Allow Me to (Re)Introduce Myself
The whole story (so far) – from starting a blog 13 years ago to designing live for Adobe to burning it all down and starting over again.
This week marks the 13th anniversary of when I first started the blog that kicked off… basically the rest of my life and career after that. My little online presence is a teenager now, ringing her eyes in eyeliner and calling me a bitch at the mall. They grow up so fast. :’)
Partly inspired by the lovely Michelle Martin’s recent post, I thought I’d create my own that chronicles the whole journey from 2013 to now, plus some fun facts and lore drops you might not know (and heck, you might not want to!).
The Short Version
My name is Lizzie – I spelled it with a “y” until I was in second grade and watched Lizzie McGuire and decided that an “ie” at the end was way more chic.
I live in Chicago in a 1905-era six flat building with my husband, my dog Phoebe (a corgi), and my cat Scully (some indeterminate orange and fluffy variety). I’m originally from a tiny town on the west side of Michigan. I met my husband in high school theatre when we were 16, and we’ve been together (almost) ever since.
I am 31, very soon to be 32. Graduated from a state college with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 2016. In the past decade-plus, I have worn A LOT of hats: blogger, social media manager, copywriter, marketing consultant, Etsy vintage seller, podcaster, designer and business owner. I’ve worked in-house, freelanced, ran both product and service-based businesses, and worked in an agency. I’ve always been a multi-passionate person and have never really fit into one box neatly.
I have always been a book lover, ever since I was six years old and first read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (typical millennial).
If I had to pick three fictional characters to sum up my personality, it would be Buffy Summers, Lorelai Gilmore, and Hermione Granger.(with a couple bonus shoutouts to Elaine Benes and Jessica Day, because I can’t help but break my own made-up rules).
Lightning Round
Star Sign: Pisces
Top 5 Movies: Practical Magic, When Harry Met Sally, Children of Men, The Last Picture Show, Silence of the Lambs.
Top 5 TV Shows: The X-Files, Gilmore Girls, Parks & Rec, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twin Peaks.
Signature Scent: Le Labo Santal 33
Coffee Order: Iced lavender latte with almond milk.
Go-To Soundtrack: Taylor Swift, Paramore, Florence + the Machine, Fleetwood Mac.
Favorite Meal: Papardelle with slow-simmered bolognese sauce.
Power Outfit: Black polo sweater, plaid skirt, black tights, black Chelsea boots, and my pink teddy coat.
Okay, ready for the loooooong version? Here it goes…
2013-2016: The Beginning
In 2013, I was a burnt out college freshman with undiagnosed ADHD and a journalism major I picked at random because Rory Gilmore made it sound cool. I started a blog one night on a whim, sitting on the floor of my dorm room eating leftover pizza and watching Doctor Who.
I didn’t have many plans for it, except having fun. But I quickly realized there was an incredible community in the blogosphere (as it was known back in the day). And my desire to have a beautiful website on a ramen budget led to me teaching myself HTML, CSS, and design principles thanks to Youtube videos and Skillshare free trials.
By 2014, I was feeling pretty confident in my skills, and started offering freelance services as a design and marketing assistant. I joined several Facebook groups for creative business owners, and once I’d honed my pitch and created a basic “Services” page on my website, I took the leap and posted in one of them, sharing that my social media management services were now available.
Within a few hours, a woman named Kim reached out to me. She was a coach who worked with high-end interior designers, and wanted to post to Instagram and her blog more regularly, so she was looking for someone who could serve as a virtual assistant and social media manager.
I scheduled a call with her during my college’s spring break, and I can still remember how nervous I was sitting at my parents’ kitchen table, waiting for our meeting time. I gave her my whole spiel, answered her questions, and then came the one I was dreading – how much do you charge? I breathlessly managed to get out “$25 an hour” which felt like highway robbery, since I currently worked as a Starbucks barista making minimum wage with no tips. To my utter shock, she said yes and lo and behold – I had my first client.
