So I got my start sort of traditionally working in large agencies on branding projects, and I sort of very quickly found out that I'm a little bit more of a swiss army knife in nature. I found I was quite bored in terms of just touching one sort of very small piece of a project. And so it was like 2012, 2013, and I sort of got what I would now call a bit more of an entrepreneurial itch to go and work in startups. I would probably not have had that vocabulary back then. So I started working in venture backed startups, doing everything from figuring out how to do social media to opening up pop up stores to launching what we would now call direct to consumer websites, writing emails and sort of doing all of those things. And while that obviously sort of left me a little fatigued, I really felt quite energized by that experience of sort of touching, sort of a complete point of view on a brand or a project. So I did that for a number of years. Some venture backed startups or some sort of bootstrap startups.

But I would say the job that sort of know rapidly changed the trajectory of my career was working at a very small studio in Montreal called Dynamo that really punched above its weight class, and they were really in the right place at the right time, really focused on e commerce and retail experiences. And it was there that I had the chance to work on Glossier and reformation and the honest company and a number of others. And eventually Glossier acquired that company a few days before I had my son. So it was a real turning pointer or transition for me in my life. Did I want to go and sort of continue what I had been doing for the past four years, doing it in house at Glossier? Or was I ready to sort of take a bet on myself and maybe start consulting or freelancing? Which is what I ultimately ended up doing for a few years until 2020 hit when demand for these types of services really skyrocketed. And I had been working with a developer pretty frequently at the time, something I'll get into a little bit more later. And I basically was like, we have to turn this into a company. Like, we need headcount, we need personnel if we are going to sort of continue to do this as demand is surging.

And so that's ultimately what we did. It's a little over three years later. We're just under 20 employees now. And that's a little bit of my origin story.

I love that. And we're really excited for this episode because I think there's so much to go into when it comes to design, to working with brands, to creating really great products from both the UI and UX perspective that people love. I think the one thing that you alluded to is that design touches so many different parts of a product experience. So actually having the knowledge of how different systems interact is really important. I know myself, I've worked with many designers, and they can make things look pretty, but if they don't have a true understanding of how the whole system works and why it works together, then the design choices that they make maybe aren't. Maybe they look good, but they're not functional. So I'd love if you talk to us a little bit about kind of what's your process in terms of when you're designing, when you're working with clients, how do you bring that level of thinking to a project? Where do you start?

Right. Yeah, that's such a great question. I'll sort of give you a long winded answer, as is my own personal brand tends to be a little bit more verbose. But I think one thing I realized sort of prior to founding pact was a lot of times when I was still consulting or freelancing, I'd sort of get dropped into projects seal team six style. Hey, enhance our sort of like happy path or our core customer journey. So I would do that, right. Sometimes that would include a whole redesign. Sometimes it might just be some conversion rate optimization.