Why Weird Works: What It Really Takes to Stand Out and Connect with Megan Eckman

Megan Eckman appeared in the 29th episode of our second season of the Take the Leap podcast. In this episode, “Why Weird Works: What It Really Takes to Stand Out and Connect with Megan Eckman” we get a masterclass in embracing brand evolution, trusting your weirdness, and creating a brand that deeply connects — not just converts. 

Some of our favorite takeaways include:

• Follow curiosity, not trends. Megan’s success often came from experimenting — not following trends but responding to what customers asked for.
• Too many businesses skip deep internal work when branding in favor of aesthetics.

• Having an outlet for joy actually improves clarity, focus, and innovation in your work. 

Check Out Megan’s Uplevel Lab (formerly known as Design Jam)–Launching May 2, 2025

A small-group incubator for entrepreneurs who feel stuck in their business and want to ideate new directions through creative collaboration and structured support. 

Guest Information:

• Guest, Megan Eckman, Founder of Fat Cap Design 
• Find Megan on Instagram @meganmeckman
• Find Megan on LinkedIn
• Visit the Fat Cap Design website
• Learn more about Design Jam 

Megan’s Bio:

Megan has always been drawn to ‘impossible’ challenges, including starting a business while earning degrees in creative writing and art.

After that she tackled:

• Growing an illustration business in San Jose, CA
• Illustrating for Google
• Building an embroidery kit empire that stocked 200+ shops around the country, kept hundreds entertained with monthly subscriptions, and helped thousands get their crafting fix during the pandemic
• Rebranding that embroidery kit business for 150% increase in sales YoY
• Starting a UX business to help small businesses redesign their websites, with most clients enjoying a 30% increase in sales YoY

And now, she’s helping businesses get their spark back with their customer by co-designing authentic and engaging brand experiences at her new company, Fat Cap. 

Victoria: All right. Hi everyone. Welcome back to Take the Leap. We are so excited to chat with our guest this week, Megan Ekman. Megan has always been drawn to impossible challenges, including starting a business while earning degrees in creative writing and art. After that, she tackled growing an illustration business in San Jose, California illustrating for Google.

Side note. I did not know that. So that’s fun. I’m gonna ask you about that for sure. Building an embroidery kit empire that stocked 200 shops around the country, kept hundreds entertained with monthly subscriptions, and helped thousands get their crafting fix during the pandemic. Rebranding the Embroidery Kit business for 150% increase in sales and starting a UX business to help small businesses redesign their websites with most clients enjoying a 30% increase in sales, and now she’s helping businesses get their spark back with their customer by co-design authentic and engaging brand experiences at her new company.

Fat Cap. Welcome to the podcast, Megan. We’re so excited to have you. Yeah, I’m excited to be here and for our listeners excited. Yes. And for our listeners because I really like to talk about this whenever I can. I know Megan from the infamous feral book club, and we have the best time reading absolutely feral books and talking about it and having the best time ever.

So really excited to have another book club member on the podcast. We’ve had a couple now and welcome. Excited to talk about your journey.

Megan: Yeah. In preparing for this, I realize it’s been a wild one

Victoria: and we’re gonna talk all about it. So basically the first question we ask all of our guests is the same one every time is what is your, take the leap story, I guess what actually inspired you to take the leap and start your own business?

And I know you have quite a bit of a journey and there’s been a lot of pivots and things that have changed over the years, so feel free to just talk about that whole journey with us.

Megan: Yeah. So I feel like I always feel like I have to go back so far. And it is because when I decided to get dual degrees artsy partsy degrees in creative writing and drawing my parents were like, fine.

But you have to start a business before you graduate to prove that you can do something with this degree. So it took me four and a half years, and the last half of the four and a half years was me figuring out how to file all the paperwork, what business I was gonna run. And there were no classes on it.

I actually ended up teaching some of my professors how to file taxes, how to start a blog. Yes. So I was running an art print business and honestly taking quite a bit of flack from it, from classmates, it seen as selling out. But I knew that it was the only way to make money. I met the deadline, so I launched what was called Studio, MME, my initials.

So studio me that was 2009. Then my, at the time, boyfriend got into grad school and so we moved to San Jose and I was like, hell yes, I’m coming. Don’t leave me in North Dakota. And so while working for some other people there, I kept that business going. So I did a little bit of VA work for some well-known business couches for a few years and kept my art business going.

And it was about that time that I was vending at shows and I was asked by somebody who worked at Google if I could come. They had a new app launching which has since gone away. And they were holding their launch party and they needed these hand-drawn maps. So of course you just say yes and you. I went to Google and they were like, bring your supplies.

And I was like, okay, I normally don’t do that. So I brought all my supplies in. My little bag, went to Google, and they left me a ro alone in a conference room and said, you have 30 minutes. Show us what you would do and we’ll come back and look at it. I spent most than 30 minutes having a panic attack. It ended up being fine.

They liked it. They were also nice enough and they doubled what I was asking for. ’cause they’re like, you’re not charging enough. We’ll pay you more. It was a, it was hell like that. Next week was hell. And I have never drank so much as I did every night crying myself to sleep from that project.

So it’s just a nice little pip on your resume, but you’re like, gotta never do that again. And it was about that time that I burnt out, so I burnt out in the illustration business. The Bay Area is very expensive and most of the money at that time was coming from my business and it just wasn’t enough.

And anybody who’s been there where you are, the sole one bringing in the money, and if you don’t bring in enough, what are you gonna do next? It’s really stressful. So one night sounds like I cry a lot, I cried a lot in those three years, but one night I was like, we’re just gonna make art for me. And I don’t want it to be the pen and ink illustrations that I normally do.

So I ravaged around and I found some canvas because I had taken some painting classes and some thread, and I was like, I’m gonna turn one of my illustrations into something with like textile, like an embroidery. And so I did it and it was really cool. It was very different ’cause it was taking line art and making it an embroidery.

