Dear everyone,
At long last, I’m free of all legal restrictions on my professional activities, and I’m very excited to share what I’m up to! Let’s get into it.
1: THE GREATER GOODS ALLIANCE
Co-facilitated by me and Lisa Congdon, The Greater Goods Alliance is an intimate, six-month, live mentoring and mastermind community for entrepreneurs with product-based businesses. Applications are open now, and we get started May 8th.
This program is a powerful combo of personalized coaching and strategic guidance, led by folks who’ve actually done the thing you’re doing, plus a supportive network of smart, thoughtful peers who all get what it’s like to feel guilty about reading a book for fun. (COUGH COUGH FOR EXAMPLE.)
The GGA is not designed for beginners— it’s for folks with established businesses that create and sell physical products (not digital or service-based) at wholesale, online, or both. There are only 14 spots and the group is already filling up, so if you’re interested, do check it out ASAP. Learn all about it and apply here.
2: BUSINESS CONSULTING & ADVISING
My 1:1 consulting is also based in the world of products and product development, and it’s for people in two scenarios:
You already have a successful business doing something outside the world of products. You want to add merchandise to the mix (or you think you might), but you don’t have time to also become an expert in product development, manufacturing, and sales.
You’re a product-based business owner who wants 1:1 support and thought partnership, and the kind of expertise that can only come from someone who’s successfully walked this path themselves.
Could this be you? Read all about my consulting offerings here.
With both my 1:1 advising and The Greater Goods Alliance, my goal is to offer the kind of guidance and support I needed when I was running Em & Friends, but didn’t exist. I hired plenty of great consultants over the years, but each one specialized in one or two aspects of what I needed to know: how to prepare a wholesale collection and work with retailers, or how to put together a warehouse, or how to standardize my systems. There was nobody I could work with who could help me figure out all of it, and nobody to learn from who’d actually done the thing I was doing. So here I am, 10 years later, being that person.
If you want to get in touch (great!), please do it through my site. I don’t have Substack DMs turned on. Namaste.
Hi to the other 98% of you!
As enthusiastic as I am about offering the above very specific services to people who do very specific things, it also feels clear that this work is a bridge to something else.
Most people who start greeting card companies do it because they love stationery. I don’t actually care all that much about stationery, but I care a lot about authentic communication and relationships. (Have I ever sent out a holiday card? Not once.)1
If you’ve been here longer than four minutes, you know I’ve been on a long personal journey to hell and back (in a middle seat in coach, one star), of healing from burnout and autoimmune disease, learning to work with my nervous system and train my body to stop living in fight-or-flight mode, and studying the cycle of change.
Part of what I mean by “studying” is like, actually studying. But in my case, “studying” also meant spending a long-ass time flailing around in the dark confusion of liminal space, a formless blob with an email address. This part was definitely not a choice, but it was absolutely the best thing that could have happened to me. Life is a series of cycles of death and rebirth, and you can’t skip the death part.
The longer I’m alive, and the more chaotic our world becomes, the more interested I am in supporting people in shedding old identities and toxic cultural conditioning, finding their way home to the joy of being who they really are, and learning to live from that place—because the more I practice this myself, the better my life feels. I’m a longtime admirer of Martha Beck’s work, and after she was a guest on Quitted, I decided to join her Wayfinder coach training program (I graduate in July).
I’m not yet sure how I’m going to use it professionally, and “become a coach” was decidedly not on my personal bingo card of Potential Life Experiences, but part of my practice these last years has been in ripping up that bingo card and being radically open to change.
Radically changing, with my friends who are like family, who I met at the GYM. If it’s not radical for me to a) go to the gym consistently for 2.5 years b) find my people there c) swim naked in the Pacific Ocean in March d) have my photo taken during said swim and e) send it out in a newsletter, I don’t know what is. (Obvs, photo shared with permission.)
Speaking of change, you may have noticed this newsletter has a new name.
Unqualified was fun, but it never felt entirely right. Kind of like our cat Aquarius—the one who does NOT know how to operate indoor plumbing—whose name, it turns out, is actually Lady Todd. We just had to get to know her better in order to figure that out.
After getting to know this newsletter a little better, Subject to Change feels much closer to the heart of what I write about here, and where my work is ultimately going.
Also, like many other things, it turns out you can change the name of your newsletter and nobody really cares.
Finally: a question I’d love your input on. I have no desire to start another wholesale brand, but there are a lot of things I’ve written and illustrated for IG, etc. over the last several years that some of you have asked to buy. I couldn’t legally sell any of that work (or new work) until now, due to noncompete agreements with Em & Friends, but I’m now free to open my own shop. It’d be print-on-demand, which gives me (and you) a lot of flexibility; it’s just as easy to offer a poster as a phone case, for example.
Setting up the shop itself is a fair amount of work, tho, so I wanna know:
(A “no” doesn’t hurt my feelings, btw: I’m personally not a huge shopper at this point in my life! I just want some honest data, friends.) Thank you for voting!
More things are coming, including some affordable workshops and things beyond my former work niche. But after announcing season 2 of Quitted, looking at the massive amount of work it would take, not being able to find a sponsor to help with funding it, and deciding we didn’t have the bandwidth to take on another job that we actually had to pay to do— I’m now smart enough to not announce anything until it’s finished.
I’m headed to the airport in an hour to teach at a conference for the first time since 2017, and I can’t freaking wait. Uhh… gotta go pack now.
More soon,
PS: If you wanna know more about the Greater Goods Alliance, go here. If you wanna know more about working with me 1:1, go here.
PPS: If you wanna inquire about booking me for a workshop or a talk, go here — I’m available for that now, too.
PPPS: If you wanna start a creative project and join our weekly Zoom for paid subscribers, we’re meeting on Tuesday mornings at 8:30 PST until May 28th, and we’d love to have you!
Oh man this is total blasphemy. I feel DEEPLY UNCOMFORTABLE admitting that I don’t totally nerd out about stationery!
Congratulations! I'm just so darn lucky I get to hang out with you and the gang on Tuesday mornings for a few more weeks (longer if you do a writing challenge, hint, hint). You rock! See you next week 🥰.
I have never wanted more to be someone who creates actual physical products for sale so I could join your new mentoring group! Alas, I am a service-based provider (Certified Martha Beck Wayfinder Life Coach [...I also did not see this on my bingo card of Life Exoeriences and this shocked the shit out of me] and a Certified Forest Therapy Guide). So....boo. And congratulations to you on the freedom to do all the things!