A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To This Blog...
What Better Place Than Here? What Better Time Than Now?
This blog is a culmination of several events in the past year or so, including starting a new business (The Ensign), a wildly unpredictable political year, and breaking my ankle. In the mix, I started to realize I was missing an important creative outlet for my thoughts on being a entrepreneur, dealing with a tumultuous cultural environment, personal accountability, and all the other things that I’ve been pondering that don’t fit inside the company I’m trying to build.
In many ways, this blog is cathartic– I’ll write about things as they come to me and hope that I’m doing a passable job of expressing myself. In other ways, I hope to culture a conversation with anyone reading this. So many of the issues that I find myself dealing with are in desperate need of context, conversation, consideration, cultivation, and a few other alliterative parlays to make them productive for myself and/or practical for anyone else. As I began exploring some of these ideas with friends or acquaintances, I realized the power of community: My business ideas drastically improved when I shared them with others; social concepts became actionable when they were debated among friends; and I found myself better able to respond to the world around me once centered by other perspectives.
I grew up in a multicultural environment (SO New Mexico), which resulted in me growing up as a white minority. I studied music and business before working in fashion/retail for most of my career. After 12 years in fashion businesses, I transitioned to startups, working across almost every aspect of tech business. Now, I have my own fashion ecommerce company and regularly consult (“growth-hack”) for a variety of companies. I’m a great cook (I have references), have a huge appreciation for art, and am generally a fun person to be around most of the time. All that to say, I try to be well-rounded and open to other perspectives and ideas.
You’ll notice this little notation around corners of this blog: “-.-. --.-”. It’s a Morse hail for “C Q” or “Seek You,” a general call for anyone who hears it to respond. I stumbled across it a while ago when doing some tattoo research and connected with the idea of being open to ideas and conversations in the world around me. If someone has an opposing viewpoint, it benefits me to attempt to understand their case. Certainly, there are exceptions, but I’ve found this to be true 9 times out of 10.
Now for some ground rules:
My blog, my rules.
My goal is to post about once a week. Anymore than that and someone please tell me to find something else to do.
Topics will include (but are not limited to): Fashion, entrepreneurship, society, technology, and general amateur philosophy. I might meander into fine art, music, and other stuff but would like to keep this, and myself, somewhat focused.
This is mostly for fun. That being said, if I’m able to generate revenue for either my own business (https://theensign.us) or someone else’s, I encourage you (reader) to support work that I believe in. Without getting into FTC disclaimer policies, if I have a stake in it, personal or otherwise, I’ll indicate it as such. Everything else is just because I want to.
In summary, welcome to my world. It doesn't always make sense but we'll have a good time together. Feel free to send me a note or introduce yourself in the comments below.
And yes, the blog heading is from Rage Against The Machine's 1999 political anthem "Guerilla Radio."