And I posted it to Facebook and all of my customers members went, oh my God, I want to make this. Thankfully they didn’t say, I want to buy this because I knew they couldn’t afford it. And I wasn’t, I didn’t, I liked my hands. I wasn’t gonna go into that business. So I said like basically, hold my beer, give me a week and I will figure out how to get you something that you can do this with.

And this was before there were really any embroidery kits on the market. So this was me figuring out how do we make iron on transfers? How can we, what can we put through the printer? What can we just print out ourselves? Where are we even gonna get the fabric? Where are we gonna get the hoops? And so it took a week.

They sold, I made a lot of money. I started vending at shows, doing both. Half the booth was illustration. Half the booth of embroidery. Embroidery sold out every single time. And so I was just like, let’s just go with easy, like having a whole identity crisis about what is art, what is fine art?

What is an artist? It was like, let’s just go with easy. Ditched all the illustration business. Went all in with the embroidery. Ran that for, we started that like 2014, ran that until 2019 when I was again, burnt out. So done. I don’t actually like to sew. It’s like the secret. I don’t do. I pay other people to do.

Just so I could have Instagram pictures ’cause I just don’t like it. And I don’t like it as much as my customers did for my customers. It was their anxiety relief. It was, it was so different. So we were burnt out and I told my husband like, I don’t think I wanna do this anymore again.

I had hired him at this point, so this was again, the sole income and he is we don’t have anything else. Let’s look at rebranding it because the brand isn’t that strong. So we took a course on it and we loved the process. We geeked out so much, we changed it all over. So we turned into pop lush embroidery and we got official, we trademarked this, we got it all set up.

We actually figured out who our customer was and it was roller derby librarians. These women were fun, vibrant into comics, and so we packaged everything for them. And that’s how we then launched with 150% year on year increase. And I was like, I still don’t like this. I still don’t wanna do this. This isn’t what I wanna do with my life.

I’m still burnt out. And my husband’s okay, let’s do something else. And then the pandemic hit and we’re like, fuck. We only have no one has a job, right? No one’s hiring at this point. All of our wholesale shops closed because nobody could do in-person stuff. So at that point we had 200 wholesale shops, all of them closed up.

So there’s half your income right there. Yeah. And our Etsy blew up. It blew up so far, like the day after lockdown. I had stupidly put everything to. Unlimited because no one ever bought enough on Etsy. Oh no. I put it on unlimited. All of a sudden it woke up one morning and it had been featured on their front page in their newsletter.

And it’s do you need a craft for lockdown? And it was like 300 orders and it was like, ah, also, all of our supply chains have collapsed at this point. And I was just like, goddammit, there’s

just

Megan: so much money in my account right now and I have nothing for these people. So I had to message every single one and be like, I am working on it.

Give me a week. We know that some of these places are working on a way to get employees in. Give me time. I promise you’ll get it. And everybody was nice. Everybody was like, I don’t care when I get it. I just want it right now. I just want it. I just want it. Yeah. Don’t gimme my money back.

I’ve got hope. And so we can rebuild. A worldwide supply chain in a week. Oh

Ashlan: my God. Oh my God.

Megan: Thankfully. I know. So thankfully, like the one hiccup is if you’ve ever used Spoonflower, they’re the only one who does what they do, which is print designs on fabric. So that was the one we could not find a workaround for except to get like the old iron on.

So it was like, whatever way you want it, we can get it to you, but give us a little bit more time for Spoonflower.

Thankfully, they were printing masks and that was how they were able to stay open. It was that, that they turned half of their factory into a mask making factory That’s great for the fabric masks.

And so it was a way for them, it was sneaky, but also, kind, it was a way for them to keep their employees going and to keep profits coming in. So we had. Double Christmas months for March, April, may, June, and we were working 14 hour days to pack all the orders and I was like, I’m so done at this point, I run the marathon.

I’m like a hundred yards from the end. I’ve tripped, fallen and my husband is like pulling me face down across the finish line. I was like, I don’t do this anymore. I don’t even like this. And now there’s just no room again, no way to get another job at this point because the market is still not ready. So we launched subscription kits, like monthly subscription clubs.

That’s amazing. We’ve got three of those running now. We’ve got some steady, we can like. People didn’t ask for much for that. They literally, we have all the supplies. I don’t even gonna want thread. Just give me the fabric, I’m good to go. ’cause most people, it’s like when you knit and you have a whole closet that you don’t want people to know about off your yard.

So we had that going and eventually my husband is Hey, I’m gonna start applying for jobs, but here’s all my duties. Keep it running. It’s a full-time job. It, so it took him six months and he finally got a job and it was really hard in the midst of it, he had gotten a certificate in UX and he was like, this is everything we did to make our business as good as it was.

The reason why our kits were so good and it has taken me a really long time to openly admit they were one of the best ones on the market ever. It’s because we iterated and we came at it from, if I’m an absolute beginner, how do I make this the easiest most handholding kit possible? And that’s what everybody liked about ours was that it wasn’t pretentious.

The quality was really nice, but also everything was so thought out. And so my husband’s I think you should take this certificate. It just really systematizes everything that we’ve just done naturally. So I got the certificate, started applying for jobs, and I interviewed with some people who could be mentors and they said, what do you love to do?

And I said, I love getting to solve the big problems. I love getting to understand what makes the customer tick and what can we do to make the best solution possible. I love to world build with somebody. And the woman goes, great, so you won’t get to do any of these in this field. How much do you like screaming into the void?

Because you will just be told what to do and you can’t go higher up the chain of fix the problem. I was like, I really don’t like screening to the floor. I only work for myself. And she’s I don’t think you want to go into this field in this capacity, maybe freelance. So I tried to freelance that for a while, helping people just fix their websites.

