Frozen, too
The frozen waterfalls of Robe Canyon with Ava Baker Olsen.
Winter is here
Something you may not know...
Recently I took a full-time J-O-B with Hornall Anderson as their Head of Marketing.
If you’re a Seattle-area resident and intersect with the brand and design world, you know Hornall Anderson. For 37 years, they’ve been branding, rebranding, designing and impacting the businesses of the world’s most beloved brands, including Alaska Airlines, Gerber, Fred Hutch, Pedigree, Quaker Oats, Starbucks, University of Washington, and many other companies.
Hornall is merging with a larger creative company called Sid Lee. The opportunity to help move a global creative community forward, and to learn the business of an entity billing at 10X what I’ve been able to bill in a year, was too compelling to turn down.
My full-time work, combined with the busy-ness of December, brings me to the decision to downsize Underwire for awhile.
I negotiated to keep producing Underwire as part of my job. Easier said than done. Mergers are messy. A role that felt comfortable upon acceptance is far more demanding than anticipated. Duh, babe. A situation that reminds me of this quote:
“We are never prepared for what we expect.”
Since returning to full-time work, I produce Underwire on nights and weekends. I’ll be real, it’s grinding me down. I don’t want Underwire to be a dreaded task. Writing this newsletter each week connects me with incredible women and hones my perspective. I get a perverse pleasure reporting on the weekly funding data. From the venture-capital data set alone, I can see the impact women-led companies are having on the tech, biosciences, health and wellness, and e-commerce sectors. The ~3% of venture capital going to women-led companies won't yield "hockey-stick growth" any time soon. Change will continue at a glacial pace for us.
More realness, I’m going through peri-menopause. Most nights I wake up at 3 a.m. and can't get back to sleep. My body is a furnace that cranks to 100-degrees at the most inopportune times. I forget details. I rage against humanity hourly and cry at the drop of a minor key. The random bleeding...well, I'll spare you those details. I'm on the same physical and emotional seesaw as my 16-year-old daughter. Oof. How delightful for my new co-workers.
I tell you this because Underwire is about the female journey. Like me, women at the height of their careers are going through this, too. As I sit in conference rooms and feel a hot-flash broiling, I remember that our experience is very different from the male journey. There is still a mountain of inherent white male privilege in the business world. It exists in my new organization. Five of the six people on the leadership team are men. Most are Caucasian. These stats mirror the majority of creative agency leadership teams.
In taking this job, I cut a deal with myself that from within the belly of the beast, I have to be a voice for equality. We're on the brink of a new decade. My industry needs to change to reflect the diverse reality of life as a human in 2020.
So, here's what I'm going to do: I will continue to produce the funding updates weekly. I want to close out 2019 with a solid year of data. Underwire will still arrive in your inbox on Monday, but limited to the funding report. For now, I'm signing off from lead-in soliloquies, guest posts, link summaries and how-to guides. I need time to retool Underwire to be a sustainable, helpful and joyful part of the next chapter of my work life.
I do have a request. I'm eager to geek out on the funding data but I lack deep data-analysis skills. If you would like to volunteer to help me run analysis on 2019 funding data, I’d love to produce a report. I just can’t do it alone.
It means the world to me that you read Underwire. I hope you stay tuned in 2020.
xxxo. britt