Hello and welcome!
I’m Heather, your creative partner and collaborator in designing the future of food.
I’m also a strategist, facilitator, writer, wine geek, and baker trying to do all those things at once (probably just like you.)
Over more than twenty years, my career has unfolded in interesting and unexpected ways.
I’ve worked on kitchen lines, launched a digital coaching platform for adidas, developed a gamified search engine for children’s books, conducted field research on the financial behaviors of millennials, facilitated a reorganization of Tony Blair’s staff, designed a coffee subscription service, gone to wine school, and opened a bagel shop.
Honestly, that’s not even the half of it.
As an entrepreneur, I’ve felt powerfully independent, with total creative agency to realize my wildest ideas.
Yet I’ve just as often felt isolated and stuck in the mud of my own head, my wheels spinning endlessly.
Even though years of leading design teams instilled me with the right mindset and toolkit for developing ideas on my own, I’ve never stopped craving the energy that comes from collaboration. There’s a lot that I can handle solo, but when it comes to big thinking and wicked problem solving, I work better together.
When I was turning my fantasy of a bagel pop-up into a real-deal business, I wasted no time in forming a squad of brilliant designers, producers, and get-it-done’ers to help me bring it all to life. There’s no way I could have done it without them, and there’s no way I would’ve wanted to.
And that’s why I’m hanging up my shingle as a peer-partner in helping you bring your vision to life. Someone who’s as invested in your success as you are. For those of us who’ve been going it alone, I’m putting myself out there so we don’t have to anymore.
Let’s form a dream team together.
Business by Design
Everything I know about what makes collaboration tick, I learned from leading design teams.
My approach to any project is built on these four fundamental ways of working:
Multiply the number of perspectives.
By working across and between many different disciplines, we multiply the number of angles we have from which to consider an approach.
Start with problems instead of solutions.
We are driven by empathy, believing that if we focus on the people we’re solving for, inspiration and answers can come from unexpected places.
Remember to say
“Yes, and…”
We are happy to find all the ways that don’t work, reminding ourselves that saying “How might we…” can lead us to the one that does.
Learn to thrive under constraints.
To reign in the overwhelm of open-ended exploration, we find ways to reduce our level of ‘zoom’ to focus on solving more small problems faster.