But it became clear that there were steps before that needed to get sorted in order to make the website work as well as it could. But nobody wants, nobody at the level I was playing at wanted to pay for that. They just want a website. We don’t need to go into what my, we don’t need to go into who my customer really is.

We don’t need to go into what makes me tick or what makes them tick, or what am I actually trying to offer these people? What emotions do I want them to feel? We don’t have time. Just make it pretty. So I spend all of last year being like the penny donation bins at the mall where you used to put the penny in and it would go round and round the outside and it would go really slow and then slowly would pick up speed.

I spent all year being that penny, being like, what do I actually do? Is this a job? Does anyone do this? What would I call this? Who needs this? What could I offer? How do I talk to people about it?

And in the end, what I landed on with this new iteration of business, and they realized that I had pivoted. So many times, and yet at its core, the thing that I do best has always been at the center of it. I just hadn’t realized it until now. So at its core, I am a world builder. So in creative writing, I was really good at making characters.

I sucked ass that plot, but I could build the character, I could understand what made them tick. I could build the whole world, but I couldn’t understand devious machinations. So I was like, so it just, it was basically a sitcom. Like sitcoms, they never evolve. It’s always, we’re at the same point with some silly little things.

And so with the ux, it was trying to world build with embroider kits. It was building this experience for people. And so what I do now, the way I decided to use it is this brand experience design. So I come in. When companies have been going for a while or they’re new and they don’t, they’ve grown apart from their customer and they don’t understand fully what makes them tick and they don’t fully understand the world that they are building for their customer because you build it like I did with my embroider kit business like Liquid Death just did with its diaper.

If you build it your weirdos pay you a shit ton of money because they want to be in that group and exist in that world that you’ve made where you can rock like a leather diaper to a mosh pit. And they sold outta that thing Liquid Death did. It was insane. I’ve seen pit diaper put, they put jeans, they covered a whole like pickup and denim.

And they auctioned it off and it’s like it, if you can build your world right around your customers, you can just give them such a fun, engaging experience with you that they just want more. And so that’s where I am now

Ashlan: you are reminding me of, I have this email that I should forward to you that’s sitting in my inbox.

It’s Cards Against Humanity. They sold a diamond potato. Yeah. You see you. Yep. As you’re saying that, I’m like, this is right. This is the thing they do because? Because they know their people are fucking quirky. Honestly. Like that. And trust me, if it wasn’t as expensive as it was, I probably would’ve bought that stupid diamond potato.

But I was like, I’ll just keep the email because. I don’t need that. But I thought about it. I definitely thought about it.

Megan: Yeah. And those brands get to have so much fun. Just think of just think of what the board meeting is like. And they’re like, what are we gonna give away?

Yeah. Yeah.

Megan: And obviously a lot of thought still has to go and do it. It still has to align with the customer, but they built enough trust with their customer, they understand them enough and they’ve everything’s engineered to elicit the response that they want.

That it’s really not risky at all when they do it.

Ashlan: Yeah. When it’s such good buzz, when the stuff like that comes out. Yep. Taco Bell is also really good for that. 

Yeah. They’re Munchy meals or whatever. It’s you’re like, that does totally sound like something that a stoner at 4:00 AM came up with. Yes. Because nobody should ever eat that, and it makes sense that it’s only available during that timeframe.

Yep.

Victoria: I just had Taco Bell the other night for dinner for the first time in a long time. I was like, why don’t I do this more often? Oh, I’m probably not the best for my stomach, but so great. Still great. I, okay, so I love, there were so many things that you said I wanna respond to.

I know it way too long. I, one of the things I love about your journey is that like you literally were just like. I’m gonna give this a try and, oh, this isn’t working for me. Okay, I’m gonna evolve and do this instead. And I love that because I feel like so much of the time when it comes to entrepreneurship, I feel like there’s, I’ve, at least how I was raised, there’s this very fear based, like teachings around entrepreneurship of make sure you have all your ducks in a row.

Make sure you know what you wanna do, make sure you get your degree first, and like work in the field first, and get to know people and and then once you have all your ducks in a row, then you take that risk and then you do this. And then if it doesn’t work, and I feel like nowadays too, like everybody’s an entrepreneur, it feels and when they’re posting online about it, it’s like all this like really glamorous, like life is going so well and I’m doing this because of X, Y, and Z and whatever. But we’re not seeing like the true nature of what entrepreneurship actually is and what it looks like. And I feel like for so many of us, especially if you’re even just a little bit creative or, and even just a little bit neurodivergent, like that whole process is just like that.

You, you try something. And it either works or it doesn’t. And then you have to decide, do I keep going and try something else? Do I go back to a regular job? Do I do this? And I, so I just, I love that part of your story where you’re like, oh, okay, this isn’t making me happy, so I’m not gonna keep doing this, but I’m gonna try something else.

And I feel like hearing your whole journey from like start to finish, it totally makes sense that you’re, where you’re at right now, like the whole concept for your current brand totally makes sense from everything you’ve done up until this point. I don’t know, I just, I love that part, so thank you for sharing that because Yeah.

Oh, sorry. Oh, I was gonna

Ashlan: say, it’s like a distillation, right? Like liquor doesn’t come perfect the first time you run it through something. You’ve gotta do it a few times before it’s even anything that you wanna drink. And so I feel like that kind of has been your process was like we started here and we’ve refined down to this point.

But yeah. The next question that we tend to ask folks is like, what piece of advice would you give yourself knowing what you do now, back to that person who started out as the journey of entrepreneurship?

Megan: Yeah. So obviously there’s there’s always so many that people have for this, but I spent the last year experimenting on something, and this is the advice.

This was the one thing that would’ve shaved. Years off everything. Which is to never stop making connections and being curious because when I was in the Bay, we had my husband was in grad school, so we had friends through him because I lived in their tiny apartment and my office was in the kitchen.

