I live, work and hail from Dallas.

My home boasts an outstanding collection of band posters from the early 2000s.

Kansas City, Baltimore, East Lansing and D.C. have also been home.

Never order Tex Mex in East Lansing. Michiganders serve cottage cheese alongside tortilla chips. It's heartbreaking.

I have six years of management experience: Three years of ecommerce Black Fridays at Fossil and three years of enterprise technology geek speak at 70kft.

The agile team I led on behalf of GE elected to be called Jellyfish Smack. I designed hoodies for us to wear to every scrum. We still have a secret handshake.

Becky and Bailey were the direct reports I trained at 70kft. We worked hard to improve our combined skill sets, designed against briefs that served over half a million users and garnered promotions, raises and shared lottery scratch offs.
Also in the mix were sock subscriptions, reptilian Illuminati debates, late nights, cold beers, and La Croix statues.

Despite running teams, I'm not quick to groupthink. I promote dreaming first. It is a catalyst of expression for introverts and a filter for extroverts.

Online personality quizzes tell me that I am an Extroverted Introvert, an INFJ Personality (a.k.a. “Advocate”), a “C” on the DISC and nothing below a 95 on any Plum.

So according to algorithms, I am “quiet and mystical, yet very inspiring — a tireless idealist that has very high standards for both herself and others.“ I aspire to this math and plan live up to these results.

I call myself a pet person, but I have two three (couldn't say no to a tuxedo quarantine kitten) cats and almost exclusively use the 😻 emoji in texts. Be careful, though, because I will still steal your doggo for cuddles.

Form should  follow function. But sometimes I like to get weird. In pitches, if I can throw in a slightly weird option to stretch the client's comfort level or offer an unexpected solution to the brief  — then that's a good day.

The most successful campaign I managed at Fossil required a functionality tweak for Black Friday. The homepage was too shoppable. Our servers had copper wiring and could not handle the initial traffic. It was the first Black Friday with online sales topping one million dollars.
For this campaign, I convinced the Vice President of our department to let me shoot dozens of products against a white background. This was off-brand at the time. Product looked more colorful, I could achieve a collage effect and easily swap products on the fly as they sold out.  

Quilting is my new hobby. The geometry and precision relax me. Cutting pattern pieces with X-Files playing in the background is Saturday afternoon perfection.

I sigh hilariously too much.

I was more excited by the undergrad design classes at MICA than my own graduate curriculum. The timelines were quicker, required nimbler thinking and I got an A+ from Ken Barber. How cool is that?

Unapologetically using the phrase "dead sexy" in a client presentation is empowering. I can't wait to do it again.

I've made a "bad hire" — judged prowess superior to personality. It was a big mistake. Finding the right person to join a work family is incredibly hard. Culture is an intricate balance of temperaments. Introductory emails, portfolio links and references sometimes fail to capture the splendid bliss of quirks, unexpected peccadilloes and what someone is like under duress. This list of answers captures a hint of who am I, who I want to be and the type of people I chose to work with.

I would bring to 900lbs a contentious character who loves creating for big-hearted brands, a leader who relishes when a designer seizes their potential and a strategist who wants to push clients toward outcomes that are smart, data-driven, and enviably cool. Did I mention dead sexy?