Inspiration
is everywhere.

Since I was young, I’ve found inspiration in people, places and things others might overlook. I grew up on a hobby farm in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin, with horses, cows, chickens, cornfields, open land and the nearest mall two and a half hours away. For a teenager, that last part was a struggle.

Yet my first “real” job was in the business my grandfather built and our extended family ran, a large company in a small town. Outside of it, I spent twelve years competing in figure skating and another six coaching it. As a teenager, I babysat nearly all of my twenty-six cousins, worked as a nanny and measured women at Curves whose bodies, and lives, were changing.

Before I found myself behind the camera, I was in front of it, in commercials for Best Buy and Culver’s and in film and theatre. Then mentors in two Minneapolis casting rooms took me under their wing and taught me commercial casting, and the art of street casting in particular. At twenty-two I was finding talent in barbershops, American Legion halls, and fraternity and sorority houses. It’s been a whirlwind ever since.

From there, I’ve represented commercial actors and models, as well as athletes and basketball creators in campaigns with Nike, Jordan, Adidas, the NBA and the WNBA. I’ve championed creative entrepreneurs, worked in fashion and luxury, and sold a lot of things that didn’t exist yet: wedding dresses before they were made, homes before they were built, apartments off floor plans and renderings. And niche creators to a legacy industry that hadn’t decided it wanted them. For over fifteen years I’ve also done voiceovers for commercials and animation, with clients including Target, Microsoft, Aveda and Disney’s Tangled.

I’ve built a few things of my own, too. A commercial print modeling agency I started, with a roster of real people I scouted myself. A jewelry company I owned and ran, with designs in four hundred boutiques, record shops and museums, and in People, Teen Vogue, Cosmopolitan UK and Bella. And the two companies I run now.

That work has taken me to bridal markets and industry summits across North America, Europe and the Middle East, where I speak on how influence moves. I go partly to learn, the way I have since I was seventeen, when I spent a summer in the United Kingdom as an AFS exchange student, staying with host families and traveling alongside a fellow student from China.

How another country marries, celebrates and spends is the fastest education there is in how people decide what matters to them.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve lived many lives. Different experiences, different industries, but always the same instinct: noticing what others overlook, and seeing what it could become.

Living that many chapters taught me something else, too: people decide differently when they’re becoming someone new. A bride, a new parent, a first-time homeowner. That idea has a name now. Life Chapter Marketing™ is a framework for how people make decisions during life’s biggest transitions, built from the markets I worked in, the research behind them, and the chapters I lived myself.

Some of those discoveries became businesses. Others became creative projects, ideas I’m still exploring, or simply stories I still tell.

Frost and Sea is where they come together.