So I didn’t have anyone except his grad school friends. And so we would go to all the openings, we would, I would bend at shows and I’d meet people there. And that’s how I got the Google gig. And like by talking to everybody, I was able to meet people who worked at Disney, who worked at Pixar, who did all these amazing things.

And then I was able to grow through that. I was able to learn about shows I should go to. I was able to like, I met Jenny hardest, sublime stitching at a conference, and I was fan girling her and she was like, oh my God, you are Megan. And she’s let’s go get a drink. And then we ended up doing a business deal.

I was like totally drunk. But when the pandemic hit, I went full hermit mode for four years, and the business just got smaller and smaller. And it was like when I said before I wanted out. The other thing was that after the pandemic 2020 was great. 2021 was okay. 2022, we were at like half our revenue.

The ship was sinking so fast that we were the rats trying to get off of it. And a lot of that was because we’d stopped making any connections. We’d stopped making any friends, we’d stopped talking to anybody. And so we had nothing. We had no resources, nowhere to go. And so when I started figuring out the next business last year, I started reaching out and having one to two coffee deets a week with people.

Including all of you, just to try and figure out Yeah. Ashlyn was the one of the, I was one of the ones, yeah. Yeah. And it was just I go in with no expectations. Yeah. I go in not knowing what I will get. I don’t even expect to get anything. But by being open, you get to build a Rolodex slowly you learn what other people are doing and so you can ask them questions.

You can learn and be like, oh, they’re using this platform. That might be cool to try. You also just get sometimes just some funny stories, like some of the coffee dates I went on were bonkers and you’re like, never doing that again. But I think it gets you out of your, it gets you all these different perspectives and then you never know what will come.

Like we ended up making a book club and then making another club and teaming up together. And for me, I ended up, for last year I was the Portland leader for the Freelancers Union. And that was because I reached out and they said, do you wanna do it? And I was like, okay. Just saying yes.

But I think a lot of us think that we network, but I don’t think enough. And I think a lot of people go at it as it’s all transactional instead of just just meet somebody cool and just talk with them for 30 minutes. Yeah. And you don’t know if they’ll get back to you a year from now and be like, oh my God, there’s this gig and I thought about you or if nothing will.

But I found that it’s generally never nothing comes of it. There’s always, if nothing else, a weird story to tell someone.

Ashlan: Yeah. I feel like I got connected to you by Mary and I had no idea about all the embroidery stuff. This is the first time I’m hearing about it. It was because you were doing the things with the freelancers union and Mary was like, you guys should just click connect.

And we did and it was great. And now we’ll do even more stuff together. But yeah, it was like zero expectations of you’re just cool people who should talk, which is great. And I think that, that is. Invaluable as an entrepreneur because you never know when things are going to happen. It’s very similar with Tori and I had no idea when we were solo Marco on folks at nonprofits that we would be doing this together.

Victoria: Oh. Had no clue. If you had told me that we were gonna do this in a few years, I’d be like,

wow. Really? Wow. Yeah. Nice.

Victoria: Yeah, it’s, I love that you’re saying that too because so I too, during Covid, I stopped networking, I stopped going to networking events. I stopped talking to old connections, like basically been a hermit and then having a kid and all that throughout, that just really did not help my hermit tendencies.

So I don’t, and then I work exclusively from home, so I don’t leave my house ever. And you all have been really encouraging me. I’m like I really need to start now. Parking again. My anxiety is but do you? But I definitely do. And so I, I love that because I feel like I’ve had more opportunity and just more honestly fun networking with my friends and like people that I know and like the book club, I swear like more has come from that than any networking event I’ve ever been to.

And I think that’s the whole point of it. It’s not networking to see what you can get from someone. You are just trying to build relationships. And when you build those relationships and they’re genuine relationships, they’re not like you’re fostering them because you’re like, okay, when are they gonna refer someone to me?

You’re just genuinely like the person. Then that’s when the magic happens and they’re like-minded people and they have, other businesses or people that they work with, that’s when that happens. So I feel like, yeah, in the long run, or in the short term, like building relationships probably doesn’t seem like it’s gonna help your bottom line, but I feel like it helps even more because you’ve taken the time, you get to know ’em, you have fun with them, they know you, they trust you on so many levels, you are gonna be the first person they think of.

So yeah,

Megan: there’s also just so many opportunities that you don’t know. The universe is so d goddamn cheeky you don’t know what, I can’t tell you how many times that I’ve gotten on a phone and told somebody what I did, and they go, it’s funny, you should mention that. And I’m like, it’s, but tell me what do you wanna do?

Because it’s always I have this opportunity. I didn’t know you did that. And you’re like, yep. Skip it. I think too, another week with that, the other side of the coin that people don’t do, and this is what I did a lot with the embroidery kit business, and I’m doing it more now with this business is networking to understand your customer.

So with my em embodi care business, I did a lot of user interviews and then just a lot of interviews for fun. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever done? What’s the superlative people would give you? And I would post that as content, but now with my audience, I actually, with no intent of selling to somebody, I’ll be like, I would really just love to sit down and learn about your business and like your problems, because it gives you this whole, you basically, you’re building a character, right?

And you need to write what you know, unless you have to meet these people to be like, oh, it seems like everybody’s struggling with kind of the same thing, and these are the words that they use. I wonder if there’s something that I could do to help with that problem. But we don’t sit down with them a lot.

We sit down, but we don’t listen. And so if you go in with no expectations, you’re just be like, tell me more. I cannot, curiosity is my number one. And so honestly, any job interests me. Like when it’s like I’m a plumber, I’m like, I can I see inside your truck. Like how many tools do you have?

Or like what? At the grocery store, the checkout person. My favorite is always to ask what’s the weirdest cart combo that you’ve seen today? Ooh. I have seen sadness go by, when it’s just it’s all the hungry man, and then like cigarettes and you’re like, oh buddy, that’s a bad day. And I’ve seen a woman who just had a cart full of milk and butter and it’s I really wanna know where she’s going.

