do then?
Sometimes you’ve got to take a step back, you can't force it. Then I get frustrated. Then the design suffers, then things start to go downhill.
I have to take a break. I have to walk away, go for a walk, play with the dogs, watch a show and then come back to it and be like, ‘okay, am I feeling any different about this now?’
Are there any habits or rituals that you have to help you get into that creative space?
I am a big fan of mood boards, both in TV and design. It helps me set the mood and tone and set my mind around the project.
It's a source of inspiration for me, and it helps keep me on track. They help to bring me back if I'm having a rough time. I’ll go back to the mood board and refocus myself.
Was there a moment that you decided to start a company, or was it a gradual, slow process?
I feel like it was a natural progression. I was doing it for my husband and he suggested that I could do it for other people, too. There's downtime in between my day job, so I was trying to find something to fill the gaps, and I realised that I could be doing this.
I started with a company called Decorist, which finds clients for you. I did that for two years, and then I thought, ‘I could do this on my own,’ so I started my company and started doing it for myself.
How did the name Redesigned Classics come up?
I put a lot of pressure on myself because it was my company name, and it would speak for the brand.
It was something that I thought long and hard about. I actually worked with a company on coming up with a name and a design, and we threw around feelings and emotions and thought about what design style speaks to me.
Ultimately how we came up with Redesigned Classics is that I'm taking a classical approach, I'm taking all the rules and the style guides, and then I'm redesigning it. “These are the classic styles, but we're gonna redesign them in a way that speaks to you.”
What's been the scariest part about having your own interior design company?
Art's vulnerable, so you always worry about, ‘people are going to hate my designs’, or ‘they're not going to like what I did.’ Though that really hasn't been the case.
If you're communicating well with your client from the start, you can get a good handle of what they like and what they don't. Still, there's always that fear that I'll be called out and people will think I'm a fake, you know?
Do you ever have that fear in your day job?
Oh, absolutely. There's always the fear that people aren't going to like your work or they'll feel like you're not competent enough—that imposter syndrome feeling.
Fake it till you make it, agree or disagree?
Agree a hundred percent. Even in life you find people that aren't qualified for their job, but they've been so confident about it that they get the client or they get that big job. You realize that, well, I have even more experience than they do—but they have the confidence. Even from a hiring standpoint now, when I'm hiring other crew members, you want the confident person, you don't want the person that's going to second guess themselves because then you start second guessing them.
If you can fake it and have that confidence, it will definitely get you a long way.
With TV, you said that you felt like you had to make up time. With interior design, do you feel like you've got to play catch-up too?
I've never felt like I've been catching up. I guess it’s because it wasn't my main focus. It's always been this side hustle that I fell into.
Producing has always been my primary focus, so I put a lot more pressure on myself in that role than I do with interior design.
I remember reading on your website that your style is decidedly vintage. Tell me about that.
I'm a nostalgic person by nature, so I love that vintage look. It reminds me of my grandma's house. I'm obsessed with the 1950s era and mid-century modern and those types of movies—they're just feel-good moments for me, so I want to incorporate that into my home.
I try to do it in a more modern way so my home doesn't look dated. But it gives me those warm and fuzzy, nostalgic vibes and that's why I'm drawn to it.
You mentioned that you do a lot of online consultation. How does that work?
Everything is 100% online, which means I can work with anyone anywhere, which is fantastic. It also means that I can work from anywhere as well. To start I have a client fill out a form.
It's basically a survey for me to get to know them. What room are we looking at? What styles do you like? What colours do you like? A lot of people may not even know what their style is, so with the form, there's pictures and prompts to help them through it. Once we go through that process, then I can get a feel for what we want to do and where we want to go.
I'll come up with some mood boards for them to start to make sure I'm on the right track, and then we'll go into the actual room design. I create everything in 3D so they can see what the room will look like when it's done with all the furniture in place.
Then I provide a shopping list with links to all the products online so they can purchase it all.
You just got back from Stamford, Connecticut. Where would you like to go next?
I love New York, especially in the fall. I'd love to get a job there in the fall. I'd love to go international again—the Paris Olympics are coming up in 2024. [laughs]
I like traveling, especially for work. If I can be mobile I can work in Austin or I can work in New York, it opens up a lot of opportunities. It's one of my favourite parts of the job.
If they're longer contracts, it gives me an opportunity to see what it would be like to live there, not necessarily just on vacation. I got to do a job in Abu Dhabi a few years ago, which isn't necessarily someplace that if I were travelling myself I would think of—I would probably choose Italy or somewhere. [laughs]
It was great because I got to experience and see this part of the world that I maybe wouldn't have seen otherwise, and I lived there for two months.
What do you do when you're travelling in a place for two months?
Any free time I have, I like to go and sight-see and play the tourist. Also getting to do the everyday things, like finding my local grocery store and seeing the different foods that they have available there that you wouldn't see anywhere else, that’s fun for me.
What do you do for self care?
I love sleep.
I'm one of those people that has to get their eight hours, so I’m very protective of my sleep schedule and making sure I get the rest that I need, because I know that it's important to me.
