Eleven Years In
Fifteen years ago, I was going to a job in the city every day, commuting an hour (or more) each way to go to a job that I hated. A job that I joked was where ‘creative people went to die’. Everyone who worked in my department at a large tv station who shall not be named was a former creative. Two classically trained dancers, two musical theater powerhouses, and two folks who actually belonged in that department – accountants.
The job was easy, and boring as all get out. My days were filled with hours and hours of nothing. Essentially I was hired because they needed to guarantee their budget for the next year, even if they didn’t have any work for me. So I spent all my time watching CreativeLive on my computer and learning everything I could about building my photography business. I had been a working photographer since I got my first job as a portrait photographer when my friend’s mother saw the potential in me during high-school and asked me to take her photo for her business. That got me another portrait gig, which got me another portrait gig, and then when I returned home for the summer after my first year in college, my brother-in-law got me a job photographing for the newspaper he worked at. Three years after that, I spent every waking moment (not on a train or at my job in manhattan) creating scenes and inviting friends over for shoots.
Eventually, that turned into getting features in major magazines like VOGUE Italia, Nylon Mexico, and lots of digital indie magazines. So, as you can imagine, going to work every day and doing nothing was killing me. I started making friends on the train, and one of those friends was a stylist who started helping me with my shoots. (Shout out Kim!) One day she asked me to create a logo and business card for her, and thus my design story began.
Prior to Kim asking, I was designing things for myself, creating events with friends from college where people could come and shop and get photographed, creating posters and postcards to get the word out. I absolutely loved it. And I loved it because I really got to do whatever I wanted, and I was young and confident enough not to give a sht what anyone thought of them.
After designing Kim’s logo and business cards, my friends started asking me for random designs for things, and I gleefully obliged. All the while, I kept photographing and building my portfolio through friends and word of mouth. Eventually, this helped me get my first job at a design agency building their decks. Not the most glamorous work, and I had to be there one weekend day per week, but it was fun and gave me a glimpse into what a design agency really looked like. That agency work got me another opportunity, to handle the design + marketing work for a local luxury business on Long Island.
It felt amazing to be able to leave my boring city job and go do something that I actually enjoyed. I worked there for a few months before it became apparent that I had only been hired because of what I looked like. At the office Christmas party, a partner in the business made it clear what he thought of me, and thus made it impossible for me to continue working there. His actions at that party made me deeply uncomfortable. I began trying to avoid him at all costs, which wasn’t too hard given I worked back of house and he was typically out on the floor all day. One day, he cornered me, alone in the basement of the building, to request that I join him for dinner, I declined and went home. The very next day, I quit, and recreative was born.
Is that the nicest origin story? No. Of course not. But something amazing was born that day. Not only a business but my strength and resilience grew. I knew what I could do and I was going to do my damndest to do it myself. I started by taking on a few small clients, and got myself a full-time job to float myself until I was monetarily stable. I moved to Connecticut to find a less expensive place to live, and to be closer to my family. I joined an agency there where I became the Paid Media Manager. Again, not glamorous but I was there for one thing, to build recreative so that I could be financially stable all on my own.
Two years later, I finally had enough regular clientele at recreative to leave my full time job. So though recreative was started in a basement in 2015, it became my full-time everything in early 2017. I haven’t looked back since.
Our first ever recurring client was The Greens at Cannondale, who is still our client today. We had many one-time clients but constantly selling made it difficult to focus on truly excellent work. Once we had one recurring client, the others slowly joined until we had over 100 at one time. Was that too much too soon? Maybe. But it taught me so much about how best to be a good business owner and good partner to my clients.
We’ve worked with some of the best, and some that were not the right fit. I’ve had to part ways with clients that would otherwise have helped our bottom line but who did not share a vision for our work together. Our relationships with clients are the most important, and its a great testament that we still work with many of our original clients today, eleven years later.
For the first five years, recreative’s home base was in Connecticut. I rented a light-filled studio in an old mill building, ten minutes from my house in the Northwest corner of the state. It was my first huge purchase for the business, but I felt it was important to separate my business and my regular life. That ended up being one of the best things I could have done. Not only did I get to meet a bunch of amazing people who were also working in the building but the office became a hub for friends and clients to hang out, brainstorm, and really create a community. On any given day you might find three or four people at the conference table going through their plans for the quarter, people being photographed at our in-house photo studio in the corner, two people having coffee in the coffee room. I describe this as if it’s different places, but honestly it was just one huge room where people would mill about.
At some point, I decided that I wanted to create something slightly different for recreative, something that could move with us – seek out businesses that needed us and have the option to be near them. I started researching ways that I could create a mobile office, to take that feeling that I had created in our office space with me no matter where I was. The Northwest corner of Connecticut is quite sparse. That’s the draw, it’s this gorgeous hidden space in a state that otherwise might be considered a fly-over between Boston and New York City. But that’s also part of the difficulty of it, it was very out of the way, a bit difficult to get to.
While researching my options, I came across the idea of tiny houses. Now, my idea of a good time is not dragging my house behind my car for the foreseeable future but the more I looked into it the more I loved it. I could live small, and very intentionally, making it easier and more creative to move myself around. Thus the dream of a tiny house was born. I started the plans for the house and the initial build out and then COVID hit. Cue dramatic music. My house in Connecticut was under contract but everyone was panicking because of COVID and the potential for so many people to lose their jobs. Because of that panic, we decided it was in everyones best interest to close as soon as humanly possible. Which meant that I would be homeless for a hot minute. Luckily, my parents have a vacation house in Maine and since no one was supposed to cross state lines at the time, it was sitting vacant. I moved all of my furniture outside for neighbors to take what they wanted, packed up the rest of my stuff into a pod, grabbed only what I needed and my three puppies, and headed up the coast.
Six years later, Maine is still home. Recreative has grown into something I couldn’t have pictured in that Connecticut mill building. We are a small, tiny even, intentional team doing work for organizations we believe in, mostly right here on the seacoast. I am so profoundly proud of this, of our team, of our clients, of our work.
I cannot begin to express how wild it is to think I’ve been doing this for eleven years. It is the best feeling to know that I built this from the ground up, and that I get to do the work that I love and that hopefully inspires others to do the same. Let’s crush the next eleven with the same energy and excitement. Thanks for being here.