And so I feel like if you can have that curiosity when you chat with people, they will drop weird little nuggets for you to be like, I never thought that certain, like times of year affect certain businesses in ways that we don’t anticipate, and so by networking you learn those and you’re better able to build a business around that.

Victoria: That’s a really good point. I feel like so often when you’re in your own world and you’re in your own business or you’re marketing for someone else’s, like it so easy to get into a vacuum of this is. What the business is like, this is what they do and this is how we’re gonna move forward.

But yeah, if you can be curious, if you can be curious and get to know your audience more on a more personal level and the challenges and struggles they deal with, that’s gonna impact you more than anything. Yeah. I feel like people don’t care enough right now or they’re just too busy or whatever, that they don’t.

Really dive into that. I know we’ve had a lot of conversations about like working with clients who genuinely have no idea who their audience is, and they think that they can just move forward with any sort of marketing campaign without knowing that answer. It doesn’t make any sense, but screaming

Megan: into the

Victoria: void.

Screaming into the void for sure. Let’s transition. I wanna ask you, this is the other basic question we ask all of our guests, and that is, what is your why? Why do you do what you do?

Megan: So I want people to find their weird people, basically. I feel like the world is so magical. If I can help businesses make other people feel special and they can build their own little happy worlds,

I think I can make the world a little bit of a better place by doing that. And it’s not selfish. It sounds selfish, but it’s like it’s, I’d like to think that I could make the world a better place, but not by doing much. It’s just by helping other people, like just make a safe, exciting place for people to come in to feel seen, to feel like acknowledged and they belong.

And it’s silly, I think, to me, that you can do that just by having the right voice. And the right diamond potato and, like you can just do it. You can do it in a weird way because I feel like so many people take things seriously and I think the world is just too crazy, and I would just like to make the world a better place by making it more weird.

Ashlan: That’s a good answer. I love that so much. So find your weirdos. Is that, find your weirdos. And is that the tagline? Find your weirdos. It should be, yeah. I see Megan’s writing this down.

Victoria: I’m gonna put it on a sticky note. That’s my mantra.

I love that so much. We’re now gonna transition into what we are calling the hot seat questions as we go on. We’re realizing they are not very hot and they usually don’t get answered very quickly either, but they’re still fun. We’re still gonna call them the hot seat questions. So my first question in that is, what is the best and or worst advice you’ve received in your career?

Megan: Oh yeah, that is hard.

I’ll have to go with recent. Honestly, some of the best. Some people are gonna hate this.

Ask a mediocre white man how much they would charge for what you’re doing, because it will, it’ll save you so much time and effort. Effort. And you’ll be like, God damnit, they doubled my prices. But ask some, maybe you have a friend, couple, you know them, but just be like, here’s what I’m going to do.

How much would you charge if it was you? And I’m not saying you have to meet them. But I sat down with a white male coach, business coach, and he at least said like, how much do you wanna charge? And then he said, if you, he quadrupled the price for me. And said, what if you charged that?

How much more work would you do? And I said, I wouldn’t do any more work because I’m already doing all the work. And he’s we just made that easy for you. And

Victoria: that is fucking brilliant. Ask a mediocre white man.

Ashlan: I, I’ve just figured out a new website idea. Sorry. Connecting the people. Yes,

Megan: you could. That’s I bet too. Yeah,

Victoria: probably.

Megan: Yeah, because like how would a

Victoria: mediocre white man respond to this?

Megan: Yeah. Pick some of their websites, and be like, look at their pricing. Get us. Yeah. But you could farm it out.

Yeah,

Ashlan: that would be so good. Just a blast of a survey. Be like, there’s nothing in this for you. I just am curious. I’m doing research.

Megan: That is my other, yeah, that’s, I love making businesses. Worst advice. I do feel like it hasn’t been given to me but I know that there’s like that sentiment out there. It’s not that you should just do it, do what you love, you’ll figure it out. Because there are some conversations that I’ve had to have with clients where we have to have that come to Jesus that this isn’t gonna work.

That what you wanna do in a late capital economy, late stage capitalism, and it just won’t work. And I think that whole idea that if you love it, you should do it and you will figure out a way to make it work isn’t true for everyone, because some people won’t. I iterate enough or budge enough and they’re like, it has to be this way and I’ll just keep grinding and I will make it work.

I will get lucky and it will, it’ll come to something where instead, you said, you mentioned like I iterate all the time. I do. It does take me a while, but at some point you have to go with easy and be like, there was no way that I was going to make what I wanted to make from my art print career.

And by staying stuck there, I wasn’t helping anybody. And also again, when I realized I had hit the cap of my embroidery kit business and the cap was $150,000 and the only way to get bigger was to buy a facility and employees, which then would still end up probably with us making this take home. Same take home thing.

You just have to throw in the towel. And I know that some people are like, you could have made it work. You just didn’t try hard enough. No. We saw the writing on the wall soon enough that we are like, we’re pivoting and it doesn’t mean this took years, but it doesn’t mean that we failed.

It means that it was never going to work, so why keep trying. Yeah.

Ashlan: Yeah. I’m really glad you said that because I, as somebody who recently, just like I. Saw the writing on the wall financially with keeping employees and like needing to do layoffs. I was just like, this is not what I came into business for.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Like it stopped being fun and it’s okay. And like I, I mean I had texted Tory and Victoria, like Erin and Mary immediately, and I was like, oh my God, this is what I’m doing. And they helped me like be relieved. That is not a failure. But it was hard.

It was really hard, but it also would’ve been really hard. Like I was just like, the options are sink the entire ship or throw some heavy shit out and pass the ball. Like

Megan: there’s just, but you now get to say you have tried that and that’s not what everybody can say is you were willing to pivot.