I mean, sometimes work doesn't allow that. There are times when I've come back from a job and I spend a week sleeping and hanging out in my pajamas, recovering. I know that I need that, so I make sure that I have that time.
How do you keep a separation between the day job and the interior design business?
If I'm not doing the day job, then I'll treat interior design as my primary job. Sometimes I'll be finishing up with a client when I get another TV job, so I'll have to finish that before.
Usually I'll do my TV job during the day, and then I'll go home and I'll set aside a couple of hours and I'll just work on my interior design project. I try not to cross them over because I feel like it's unprofessional. It's distracting for both.
Do you still view one as the day job and the other the side hustle, or are they of equal status now?
I still view producing as my primary job and I view interior design more as the side hustle. I feel like the producer job always trumps that—if I had an opportunity to take a new design client or a producing job, I would take the producing job.
It's where my background is and where my focus has always been. For me, that's the dream job, and I want to continue pursuing that, whilst the design was this happy accident that came into my life.
To wrap up, you're a producer, interior designer, hobbyist; what else would you consider yourself to be?
Oh gosh, I don't know. I like trying new things and I find that if you find something and you love it, then a lot of times you can find ways to monetize it; opportunities open.
I just go with it.
As Helen says, “it always goes back to Twitter.” I came across Helen’s colourful moodboard during a leisurely scroll and, from there, became entranced by her impressive career marrying music and tech.
These days, Helen’s musical recitals are largely reserved for her family at home but her proficiency with a keyboard extends beyond music.
As one of five lead developers of WordPress—a CMS responsible for approximately 43% of the internet—it’s fair to say Helen knows her way around computer keys too!
The harmonious relationship between tech and music first became apparent to Helen in an eighth-grade typing class. Today, Helen maintains that some of her most valuable assets as an open source developer were nurtured whilst sitting on a piano stool.
Helen’s technical ability is indisputable but her success, as a Chinese woman at the top of a historically gate-kept industry, largely lies in her ability to see beyond the code—analysing the ‘why?’ of her work.
In our chat, Helen recalls her awakening to responsibility, calls for more human interaction in the software space, and explains how piano has shaped her understanding of the world.
Let’s start with: what was your childhood like?
I have two kids. Watching them makes me think a lot about what I was like as a child. Did I terrify my parents the way that my own children terrify me?
I was born in New York—a lot of who I am is a New Yorker. My parents split when I was young and I grew up with my dad, which definitely impacted how I was raised. My dad believed that you had to really try something before you could decide you didn’t like it.
A big thing for me growing up was piano. Piano has had a huge influence on my relationship with tech and who I am today.
Tell me more about the piano.
I started piano when I was five and it quickly became an integral part of my life.
I took piano lessons from an older Chinese woman in our apartment building but she soon decided I needed a more serious teacher. It was one of those things that just clicked for me. I started going to a more serious piano teacher and I got involved with piano competitions—which I hated.
I’m not competitive, at least externally. Doing something better than somebody else is not important to me, what I really care about is if I did something in a way that I am happy with.
As a teen, I was really unhappy with piano and it got to a point where I didn’t want to do it anymore. I had won a scholarship for my lessons because they were very expensive, especially for a single dad who works as a teacher, but I hardly practised. However, in order to keep the scholarship, I had to give an hour-long recital from memory.
In the end, my dad rescued me. He proposed that we do a violin sonata so that I wasn’t alone and I didn’t have to memorise so much. Only as an adult do I really appreciate what he did to keep that going for me.
That whole experience taught me an important lesson: I enjoy playing music with other people. I started playing for church choirs, which I have continued throughout my life, and it made piano something I enjoyed doing again.
Was tech of any interest to you growing up?
Not really, but I was always doing dumb stuff on the computer. I did a website-making competition in the eighth grade, not because I showed any special affinity for it so much as I already knew how to type.
In my computer class, the first thing we did was take a typing test. I already knew how to type; piano really helped with the coordination aspect. I wasn’t going to get anything out of this class, because it was essentially a typing class, so instead I had an independent study session with the computer teacher.
In this independent study, I learned all the stuff I’d need for this website competition, a little bit about Flash, a little bit about Paint Shop Pro and a little bit about HTML. I didn't get anywhere with the competition—I wasn’t actually very good at it and I didn’t pay it much attention.
At that age, you don’t think about your future. You just want to talk on the computer with your friends and kiss a boy for the first time!
Back to music, your dad is a musician too?
My dad only listens to classical music: Beethoven, Mozart and a little bit of Tchaikovsky. He grew up in China in the communist era, when Western influences were banned—a Beethoven record was contraband.
When things loosened up, my dad taught himself to play violin because he loved it so much. He had to be self-taught because you were still not permitted to learn classical music.
So I was exposed to a lot of classical music growing up, growing up, classical piano in particular. I think, and my dad agrees despite being a violinist, that piano is easier to listen to alone than violin.
Are your kids musical?
They both play piano. My oldest child is very naturally gifted; reading music immediately makes sense to him. My other child learns very quickly, but it's not the same kind of innate understanding of music notation and scores and how to connect that with your hands and movement.