From there I collected a handful of ongoing monthly clients. I’d help them do things such as create and post Instagram posts for their businesses, make tweaks to their website, and design marketing assets. I learned a LOT from this process and continued to hone my design and marketing skills.
Also during this time, I started an Etsy shop selling vintage home decor and fashion items that I sourced at local thrift stores. In the fall of 2014, I posted a listing on Etsy for a “Mystery Vintage Flannel Shirt” where someone would purchase it in a specific size and I would send them a flannel shirt of varying colors and styles based on their preferences. My listing got featured on the front page of Etsy, and went the 2014 version of viral, resulting in hundreds of orders.
I had to stop offering this a few months later because frankly I’d purchased every old flannel shirt in several surrounding counties and it was becoming overwhelming to manage while also going to school full time and working part time to pay for college. When it was all said and done, I’d made about $3000 and was able to purchase a brand new laptop for myself for the first time, which felt like a HUGE deal. While it was stressful, this experience definitely gave me my first real taste of entrepreneurship and selling products, and I loved it.
Flash forward a couple years. I remember sitting on the bus after my final exam my penultimate semester of college – spring 2016. My phone started to ring, which was weird, but since the area code was the one unique to my school’s campus, I picked up. The woman on the other end introduced herself as Monica, and said she worked for the marketing department at my university, and she had gotten my resume from her coworker (I later found out that when I had applied for a social media internship several months back, the woman in charge of hiring had lost my resume and when she found it, she felt so bad that she sent it on to the marketing department).
Monica told me that the marketing department didn’t have a formalized internship program the way that the social media team did (why they were separate teams, I still don’t know) but they sometimes took on interns when a qualified candidate crossed their desk. She invited me to an interview a couple weeks later and to do a sample project – I believe it was writing some headlines for Facebook ads.
A few weeks later, I had myself a summer internship. I gleefully put in my two week’s notice at Starbucks (where I had worked for four years and was frankly very over it!) and scoured Goodwill for some business casual outfits.
I loved the work I got to do at my internship, and I got along excellently with my coworkers. The internship extended into the fall semester, and in December 2016, following graduation, they offered me my first full-time job. During my tenure at University Communications, I wrote copy for ads, marketing, social media, billboards, and even a commercial. It was super fun, and I loved almost everything about the job… except the location.
In the spring of 2017, Josiah, my then-boyfriend, graduated from college and accepted a job in Ann Arbor, MI – about an hour and some change from where I was still living in Mount Pleasant. I began applying for jobs in that area, with little luck. My lease was up in March 2018, and we decided that if I didn’t find a job before then, I would just move to Ann Arbor and continue to freelance while I looked.
I had wound down most of my client relationships after I accepted a full time job, but my very first client, Kim, had reached out about six months later to say that the person she’d hired to replace me wasn’t working out and ask if I would be interested in working with her again. By this point, I had the rhythm of my new job down and knew that I usually ended up with plenty of free time, so I said sure, why not.
During this time, I also began to shift my blog focus to topics regarding design, social media, marketing, and small business management. I started tentatively offering logo and website design services, which is hilarious in hindsight. I had no business designing logos. But hey, you have to learn somehow right?!
2017-2018: The Influencer Era
One morning in December of 2017, I woke up to an email from Kim asking me if I would ever consider moving to Chicago. She had a new client who was looking for a full-time, in-house marketing and social media manager for her small interior design firm there.
I called Josiah and told him about it, sort of laughing it off since I was working so hard to find a job in Ann Arbor. To my surprise, he told me I should get more info. Next thing I know, I’m on a plane to Chicago a few days before Christmas, in a snow storm. Josiah and I flew into Chicago for an interview (and got an uber to the wrong Starbucks the first time, with only about 10 minutes to spare). I met the woman and her team at her tiny little studio, had a formal interview in the Starbucks next door (where Josiah was surreptitiously sitting in the corner because we didn’t have anywhere else to go) and afterward let myself dream about living in Chicago as we sat there waiting for our flight back.