You were willing to iterate and say, this didn’t work. We gotta cut the losses. And that’s what I’ve had to learn. It doesn’t mean that it failed because it might have never worked. Yeah. At that point, it doesn’t mean you can’t do it again later, but you will be at a different point when you do it again later.

But yeah, it is very hard to not I, yeah. Yeah.

Ashlan: There’s lots of learnings. Learnings in the process of learning. Yeah.

Victoria: And I feel like too, like that’s such an older way of doing business and like entrepreneurship is like sticking to your guns and figuring how to make it work and, but I think in today’s day and age, the like best skillset you could have as an entrepreneur is learning how to pivot and evolve, and also learning how to recognize when it’s time so that you’re not in that holding pattern and it’s not bringing you down.

Yeah. Absolutely. For sure.

Victoria: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. That’s great.

Ashlan: I have our next hot seat question. So you help your clients with their branding challenges. Do you find that more folks struggle with the verbal expressions of their brands? So the words, the tone, all of that, or the visual expressions of their brands?

The just make it look pretty.

Megan: It’s actually neither of those, oh, it’s the deeper it is the assignment that I literally have to sit on the phone with my customer to do because they don’t want to do it. It is the, what is our brand story. So what are our values and our mission? What is the journey that we are helping our customer? So the customers on the journey.

You are the like old lady in the woods who like comes to help them and by giving them something like, I’ve got a map and some magical things and you need to know where they want to get to. And so most people don’t think about the journey that the customer’s on. And also we like to just think about if you buy my thing, here are the features.

Which goodness, the crafting industry will tell you all about the features and artists too. And maybe with this paint, nobody gives a shit the benefits. And that’s you’re gonna lose 10 pounds, you’re gonna your car will never be cleaner. Yeah. But actually the most important thing is the psychological changes that you are helping your customer along with on that journey.

And so at the end. Is it, are you helping them step into a new group? Are you helping them step into new identity? Do they get to say, I’m a charitable person now, or do they get to say obviously like we’re always bombarded with weight loss stuff and it’s there’s a moral issue, yay, America. But also like you get to say I’m an athlete.

I am a strong person. Now I can do this. It, it’s, so that’s actually the hardest part is like, what does your company actually want to help your customer do? And once we know that, once we know, are you the preacher, are you the best friend? Are you a parent? What is your company to your customer?

Once you know that. Then you know the direction that your language needs to go. Because we have all of our story, we have our adjectives that describe us. We know A, B, C, all the touch points that are gonna come. And we know what our customer’s gonna feel at each one when they come in, and what we want them to feel when they go out.

So when they get our welcome email, what are they feeling? Or like when they get to your landing page, what are they feeling inside and what do we need to get them to feel at the end to click the buy button, and then that next touch point when they’re like, oh shit, I just spent, I signed up for mountain bike lessons and I had a panic attack after I went, Hey, and so knowing that the next message was like, you’ve got this, you’ve got weeks.

It’s okay, here’s some videos of lessons for you to do. But here are all these other testimonials of people who were scared just like you. They knew what my response was gonna be, and they were like, we got you. Here’s your tea. And so I think once you know that everything else gets easier, but it’s the hardest thing you will ever do, and nobody wants to sit with it because all the other stuff is 10 times more fun.

And I’m the mom who has to be like, no, we have to finish the homework, then we can go play. And they will squirrel out of it every single time. I’m like, I know this sucks. I know it sucks and we will have to do this every six months to a year, but this is the only way to get better.

Victoria: It’s, and it’s such an important step and it’s the clients I work with, a lot of them haven’t really taken that step at all.

And so we’re trying to backfill that. While working on their existing campaign, and depending on the type of client, some of them have the capacity to do that, some of them don’t. And it’s just, it’s yeah, it’s a mess.

Megan: Yeah. Basically if they don’t do it, you are painting a ramshackle house. Yeah. It is still going to fall apart.

It’ll look nice. Yep. But if anybody walks into it, there’s mold everywhere and an infestation of rats and it will only last for so long. But yeah, no, yeah. I would say 90% of companies haven’t done it.

No,

Megan: because it’s, it’s the, it’s inner work. It’s therapist like most of us haven’t done therapy enough.

Yeah. Why would I do that when I could go just hit my midlife crisis and die am Mazda Miata instead. Like, why do I.

Victoria: Like on the same note of branding in general. I wanted to bring this up just ’cause I thought it was really fun. So I took a look at your new website since you published that and I was looking through all your branding and I know you’ve been doing some stuff there and I love your branding I’m obsessed.

It’s,

Victoria: yeah. Every marketer’s dream and I love your use of I think it says co couples counselings for brands that have lost their spark. And throughout like your entire brand, you talk about you talk about your customers as if it’s like a relationship and like how you’d fix it. And it’s really unique and fun.

So I wanted to bring it up and ask you like, what made you come up with that and then yeah, I’ll just have you talk about it. ’cause it’s really fun.

Megan: Thank you. It took. Four iterations. And I worked with our friend Megan Dowd for the first one just to figure out what do we even put on this site?

And I gave her my word vomit. And then she came back and said what voice are you going for? And this is where 90% of businesses, I hadn’t even done the work online. And I was like, I was totally masking when I wrote that because I wasn’t weird enough. So I got what she had. I put it up, just didn’t feel comfortable.

’cause it was just general, here’s what we do, here’s why you need us. But it didn’t fit, it didn’t fit the brands that we wanted to work with. We want to be the people that help make the next liquid death. Our favorite brand is Ghost. Those weird experiences. So those. The companies that get their weirdos together.

And so I was trying out at every networking event, ways to explain what I do. And I have sat through so many titles and tried and design is one of those worlds where if you mention anything with design, people go graphic, and you’re like, no. It’s like when you say you’re an English major and they’re like to teach, and you’re like, no, it hurts so much.