I don't care whether my kids are good at piano or not, but I do believe it gives you the strongest foundations for if you choose to go and do something else.
Piano also has a much lower barrier to entry than basically any other instrument. Our piano is not off-limits, whereas my children can't just pick up my husband's clarinet and start playing—it's much more delicate… and expensive.
You went on to study piano, is that right?
I did my undergrad in piano. Then, for my master's degree, I got into a competitive piano-specific program at the Eastman School of Music. I loved it and I learned so much. However, when I finished I realised it wasn’t the career that I actually wanted. I thought it would be great to have a paycheck and health insurance and being a pianist wasn’t the best option for that—it's a lot of freelancing and uncertainty and it does not pay well.
We grow up with the idea that you go to college to study a ‘thing’ and then you go to work to do that ‘thing’ for the rest of your life. That's still the mindset for a lot of people—definitely in my family.
The music conservatory at Eastman was hiring a web developer and so I applied.
Did you have any experience in software at this point?
Whilst studying at Eastman, I was part of the graduate student association and I worked in the computer lab. Working in the computer lab meant I restocked the printer and made sure that freshmen were not watching things they were not supposed to be watching on the computers…
But because I was in the lab, the web developer at the school asked if I wanted to try making a webpage for the graduate student association and so he taught me some basic PHP and the concepts around my SQL databases. I had a basic understanding of this because I started college as a double major in computer science and piano. If I'm being honest, that was as a result of the pressure to major in something ‘productive’—being a music major was a little controversial in my family and community.
Although I found programming easy to pick up, I did not enjoy it as a major. I was deeply unhappy and so, instead of suffering, I dropped it.
I ended up back in computers because it turns out that when it comes to adult life and supporting yourself, computers are a good option.
What is the most important factor in choosing a career?
My priority is not making a ton of money. Money is nice, but it’s not my priority.
My priority has always been having a family. I didn't grow up with a ton of stability and so I wanted to create that for myself. I realised that working with computers could provide that.
Why do you think you got the job at Eastman?
One of the big reasons they hired me was because I was a collaborative piano major.
Eastman is a world-class music conservatory, it would be difficult for someone who has not experienced music at that level to understand the level of specialisation and the needs of music professors.
My job was to write the code in service of the school—the programming skills could be learned, but the human part would be much harder for somebody to pick up.
What was your first project in your new role?
The first thing we needed was a blog. A fellow pianist, Chris Foley who runs the collaborative piano blog, had recently told me about WordPress and so I figured I’d look into it.
The big appeal of WordPress, over platforms like Blogger, was static pages. As a musician, the prospect of having a space to talk about music whilst keeping a static ‘about me’ page for self-promotion was really cool and so I used WordPress to create this blog.
I wrote terrible code—I'm sure I would be terribly embarrassed by all of it!
What other features initially attracted you to WordPress?
Working with WordPress made me understand the meaning of a content management system (CMS).
As a responsible web developer, you have to pay attention to what is going to happen when you update the software. WordPress has a policy of backwards compatibility, meaning every effort is made to stop your site from going down during an update—that was a huge relief for us as a low-budget music school.
WordPress also made it possible to run many sites, connected with a single user base—that feature made so much sense for the music school. We had separate departments and studios that all needed control over their own sub-site. WordPress allowed us to give permissions for the things they were supposed to be able to access and block what they weren’t.
Ultimately, we went on a year-long project to move the entire school over to WordPress. That formed the bulk of my learning in understanding and developing with Wordpress.
And what did you discover about software development as a whole?
I was introduced to the idea of the four freedoms of software.
This one, in particular, stood out to me: to make modifications to the software, you have to inspect the source code. We're so used to proprietary software on the computer, that being able to see and modify the source code was mind-blowing to me. But as a musician, it made total sense.
A big part of being a musician is master classes. You perform a piece in front of an audience and then somebody picks apart that performance—a very real form of learning in the open—so the idea of learning in public was familiar to me.
I had a really quick turnaround on fixing things in WordPress. Some modifications felt small, for example altering a border colour, but when you take a small fix and you multiply it by the scale of the people using it daily—it’s huge.
Huge impact isn’t just huge features. A huge impact can be the small thing that impacts somebody's daily workflow. That was a light bulb moment for me.
Were you the only female lead?
Many women contribute to WordPress but of the five leads, I'm the only woman. I'm also the only non-white person.
Open source is heavily white and male, more so than tech at large. It is a privilege to have the time, space, and energy to do work that is not directly paid—it's basically impossible to do this work if you are not fully equipped outside of it.
Luckily, because the university job was not high-pressure, I had the time and the space to explore within my daily work. I wouldn't have been able to do so if I didn't have the space within my paid job.
There is a lot of energy behind reframing the software industry to benefit the people who have historically been excluded by default. It's not a solved problem by any means, but there's some hope there.
Do you consider yourself a designer?