That January, I accepted a job offer from the interior design firm and we set a start date of mid-February to give me time to find an apartment, sell my car, move all my stuff, and get settled.
It was one of the most hectic times in my life, but I managed to do all of those things in just under a month. Ironically, now Josiah and I had switched spots – he was frantically applying to any and every job in Chicago. For the first two months, I lived there alone with all his furniture and he spent many long hours driving back and forth to Chicago from Ann Arbor to go on interviews. Thankfully, it didn’t take long for him to find a job (yay tech industry) and we were, finally, for the first time in six years, together in the same place.
As far as the job goes, well… I thought it was going to be my dream job, but unfortunately it was a nightmare. The owner was a bitter, spiteful bully who destroyed my confidence and self worth over the span of ten months. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
During the time that I worked there, I grew my Instagram following to 10,000+ followers posting primarily about lifestyle and home decor content. I also started designing shareable quote posts and Instagram story templates that went viral a few times and helped grow my following significantly (and even got shared by Sarah Hyland from Modern Family). I wrote about this period in detail in this post, so I won’t get too into the weeds.
Sometime in mid-2018, I discovered the concept of Print on Demand, which was still a fairly new industry. I have always loved quirky graphic tee shirts, and finally found a way to design and sell my own without having to pay tons of money up front to get them printed and then store them and ship them myself. Yay!
So, I got back to my Etsy roots and created a new shop called Brave Girl Club, where I sold cute and quirky graphic apparel and other small goods (like coffee mugs and art prints). My original designs often focused on pop culture of the 1990s and 2000s, and my Instagram audience reacted pretty favorably to my launch.
It must have been kismet, because the sales from my Etsy shop helped me pad out my savings – and in October of 2018, I finally reached my breaking point with my job. I could barely sleep and had lost a ton of weight from the stress of working there. My boss was basically being openly hostile to me because her daughter, who had just graduated, clearly wanted my job. It was a whole thing.
Josiah and I agreed that I should call it quits and try my hand at freelancing for a few months. If it worked out, great, if not, I’d start looking for a new gig.
At that point, I was super burnt out of offering social media management and marketing services, so I decided to focus solely on logo and website design. It was a bumpy ride at times, but I managed to gain quite a few clients in the first few months and continued to hone my skills at both project management and graphic design.
2019-2022: The Girlboss Era
As 2019 rolled around, I continued gaining more design clients and honing my skills, learning more and more and gaining confidence with every project. I finally was able to say, “I run my own design studio,” when someone asked me what I did, instead of “Oh I um, so I sort of help small business owners, like, design stuff, like I kinda am a freelancer I guess, but also I…”
I once again shifted my online content (blog, Instagram) to focus on educational info for small business owners regarding social media, marketing, and design, and began to offer some digital products and courses around these topics as well. I started a podcast, joined the Wing, and bought a pastel pink pantsuit, as any good aspiring girlboss did in this era.
Brave Girl Club was still going fairly strong. Over the Black Friday/Cyber Monday week, one of my listings for a Harry Potter-inspired sweatshirt (cringe) was featured on Buzzfeed and exploded, resulting in hundreds of sales again, and nearly $15,000 in revenue before the year was done.
In 2020, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and my clients essentially dried up completely. I had just signed a big monthly retainer contract for a completely in-person-events focused company. Yippee. I spent the first half of the year taking a breather from working and tried to focus on designing stuff that I enjoyed, including more things for Brave Girl Club, which continued to chug along in the background.
In my personal life, Josiah and I moved back home to Michigan from Chicago, and got engaged in August 2020. In December 2020, when it became clear that pandemic restrictions weren’t going to be lifted any time soon, we decided to elope in a small ceremony at my parent’s house. While it wasn’t anything like I ever expected my wedding to be, it was perfect and I wouldn’t do it any other way.