So I realized that was a problem. And then trying to explain what I do, large companies understood what like brand experience was. Smaller ones didn’t. And it took too long to explain and explain. And I was watching my therapist told me about this channel called Cinema Therapy, where they watch movies.

And they there’s a relationship coach on there. And so he analyzes like all the nineties rom-coms and which ones were toxic and it’s really cool. And he’s I do couples therapy. And literally I woke up in the middle of the night and was like, oh my god, we’re couples therapy because it’s the work.

It’s the work no one wants to do. You have to go really deep. My husband was scared to call us that because he’s but they’re not gonna want to do the work. I’m like, yeah, but we don’t want ’em to not do the work. So we may as well put it out there because if you’re willing to do it, we might as well put that out front.

Yeah. So my husband had this vision of using, there’s a type of writing called agt, prompt Agit, prompt Agitation. To prompt an action. So it’s very, it’s like Soviet, it’s like comrades let us unite together in this revolution against the machine of anarchy. And he is I really like this. What could we start here?

So we started with doing that into cha GBT, didn’t like where it was going. Then we found one of our favorite bands called Royal Republic and they are irreverent was it power disco, I think is some of the labels to explain what they are. And we’re like, yes, we want this weird, these guys dress like all in leather jackets and it’s just this weird disco group.

And we’re like, okay, let’s feed it that. So have it do the agitation prompt, then have it do this irreverent, weird metaphorical speak. Then throw in the couples therapy and that’s the voice that it then had to go through every single time. And once we read some of what it was making, we knew we had gold because it was so funny.

Some of the things that put out is like, why do you need us? ’cause that’s a question people have. Why can’t my team just do this? And it’s like the same reason Pandas need dating advice because sometimes you’re too close to the situation. And if you know that pandas need because they dunno how to reproduce.

And so it just, once it took five iterations to get there and I think most people stop at the one. Yeah. But you really want a voice that, that encompasses. That brand. And then what I did was I tested it with people to the next networking event I went to and started trying it out, tried the old one and the new one divided and conquered with my husband.

The only people who didn’t understand the new one were older white men. And I was like, that’s

fine.

Megan: Not my audience. So I was like, that’s fine. That probably checks up. So I would say for anybody who’s like trying to think of how to do their voice, one would definitely be like find books that have the voice you like bands that have the voice you like, feed that into the chat.

But then also just test it with people. I think a lot of people don’t test and you get out to a networking event and you feel like this is my only chance. And instead just be like. I have a list of things generally when I go to events of I want to test out these things with these, I’m gonna talk to as many people as possible and I wanna see what their reactions are.

Because with my old way of saying like I’m a brand experience designer. I help you build a world for your customers. They’d be like, okay. And then when you say couples therapy for brands that have lost their spark with their customer, they look at you, they laugh generally, and then go, oh my God, I know exactly how that feels.

I know I don’t understand quite what you do, but I know when people might need your help now.

Yeah.

Ashlan: It’s that like analogous thinking, right? You’re being introduced to this because. The way that I explain marketing to customers who don’t understand or like clients and customers who don’t understand marketing is find something that they will understand and explain it using that, yeah. So there’s a lot of car related analogies, there’s a lot of sports related analogies. There’s like airplanes, anything that’s like more easy to grasp being like, okay, we’re, or my favorite one is when, everybody’s I think I just need to advertise. And I was like, okay, that’s like bringing 10,000 people to your mall, but they never come into your store.

Yeah. So to buy anything. So yes, we can do that, but you don’t have a traffic problem, you have a conversion problem. So

Megan: I had somebody last night he connected with me on LinkedIn and I felt like I knew the name. We must have gone to college together. So I was like, fine, whatever. Connect.

Then he sent me a smiley face, a wave, and a link to his like, latest project. And I was like, this is the equivalent of coming into a party and just like throwing a business card at me and be like, yeah, what do you want me to do with this? Hello?

Ashlan: It’s like a, what is it called? Is it like a professional tick pic, essentially?

Yes. There you go. That’s what it’s, that’s here’s my portfolio.

That’s in Incre. I love that. I feel like we need to pull that clip out. Just,

Megan: yeah. I think that’s how I ended up not responding because I was like, my husband was like. Tell him like, so what am I supposed to do with this? And I was like, I don’t wanna be that mean.

But now I’d both be like, thank you for the unsolicited business dicking.

I think you should. I think he, I think you should.

Megan: It was a mediocre way. I triple dog.

Victoria: Dare you.

Just for our entertainment.

Megan: It was a white man thing to do. It’s a medioc thing to

1. Yeah. I just assumed that’s who it was. That’s fair. That’s awesome.

Ashlan: Awesome. Okay let’s talk a little bit about Farrah Book Club. Because this is part of one of the many ways that we all know each other why do you feel like having a group or a community like this helps people as business owners?

And I think what I’m getting at is, now we’re all in the commonwealth too, but like, why do you think it’s important to have business friends that you talk with other stuff besides business about?

Megan: I think for me, up until that point, I, this will make me sound like such a loser. I really didn’t have friends. The pandemic, I had lost most of them not to death, just to separation. And I think having that network allowed for collaborations that I never anticipated. I think it also, it helps to validate.

I think sometimes you can think that you are much smaller or bigger than you are. And by having other people to like, let’s share real numbers. Let’s share real launches and let’s share the workshop that I just led that no one attended, and they’re like, I’ll be honest and tell you about it.

’cause I know there’s no judgment here and that I can get the help I need. Again, I think life’s too short and you may as well do funny things like I really hadn’t read. Smart before the club and it was like, I’m going in with no expectations. I think in that case also you learn a lot about yourself.

You learn where your like interest lines are and where you’re like, can last hundred pages that because I’m tapping out on this one. What I will say is business wise too, I think you can learn a lot.

I think when you’re with people who run businesses, you can’t help but look at everything from a business point of view.

Ashlan: Yeah.