I'm not inherently a front-end engineer but I care about UI and UX because without them, who cares? It has to be pleasant. It has to be delightful—open source struggles with that. There are a lot of projects in WordPress where our priority audience is non-technical users, which means UI has to be considered mindfully in our process.
My appreciation for design combined with my technical ability is reflected in my aesthetic and my method of working. I will not let something go live if the UI is bad. If I was involved with software that went out looking or feeling bad to use, I would be ashamed. I don't want that.
It is my way of exerting control essentially. Is it a personality flaw sometimes? Sure. But adulthood is about taking those ‘flaws’ and finding productive ways of channelling them.
How did you know it was time to move on from WordPress?
My last big project at WordPress was for the White House—we essentially engineered a one-on-one editing experience. It was exactly the level of editor experience that I wanted to achieve and I am very proud of it.
That project set a bar for a new standard at WordPress, but I realised I didn’t have the energy to implement it. I was tired of being a public figure—I realised I couldn't say anything in interviews without it turning into a quotable in somebody's post! It was exhausting, but it was the reality of the role that I had accepted.
I’d also stopped learning as much. Learning and passing on knowledge is an important part of directorship, but I no longer had the energy to do so.
A director should be setting standards and uplifting the whole company but I realised I had lost the ability to do that—I think it's important to be honest and humble about that.
At the end of the day, for me, computers are just a tool—I don't feel strongly about them outside of work. Whilst working at open source is incredible, I cannot get the same feelings from a computer as I do from music. Music evokes such strong emotions in me—I wanted to feel that same passion and sense of movement within my job.
Was that feeling similar to the burnout you felt with music?
As a music student, you have the framework of school and you know what your milestone markers are.
But when you’re pursuing something on your own for leisure it’s hard to know how to direct yourself. I lost that self-drive with music. I used to wake up in the morning dreading practising, and the same thing happened with WordPress.
At GitHub, we have a Slack channel for recovering music majors—evidence that the two industries are closely intertwined. This morning, I asked the group what they reach for when they are feeling the itch to learn something new, without getting too ambitious.
How do you balance your performance schedule with work? Are you still performing?
Whilst I was working at Eastman, I was still a pianist. I played weekly at church, I played with orchestras and chamber groups, and I played with my husband (he plays the clarinet). I was performing frequently, not just regularly but frequently.
But the last time I performed was in 2019. My husband and I went to Guatemala for a music festival where we gave master classes and performed—it was super fun. I did a bunch of performances around that time but then it slowly tapered off again.
I may perform again someday but I'm not in hot pursuit of it—it’s not a priority for me.
What lessons did you learn as a musician that are essential to your work today?
Being a performer taught me the art of self-promotion—a lot of people in tech struggle with that. You can work your whole career with your head down, but certain roles require getting comfortable with self-promotion and outreach.
Piano also taught me responsibility. When you play piano at church, you have to show up every week, whether you like it or not.
Music is a huge part of the church experience, especially in the type of church that I grew up in. There are hymns, music during offerings, music when people are coming in, music during prayer—there's music all the time.
So you don't have a choice but to show up because it directly impacts other people. You can’t back out because you had a bad week—too bad, suck it up!
Piano teaches you a lot about discipline, being considerate and understanding that your personal problems don't trump everything else.
What is open source lacking?
The human aspect—which I know I’m contributing to at GitHub.
In tech, human connections are just as important as technique. But when your daily work is writing code alone, you don't get a lot of practice doing the people part.
I’m good at building relationships with people. My work relationships are not just transactional, they’re genuine—which means we can communicate and approach work more efficiently.
The people with the most value, in a business sense, are those who know how to influence others—that's where I can be really effective.
“Technique without music is pedantry. Music without technique is not music.” This was on a sign hanging in your graduate professor’s office. How do you relate to that today?
In music, you can be excellent at playing scales but if it's not in service of making music then it doesn't mean anything. But you cannot execute and express yourself through music without having that baseline technique, and so the two have to work together. That's the same in tech; if you don’t understand the problem then you're just writing code for the sake of writing code!
My real strength is deeply understanding the problem space. I learned the value in that thinking whilst working at Eastman and it has formed the basis of my approach to work ever since.
Engineering is not just writing the code. It's understanding the problem. It's connecting people. It's caring about the end result.
You gave a talk at WordCamp in 2016 in Vienna, titled ‘Code is Poetry: A Musician’s Tale’. You mentioned that you identify primarily as a musician. Is that still the case?
I had a real career highlight moment in Vienna. I played the piano and then I gave a talk on software—I essentially combined the two worlds.
But since that talk, my identity as a musician has faded. Back then, I still thought of myself as a musician doing computer work on the side. But then, I had my portrait taken for a project called ‘**Faces of Open Source**’—putting a spotlight on formative, influential people in open source.
I had my photo taken in between Camille Fourier (writer of The Manager's Path Book and former CTO of Rent The Runway) and Limor Frid (co-founder of Adafruit)—two really big deal names in the industry! That whole experience changed my thinking.
I started realising that this is who I am now. Open source itself is inherently political, it is a movement, and I have become a person in this capacity instead. I have friends performing at the Met and winning Grammys, which is so cool, but I've let go of the idea of that ever being me again. And that's okay.
