I don’t know that I was a particularly creative child, but I definitely felt like life was better with things looked pretty. I, like any other child from the 90’s, had a fair amount of Lisa Frank in my collection of school supplies, along with all the gel pens a girl could ever need. I’d spend the weekends rearranging my room to find the perfect Feng Shui of the week, and I never bored of coloring up something fun, whether on those sweet fuzzy felt coloring boards, regular old paper, or directly on my walls (I’m so, SO sorry mom and dad).
As I entered my teenage years, computers started becoming a household norm. I loved computer class where I took countless typing tests and peered curiously inside those colorful and super duper modernly designed iMac G3’s (still want one, btw). Looking back now, I can see that my fascination with website design must have all began with good-ol’ Myspace. I spent hours upon hours messing around with code and switching out layouts to get my profile page just perfect. I even “designed” a few profiles for my friends who were jelly of how cool mine was ;) (yes, I totally had the falling stars on my page, and I knew allllll the code shortcuts to get those expressive pre-emoji icons).
As it does, life as a new adult got busy, and Myspace slowly died, and it was time for me to choose a career path. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize at the time how profitable it would have been for me to stick with that coding knowledge and move down to Silicon Valley. Man! I could have been a part of the BOOM! But alas, my heart led me to public service. And so, I focused my studies and job-sights on the nonprofit world. I did this exclusively for nearly 15 years. It was incredibly fulfilling and I Ioved to see the difference I could make in peoples lives. My life, however, was about to take a drastic detour.
Sometime shortly after I turned 30 my, for lack of a better term, existential crisis began. Every day was a monotonous routine. Each morning I’d wake up at 5am to get ready for my corporate job that was sucking the life out of me. I’d spend the day doing the same thing, a routine that left me unfulfilled and miserable. One morning as I was throwing out yesterday’s coffee grounds, a feeling of urgency came over me: I can’t do it. I cannot live my life like this. I knew something had to change. It’s not that I didn’t want to work, but I didn’t want to slave away for someone else’s dreams. I wanted to bust my butt for my own dream life. I wanted to live life on my own terms.
Pretty much immediately I started brainstorming about all the ways I could turn my passions into a paycheck, and do it from anywhere in the world I wanted to. When I asked myself what it was I was passionate about, the only thing I could come up with was travel. Over the previous five or so years, traveling the world had become a priority for me. This was likely a driving factor in my unease at my job - I mean why should someone else be able to tell you how much time you can spend living your life (can you hear the entitled millennial in me??)? I ended up settling on marrying my love for travel, with my obsession for planning, and decided I’d try to start a travel planning business. I was SO excited. I spent 6 months, and thousands of dollars on coaches and tools, learning how to become a 21st century #bosslady and attempting to build a business in my yoga pants from the comfort of my couch (before and after my 9 hour days at my “real job”, that is).
The funny thing is, 80% of the time it took me to build that travel planning business, I spent working on my website and designing pretty marketing materials. I was OBSESSED. I couldn’t get enough! I would try to fall asleep at night and I’d start half-dreaming in code because I had spent the last 6 hours trying to figure out how to get my headline to do that fancy typewriter carousel thing (I finally figured it out, don’t worry). When my website was finally finished, and I didn’t need anymore marketing materials, I was honestly sort of sad. Doing the work of planning other peoples vacations didn’t sound nearly as fun as designing my website and traveling myself. Life is great isn’t it? I started a business based on the only passion I could imagine monetizing, and ended up discovering a passion for something so vastly different than what I had ever imagined. And guess what? The demand WAS THERE for this one.
Fast-forward another six months and I had designed a half-dozen brands and websites for friends who were trying to launch their own businesses. It started with a consultant I was working with as part of my full-time day job. She was also leaving her corporate job to branch out on her own and between work and school had absolutely no time to build her own website. I timidly told her my story of building my side-hustle website and how much I loved it and she quickly responded, “do you think you could help me with mine?!”. That was the beginning of it all.
I then started reaching out to friends and acquaintances who I knew were starting their own business ventures and simply asked if they’d be interested in brand and website design for a super affordable price in order to help me build my portfolio. Not one person turned me down. And so, in the process of building one business, I built a whole other, and one that I truly loved. I love helping entrepreneurs and small business owners clarify their brand’s purpose and find ways to speak to their dream clients in order to meet their business goals. It is so rewarding to hear clients tell me stories of how a potential customer saw their website and “just knew” they had to work with them.
I love this little business I’ve created and can’t wait to see it blossom into something beautiful. I decided to call it Abloom Creative because the word bloom really captured the feeling of that first year. On both a personal and professional level, I experienced so much change and growth - becoming someone, and creating something, so beyond what I had ever imagined. I had bloomed, and I had an unquenchable desire to help others do the same.