Megan: And so when I saw you guys didn’t go, we went to the signing for Kiss of the Basilisk.

Okay. That woman got her book into the top 10 romantic. This is. Bas smut. Okay, this is like the woman with the bear versus the man.

And she said, I do the bear. And the fact that it’s in the top 10, I told my husband, like this woman, like again, she should be a client. ’cause she has gotten all of her weirdos together. And they’ve said, yes, take my money and give me three books of this. And they are unapologetic about, this is what I want.

And we live in an age where there’s a publishing company that’s alright, this is what the ladies want. Who are we to judge? We’ll make money from this.

Ashlan: That’s awesome. I’m gonna add that to the reading list now.

Victoria: I haven’t read it yet, but I’m, yeah, it’s definitely on my list. I’m very curious.

Hing,

Megan: I haven’t, it’s on the list. Megan Dow, it was her first. It is. I looked at the Good Reads Review and all of them are like, what did I just read?

Ashlan: Those are the best though. Where you like literally can’t put it down and you’re just like, I just need to know where this goes. Like I just like,

yeah,

Victoria: just need to know what happens next.

I feel like too, since like we’ve done this book club, like I have been reading so much and not just smut although I’ve been consuming copious amounts of smut, I’ve also been reading other things too. And even with the smutty books, I learned something. Yeah, I learn something every time. I feel like.

And then how that’s impacted me. I’ve been more creative in my business. I’ve been writing more. I’ve been in like such a rut for the last few years because writing became a chore and reading became a chore. And since I’ve introduced fun back into my life, I’ve been able to replicate that fun in other ways.

And so I think maybe it’s not reading, maybe it’s something else, but yeah having something fun and then also doing that fun thing with friends who own their own businesses, I think is just a really magical way to kick that off.

Ashlan: Yeah.

Victoria: Yeah. I love our book club and I love all the opportunities that have come from it to like just talk about business.

So it’s been great. We’re gonna wrap up with one more question and this, we’ve decided to introduce this in season two, and we are making a playlist. So we wanna know what is a song right now that is on repeat or on your frequent playlist? It could be unhinged. We have some unhinged okay, good.

Megan: Yeah. It goes, it’s on trend, so I can’t get enough of the Swedish Band Ghost. If Ghost, you’ll understand why, but if you don’t, ghost is a Swedish metal band, and the main the front man, the lead singer, the guy sickly the songwriter has created his own world. He has created personas for himself that every few year, few years, he comes out with a new one and they are all satanic popes.

There’s been papa one through Papa five that just came out, which means that he gets a new outfit and a new like prosthetics and face and whatever he wants to do. All of his band are the nameless ghouls, so you don’t see their face. They all have new costumes now. He has put out short films. He has put out a full length movie, and so he did the a most amazing record announcement that a new album’s dropping in April by buying a billboard in Vegas, putting a live stream on it called the Fu Miata live stream, which is Latin for smoke, meaning that when the smoke signal will go up, like when you elect a new Pope, then you will know that.

On YouTube, there’ll be a video announcing the new Pope. So everyone was watching this live stream for two days of a billboard. And then when it finally, like the smoke went up, Ash Wednesday morning at midnight, he dropped his newest song called Satan. He’s the most lovely per Americans have a weird thing with satanism.

He’s not he’s the most lovely person. So we put out this whole music video with his new single Satan and it’s like German expressionist. So it’s like back in the silent era, Atu shot. But I love that this man can make such a world that. All of his marketing is from the clergy.

Message from the clergy to let you know, for the parishioners to know that like the New Ghost album will be dropping April sometime in April, but that one’s been on ’cause it just dropped yesterday, so it’s, or Ash Wednesday. So Ash, there you go. Two days ago.

Victoria: But yeah. That’s really fun.

Megan: It’s, I know people get weirded out, but it’s this man just knows how to build a world.

Yeah.

Megan: And Mexico is obviously like their biggest fan base is like in. Central America. They love this man. That’s

hilarious. It’s really fun.

Megan: It’s so catholic.

I

Ashlan: love

1. I love it.

Ashlan: That’s so awesome. I feel like that’s like such an important, like knowing, like you said, knowing your like consumer and knowing what the hell is gonna get them.

Going.

Megan: I love most of the comments were like, we make fun of the swifties and yet we just watched a billboard for two days.

Ashlan: Rabid fandom in another way.

Victoria: Exactly. Exactly. I’m sure there’s also some intersection too, like that’s when you know you have a big musical taste of like swifty and then that.

Yeah. That’s great. Awesome. Listen we had the best conversation with you today and before we wrap up, I just wanna ask you, is there anything we didn’t cover that you wanna make sure we cover? And yeah, is there anything you wanna tell our audience?

Megan: Yeah, so may, May 2nd I will be launching or we’ll be starting design Jam.

And so Design Jam is just this little kind of incubator for four people to go through with myself and my business partner. And it’s for people who are feeling stuck on a business idea. You’ve been in your little echo chamber with all be your own ideas for too long. We just bring in other people who are also in the same spot, help you figure out the actual shape of your problem, and then ideate and evaluate some of those ideas so that you can have momentum moving forward.

Love that

Ashlan: I have gone through it. It is really helpful to give you. And then of course I did nothing yet, but not because of that. I also just took it at a a wrong time in my life. But it was very helpful to be able to ideate, iterate, get some feedback, and make a decision of how to move forward as well.

Victoria: I love that. Thank you so much Megan for chatting with us today and I’m sure we’ll have you on again at some point. We’ve already had Mary on a couple times. We had Dusty on recently. So yeah, thank you so much for chatting with us today and for our listeners make sure you check out the show notes and you can find all of Megan’s links in there.

And yeah, thank you so much. It was a great conversation and if you have any questions or guests that you want us to chat with, feel free to shoot us a DM and we’ll see you next time. Thanks everyone. Bye.