Flower girl in chief and poet in residence. That’s what it says on Sana’s Twitter bio.
Sana is currently a VP of Product and Design at Peanut, the social networking app for women. She’s a longtime member of the tech community, having earned her stripes at places like Apple, Twitter, and Deliveroo. Sana grew up in India, and has lived in New York, San Francisco, and London.
I was interested in Sana’s multi-hyphenate identity—but not just the jobs she’s held, where she’s lived, or how she defines herself on a social networking app.
There’s her work with understanding feminine-coded communications, which stemmed from her own exploration of creating safe and equitable workplaces.
And there’s her exploration of her own femininity.
“I didn't make peace with my own femininity for a very long time. I had associated femininity with whatever Asian cultures associate femininity with: weak, small, demure, sensitive, and emotional. But, over the last few years, especially with weightlifting, I made my own understanding of what femininity is for me, and realized how complex it is and how misunderstood it is in wider society.”
Her identity is ever-evolving, she says. She’s spent the last few years unravelling the parts of that were given to her: what bits she accepted, versus what she discarded. And what of the parts of herself that she’s created? She’s relearned, or reintegrated, those parts that were natural to her, and re-examined aspects she had taken on because she felt she needed them to ‘succeed’.
The hour-long conversation sped by as we talked about her obsession with tea, calling herself a poet, and the femininity of creation. As for where poetry fits into her identity, she quips, “It’s part of life, isn’t it?”
Your Twitter bio says you’re ‘flower girl in chief’ and ‘poet in residence’. What does that mean?
I've always been a little bit obsessed with flowers. A lot of people around me get annoyed by that. That's where the flower chief comes from. I set out on a project last year where I was drawing flowers and painting flowers every day.
Poetry, I've been doing for a really long time, probably about 15 years now. But only recently on my sabbatical did I really start pursuing it seriously.
I started connecting with other poets in the community, writing and submitting and publishing. And I started my own poetry curation newsletter, Found Poems, which I try to send out twice a month.
Drawing, painting, poetry. Have you always been interested in these as a kid?
I came to poetry surprisingly late in life.
I only started reading poetry in the last year of uni in India, where I did graphic design. I picked a poem as a part of my graphic design final. I had to illustrate this amazing ballad—the longest ballad written. That's when I really got into poetry.
Growing up, I was always really into art. I was never the academic student in the way that the Asian community defined academics, which was very much route learning.
I was interested in mathematics and English and decent enough at it, but I was a visual thinker and a visual learner. I always found myself in the fine arts department of the school just hiding away from all the other academics, whenever there was a Hindi or mathematics happening.
I would just go to the fine arts department and just make some sculpture.
What’s the story behind Found Poems?
‘Found Poems’ is a little bit of an inspired name. If you know about the found art of found poetry movement, it is all about moments of beauty or serendipity that you find in the ordinary.
That was very much the intention where I would be the person trying to find or curate a little bit of poetry so that—for people who don't look at poetry as an accessible thing, or like poetry very much, or read much poetry because of the way that they were taught poetry growing up—it will become more human and accessible.
Like you’re walking by on the street and you notice a little verse on the little street corner, and appreciate it in that moment.
Your ‘day job’ is at Peanut, where you’re VP of Product & Design. Alongside that, you’re a flower girl in chief and poet in residence. How do these roles fit into your identity?
Identity is a really good word. I think a lot of people who work in the tech community, or generally in a capitalistic society, tend to look at work as the way that they define their identity.
It was very true for me as well, because of my Type A personality and Asian background. You tend to use career achievement to define your identity.
When I left my previous job and I was on a little bit of a sabbatical, I didn't have work and I wasn't really achieving or producing something. I started to pick apart what identity even is, and why I felt the need to define my identity by the achievement or the day job or the work that I do and the employment that I have.
That’s when I actually started defining myself as the ‘poet’ or the ‘painter’. I was always hesitant to claim these titles in my identity, because I wasn't achieving something in them or I wasn't employed [in those roles].
If you look at my Twitter bio or anywhere else, I actually now say that I am a poet first. And on the side, I also ‘work’ in product. It’s not to say that I don't derive any joy from my ‘work’, which I absolutely do at this moment, but it is not the primary source of my identity.
When did you feel comfortable calling yourself a poet?
It wasn't very long ago, even though I've been writing for a really long time.
It was probably a year and a half ago.
I was working with a leadership coach during my sabbatical. I wasn't ‘leading’ anyone during that time, so I thought I didn’t need to work with the coach anymore. But that coach said, “No, you're, you're still leading, you're leading yourself. Let's talk about what's important to you and what your values are.”
During that conversation, I realized that the thing that gives me most joy, I don't have to have any external validation, or external employment or achievement in order to claim that as a part of my identity.
I'm going to call myself a poet because I'm doing it. I'm writing and I'm going to poetry open mics. I'm going to workshops and courses.
I want to talk about your sabbatical a little. What led to you taking a break?
