I am a hands-on Creative Jack-Of-All-Trades currently residing in beautiful Denver, CO. I studied Apparel Design and Production at Colorado State University, and from there I quickly expanded my career beyond a straight trajectory in apparel into startups, technology, marketing, and back to apparel again!
It has been my experience that being skilled in marketing and business strategy has only made me a more engaged expert in brand development with the practical and emotional range of skills necessary to truly understand and develop products for a wide variety of target consumers. Designing from casual to premium to technical and back again, I have created assortments and mentored design teams at Spyder, The Sports Authority, and several startups. Currently I am working at RuMe leading the creative team in the design and marketing of fabulous travel and household accessories.
My work has been awarded and featured across multiple national platforms, including InterCon (The Internet Conference), Denver Startup Week, and Fashion Group International. I've designed products, campaigns, and websites for some really cool people too, even including U.S. Olympic Ski Team's Official Uniforms for the 2018 Olympics.
When I am not creating awesome products, you can find me on the ski slopes all over North America, or traveling between Europe, Asia, the Middle East (where my Egyptian husband and I own property), to South America, and back again. My leisure pursuits are often inspired by the garments I create, and vice versa.
A Creative Director should be a maker, someone that has an opinion on everything and the creativity to bring to life recognizable typography, graphics, and striking imagery in addition to the products themselves, Over the course of the last 15 years across positions spanning technical, casual, and luxury apparel, as well as marketing, analytics, and ecommerce, I've developed the ability to wear multiple hats in order to bring ideas to life.
You cannot create a garment or a brand in only one moment or one dimension. You have to take into consideration marketing, product launch platforms, events and social tools in addition to traditional imagery and the content that brings a brand to life.
It is my mission to breathe life, to breathe energy into the design work I undertake. Products are more than just the stitching and the components that they are made from. Assortments and brands are more than the sum of the products they sell. Each one has its own energy and lifeforce, and a successful brand is very intentional about leaning into the energy that ties its products and its makeup to its market and consumers.
Social media and digital platforms have irreversibly changed how brands interact with their customers. These days you need far more than just a product and an editorial catalog. You need content and messaging that can be quickly and agilely propagated across the digital universe as a product comes to life. Beyond the functions of selling, the products themselves are called upon to be, feel, and do more than just fulfill a basic function in a consumer's closet. The future of the apparel industry is tactile, its digital, and it is moving extremely quickly. This is what I know after filling nearly every role in the apparel-verse, and it is reflected in everything I do as a leader in the industry.