During 2021, I continued to build my design agency, hiring subcontractors to help with workload and charging more and more money and booking larger and larger projects. I was feeling very burnt out with all the project management that comes with running a design studio, but felt at the time that the best bet was to double down and focus on being the boss and CEO figure. Up until now, I had been working under my own name, but decided to rebrand to Asteria Studio as I began to consider growing and expanding my agency.
I also launched a membership community for female small business owners, and started a podcast about branding and marketing. I was reallyyyy leaning into the whole girlboss thing. And also, most importantly, we welcomed Phoebe the corgi puppy into our family and now she runs my entire life.
In September of that year, I was invited to design a brand identity live over two days with Adobe. This was a very big deal to me as a completely self-taught designer who learned to use Adobe programs thanks to blogs and Youtube videos. It was incredibly nerve-wracking, knowing this video was being streamed live to Adobes million-plus followers. But it was an awesome experience!
At the very end of 2021, pandemic restrictions were beginning to lift and my husband and I were feeling the itch for big city life again. It started as an innocent evening on Zillow and next thing I knew, we had booked a flight to Chicago (again in December – why?!) and were touring condos for sale in our old neighborhood. We fell in love with a condo in a turn-of-the-century era building and decided to take advantage of the super low COVID-era interest rates.
In February 2022, we closed on our condo and moved back to Chicago from West Michigan. I began to shift my Instagram content back to lifestyle and home decor topics now that I had my own home to decorate and renovate. I started up a new blog under my own name in addition to my design studio site, but never really posted that much to it.
Because I was so busy with moving and renovating, client inquiries for my design studio dried up and remained scarce into the spring. I had been feeling very burnt out and fed up following a string of difficult client projects and was beginning to wonder if working for someone else was a better bet. I hate all the admin and project management side of things like chasing invoices and taking sales calls. I missed when designing was fun.
I half-heartedly applied to a couple local design jobs but didn’t really get anywhere. While scrolling through Instagram one day, I discovered a local women-owned design agency whose office was only a few blocks from my new house, instead of all the way downtown like most agencies. It felt like kismet, so I took a chance and emailed the owner inquiring about part time or freelance work.
As fate would have it, one of her full time employees had decided to take a few months sabbatical to spend time with her children and while she rarely ever hired, I managed to reach out at the perfect time. I was hired as a designer and have been working there full time since June 2022.
2023-Present: The Current Era
This led me to a bit of a conundrum with my own brand and business however. I had built up an audience of nearly 40,000 combined followers on social media and my email newsletter and while I didn’t really want to take on freelance clients anymore, I still loved designing fun things for myself.
I re-launched Asteria Studio as a product brand, designing wallpaper and other patterned and illustrated gifts and goods. I created a line of greeting cards and sold those at wholesale for a while, but ultimately didn’t feel like that was fulfilling for the amount of work that went into it. I basically was really waffling back and forth, constantly changing my mind about what I wanted to do, and chasing momentary hyperfixations down rabbit holes.
I was simultaneously sick of and chained to Instagram. I really wanted to start blogging again like the olden days, but it felt so much like shouting into a void, and as much as I hate to admit it, I do need external validation to stay interested in a project.
In 2024, I discovered Substack and decided to create a newsletter intended to be about anything and everything that came to mind. Turns out it’s actually kind of hard to think of topics to write about with that broad of a scope, so it fizzled out not long after.
But around mid-2025, I got the urge to start it up again. This time I decided to focus mainly on books with a healthy dose of personal style and creative living sprinkled in and this time, it seems to have stuck. Which pretty much brings us to present day! If you made it this far, wow, thank you. It’s been a wild ride building and designing the life and career of my dreams (which is not at all what I thought I was doing at the time, to be clear). And looking back on all the crazy stuff I’ve done in the past 13 years, I have to say, I’m slightly impressed.
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I can't evennnn Lizzie. Not only do I relate SO much to your millennial thought processes (I'm 31!) and journalism degree, my signature scent is also Santal 33. This was SUCH a fun read, and it was a pleasure to get to know you more, friend!
This was so fun, Lizzie! Fellow Pisces here too 🙋♀️