I was very burned out by being in the tech community, mostly early-stage hyper-growth startups, or in environments which generally weren’t really set up for my success or for a person who looks like me. These environments were hegemonic and very monoculture.
It was also the pace. I hadn't taken a break for a decade. I’d intended to take a month off. But my body was just not having it. It was like, “Nope, you're not going back.”
What did you do on sabbatical?
For the first few months, I tried to still do some “productive” work by reading, painting flowers and writing poetry.
But for the most part, I was doing nothing. I was talking to my friends, reconnecting with people, painting when I felt like it, reading when I felt like it, and writing when I felt like it.
You talked about listening to what your body needed. What are some routines or rituals you have in place now that help you stay connected with what you physically or mentally need?
The reason I had the burnout was because I didn't have any practices in place.
Now, it's interesting because working from home has really allowed me to do that. The one positive of the pandemic is that, when you're in your own space, you're in control.
You can check in on your body. If you're feeling fatigued, you can step away from the computer. You're not in an external environment where you have to be visibly there and on your computer and working all the time.
I'm now very regimented about looking at my energy levels. So if I feel like my energy is dropping, if I'm feeling mentally fatigued, I will book a mental health day. And I make sure that everyone on my team knows that I'm taking a mental health day so that they can feel that they can take it too.
I try to take a mental health day every two or three weeks, where I will not look at a screen, not think about work. I will just read, write and do whatever it is that I want to do and recalibrate.
That’s a wonderful practice—to treat yourself.
Exactly.
You also need to have other practices that constantly prompt you to think about what you need from a situation, which I think a lot of people don't do.
I do therapy every week in the middle of the week, which allows me to refocus away from everything else and everyone else that's happening, and just focus on myself and what I need from any situation that I'm in.
Focusing on yourself—what has that taught you about you?
So much. Where do I even start?
A lot of what I've learned is that, as women or as women from Asian culture or minority communities, a lot of us are socialized into fitting in and hyper-performance. I had normalised so much of it because I had spent so much of my time figuring out how I can fit into a community.
Certainly, in the early stages of your career, you are trying to achieve something and make it in your career.
But at this point, the biggest thing I've learned is that I can step away from environments, people and relationships that don't support me.
There is always a choice in where you choose to spend your time and your energy and attention. That's the most precious things that you can give to anyone or anything, and so you have to be very, very careful about where you spend it.
What are some things that you’re devoting your time and energy to now?
I'm in the middle of purchasing a house, so a lot of my energy is going towards nesting, or trying to figure out what I want the space to be. I've never really had the privilege to be in a space where I could do it up in the way that I wanted.
Also, I’m focusing on my physical wellbeing. I lift weights a lot.
How does weightlifting contribute to your physical or mental health?
In huge, huge ways.
Obviously there are so many hormonal benefits that are already written. But it’s a thing that I feel women don't do because there are all these notions around what weightlifting does to your body.
There's not a lot of talk around what it does to your brain. And especially for women who are constantly told to, or socialized to, be the subservient people in society, I feel like weightlifting gives you a strength. I wouldn't call it dominance, but yeah, just a kind of strength. Something changes in our brain—there's a chemical change in your brain. I don't know if it's an attitude thing. It just makes you feel like you own the room. Maybe it makes you feel like a man does all the time!
Shifting gears a little, let’s talk about home. You’ve lived in India, the Bay Area, and now London. How would you define the concept of ‘home’?
It’s a really great question because I feel like any immigrant struggles with that question.
I left India about 10 years ago. I thought that it was going to be just for a two-year master's program and I’d return, because my entire family, including my twin sister, is in India.
When I moved from San Francisco to London, it again was also supposed to be a temporary six-month assignment with Twitter. The plan was that I would go back to San Francisco, but I never ended up going back.
It was always a thing for me. What is home? I felt unmoored for a really long time. I always defined home as a place that I wasn't.
When I would go back to India, things would look and feel very different. It felt like it’d moved on without me, and was very disconcerting.
After about five years or so of not having a permanent residence, I just started looking at home as wherever I am.
I started feeling a lot more settled. Now that I've been in London for five years, and I've actually bought a house, that feels really momentous. I’d never thought that I would want to commit to a place long enough to buy a property.
Can you have more than one home?
That's the thing. Even though I have bought a place here, and I'm here for now, my family is in India and India is home as well. Some of my close friends are in San Francisco and New York. A lot of my books are still there.
I’ve stopped defining home as a geographical place, and almost more like a metaphorical place. Wherever feels comfortable, or whatever place feels like you've been here before, you are free to be yourself.
You’ve got an interest in “feminine-coded communication.” Earlier on in our conversation, you mentioned that you were working in a lot of hegemonic environments. Can you share how that interest came about—are those linked?
I did a talk very recently actually at the Leading Design conference. It was about, and how do you create safety?
When I had burnt out, one of the things I realised was that I was excelling and I was getting promoted. It wasn't that I had a dearth of opportunity.
But what I realized when I left was that I burnt out because I didn't feel safe in those environments. There wasn't overt racism, but safety is created when all views are equally present and valued. When I first joined tech, because I was so junior at that point, I always thought that it was just a way of communication that I have to learn, but I never thought of it as a masculine style of communication.
Now, because I've done so much research into this, I realised that there are distinct styles of communication. Because the tech industry in general is so dominated by men, the communication style that people are conditioned to adopt, or be judged or evaluated by, is very much defined by those people.
I remember thinking early in my career that any of the women I saw in exec roles or senior leadership talked, walked, dressed exactly like the men on the team. I remember pointing it out to my boss, going “I'm not like any of them, so am I never going to be one of those people? Or is that how people talk when they get to that level?”
There are a lot of things I found in research coded in terms of the way women communicate: the ‘just’ and the ‘sorry’ and the ‘like’. Stop saying that, stop apologising. Just be clear, just be direct.
Many aspects of masculine coded communication are about dominating and superiority. It’s not about giving everyone an equal chance to talk, or wanting to connect. Those are seen in feminine coded communication styles, which women are socialised to do and naturally do anyway.
This is something I see very much in Peanut. The app is all for women. The kind of content you'll see on Peanut is drastically different from any kind of open platform. The way women talk to and communicate with each other, the vulnerability, and the trust on the platform.
That was the first time where itI actually hit home for me: that’s what happens when you have a space where that masculine coded communication style just doesn't exist.
Were you actively seeking out a role in a company where feminine coded communication would be centre stage? Or was that happenstance?
It just happened.
In my sabbatical, one of the first books I’d picked up was by the researcher, Jennifer Armbrust. She's written this book called “Proposals for the Feminine Economy.”
I am obsessed with that book. It's literally always on my table. I had been thinking about that space for so long and wanting that for myself, but at that point, I didn't think that existed in any tech companies specifically.
In the back of my mind, I was thinking I might have to do it myself. I might have to start a company where that kind of culture exists.
When I talked to the CEO of Peanut, Michelle Kennedy, and talked her through these principles and heard from her side, I realized that there couldn't be a better fit.
This feels like an academic interest, or a subject matter expertise. Where do you see yourself going with this?
I don't have an endgame to this. It's something that I’ll forever be interested in.
It’s like a side academic research interest. Maybe I'll write a book about it, or do more talks about it.
But at the moment, my focus is to just tell as many people as possible, and especially women, about it so that they understand that there is validity in the way that they communicate and they don't have to adapt and change their styles, or their natural way of being, just to be fitting into a system that doesn't appreciate it or isn't designed for it.
This is a “side academic interest” that fits in so squarely with your “day job” at Peanut. What about poetry? Is there an intersection, or are they completely separate?
At the moment, they are completely separate. But Peanut uses a lot of poetry, actually, in our branding and messaging.
Poetry is, to me, an inherently feminine act. Any kind of creation is, really. But poetry is about acknowledging your feelings.
A lot of people think about it as an intellectual activity, and that's fair.
But for me, poetry is an art and is about creation. And what's more feminine than creation.
And Peanut is a social network. Social connection is to me inherently feminine in nature.
If you had to draw a connecting line through all of my work and all of my interests, this (feminine nature) would probably be one of those core connecting lines.
I tend to rationalise a lot of emotions, and poetry helps me come back and get back in touch with the emotions and the humans and the vulnerability behind everything.
That’s probably the reason I like poetry.
How would you describe your poetry and creations?
It's changed a lot over the last year. I've become much more confident as a poet in the last year, especially since I've started claiming myself as a poet.
A lot of my poetry is about human relationships or about meta patterns that you see. A lot of art and design is about connecting the dots and patterns where an ordinary person or someone outside those disciplines might not be able to see those patterns or similarities.
The way I write poetry is very much the juxtaposition of, or moving between, two entirely dissimilar things so that you can reveal similarity in them.
Does the poem find you, or do you find the poem?
That's a really good question. Have you read Anne Lamott's “Bird by Bird”? It's a beautiful book.
And she says something like—a poem is like a train. It just comes by, with a big rush. You either jump on it in time or it leaves you. And sometimes you realise too late that it's passing you by and you try to pull it back. And it comes in backwards.
That's a metaphor that I can totally relate to. Poetry is not a thing that I do intellectually. I don’t sit and say I'm going to craft a poem.
It's a train. I have a little niggle, or a thought, or something has happened. The last poem I wrote was when the George Floyd incident had happened. It had just been sitting in my head for so long, and I'd been thinking and thinking about it. I had to write about it and I sat down and it just came in a big rush.
As an artist, you're always critical about the work that you're doing, but that would probably be the poem that I hold up to people and say is the best thing I've ever written. Because the train was coming and I jumped on right at the right time. And I caught that thought..
How do you prepare yourself to be ready to jump on the train?
The main thing that I feel like I need for myself, in order to write or create anything at all, is solitude.
You need to be able to keep yourself away from all the other people, all the other influences, and all the other responsibilities to understand “What is your voice?” and “What are your thoughts?”.
When things were open, I would just take one of my favourite poetry books, go to a cafe and sit by myself, with music in my ears. And take one of my favourite poetry books and just read, with no expectation that something would come.
You have to have a couple hours of that—taking everything away from your brain to make space for new creative things to come into the brain.
I don’t remember when I’ve not done this, at least since I started writing 15 years ago.
What music do you listen to?
It's just ambient music. Because I write poetry in English, I listen to music in Hindi so that it's not. Interfering with my English thoughts.
The music is just sitting in the background, and it's comfortable there, because Hindi my mother tongue so I can hear it and yet not get distracted by it.
And it's the opposite. If I'm writing in Hindi, I listen to English music.
Do you write poetry in Hindi too?
I write a little bit in a combination of Hindi and Urdu, but I'm not very fluid at it. I've been outside India for so long that English now has become the default language I think in.
When did you start sharing your poetry?
Poetry’s a very personal thing for me. For the longest time, I had a blog but it was private. It was never really for anyone else. I was doing it for myself to process my own thoughts.
I started going to the Poetry Cafe in London, which (pre-COVID) had the longest-running open mic nights on Tuesdays, 7 to 10 pm.
If I hadn't discovered that, I don't know if I'd be able to claim poetry as my own. I started going there just to listen to people. When I saw the variety of people who were taking a chance, I thought, “Why not me?”
On my very first open mic, I was terrified. I had never shown my poems to anyone, or actually recited them in front of anyone. I was in front of 60 people. Because poetry is so emotional and personal for me, a lot of those poems were extremely raw and extremely vulnerable. It was like opening up your heart to a group of strangers. You don't know how good you are, but also it's really personal.
I remember shaking as I was standing in front of people.
I think I just started saying that I'd been writing for 15 years, but this is the first time I had an open mic night for me. And people just lost their shit. They were clapping and hooting. And it was really amazing. After that, things got a lot easier.
The community is really supportive. You can write absolute trash and they would still cheer you on as if you are the most poetic genius. The community really helped to build up my confidence in claiming that space for myself.
Writing poetry: pen and paper, or laptop?
Pen and paper.
I've had this conversation with my boyfriend a lot. He writes with paper, and I used to write by typing.
You can always tell when a poem originated from paper or from a screen. You approach things entirely differently. On a screen, it's quicker. You can edit, you can look at meanings, you can Google names, you can look up the thesaurus, you can get distracted. The language is much more rational and clear-cut whenever I write on the computer. But when I'm writing on my paper, it's more fluid. it's more exploratory.
I don’t know if there’s any logic to it.
Do you have any other rituals when you write?
I usually like being outside in a space that's away from any distractions. You get a good cup of tea, you'd sit and listen to music and you write.
I’m obsessed about tea, although I didn’t grow up being crazy about tea.
To me, it's more about the moment. You can't rush it. You have to boil the water. It has to be a specific temperature. You have to strain it just so. You have to sit and enjoy it. You can't rush it because you’ll literally burn your tongue.
You have to be very patient, which is not something I can say I am in other parts of my life. It forces me to slow down a little bit.
Is poetry a form of self-care?
A hundred percent. It is the most nourishing thing for me.
If I’m physically or mentally exhausted, just spending an hour on poetry completely recharges me.
Does it get stressful if you feel like you’re not able to write?
I don't think it's ever been that way for me, maybe because that's not my primary source of employment. I don't depend on poetry to make money.
It's a thing I do on the side, and it doesn't need to be something I capitalise on or monetise on. And that takes the pressure off.
Are you in a different headspace when you’re creating poetry vs creating for Peanut?
A hundred percent. I used to struggle a lot earlier on with moving between those head spaces.
Tech generally, but especially screen-based design, is a very rational headspace. Design is for other people. It's not about self-expression. It's a much more rational act.
But art is self-expression. It's more poetic, it's more fluid. I would find it very different and difficult to move from that rational headspace to the poetic headspace, and I actually still do.
I hate Slack and those things that morph what you're trying to do in. You always say ‘the medium is the message’ right? The medium changes the way you communicate and how you design what you design.
I don’t do hands-on design very often now, but when I do, I try to actually start with writing. I'll start with writing about the narrative, about the person, about the user who's trying to use this product. What is their life like? What do they want from it? I’d write a story, make it a little bit more artistic, make a sketch, before you can go into the details.
The moment you start doing anything on the screen, your focus is zoomed in and narrow. And you forget about the bigger picture, or about why you're even doing this in the first place.
You’ve got all these different mediums of creativity: writing, drawing, painting… Which one are you most comfortable in?
Definitely writing. Definitely words.
One of my thesis projects in my master's program was about sound. You’ve got Clubhouse and all that now, but this was back in 2013. My thesis was around sound being completely forgotten in technology. The reason I was doing that work was because sound and writing are two things that let your imagination work.
They don't give you a specific visual. You're not fixed in what you see and what you imagine. When you're writing, or when you're listening, you can imagine whatever you want and you can let the brain do the work. I think that's probably why I'm attracted to those modalities more.
You have more space to imagine, to interpret and actually maybe humanise it or to make it more relevant to your life.
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