"we Have to create. It is the only thing louder than destruction"
-Andrea Gibson
HeLLO!
My name is Bre, founder of Sand & Sage. I spent most of my childhood growing up in the midwest. After high school I moved to Salt Lake City, Utah and got my degree in Graphic Design. Over the next 12 years I threw myself into internships, agency work, and corporate projects. I built a career designing for some of the largest companies in the US and then I got sick and burn out quickly followed. I spent 3 years juggling the demands of corporate America while navigating treatments and early parenthood. I knew my life was unsustainable and had to drastically change or I wasn't going to be around for much of it.
See you later Utah.
Somewhere between the endless meetings and the expectation to produce artwork at inhuman speeds I lost the tether to my own creativity. I couldn't remember the last time I created something that wasn't critiqued or made a piece of art just because. I stopped drawing, stopped observing, and became exhausted by the idea of creating anything.
I finally decided to quit my job, we sold our house, and moved to a small town in Colorado. I didn't have much of a plan, I just knew I needed to rest. I wasn't going to hustle my way back to health, I needed to stop. I needed to figure out a way to live differently.
For the first 6 months I napped and went for walks on weekdays. I stopped checking my email every morning and the tension in my chest on Sunday evenings began to dissipate. I slowed down enough to notice the murmuration of birds congregating in our sumac bush and watch the deer searching for fallen crab apples in the yard.
I stopped grinding and hustling and remembered there was still a whole world outside of the office calling to the parts of myself I slowly abandoned for a stable salary.
It tugged at the pieces of me that used to light up at the touch of lightning bugs and search for shapes in the shifting clouds. It called to the dreams I had of becoming an artist and highlighted the disconnection I felt over the course of my career.
It didn't take long before I found myself at the edge of the lake–sketchbook in hand. As the leaves changed I settled into a practice of creating what I noticed just for me. Watercolors, pencils, and paint brushes now litter our dining room table. I had to rearrange the living room to make space for bags of clay and stacks of construction paper. After almost a year of nurturing my own creativity back to life I'm no longer willing to compromise it for mass production. I'm ready to come back to design with a different purpose.
I know there is a push to create a high volume of marketing through AI and bypass the human touch but I've started to wonder what we will lose if we build businesses on repurposed ideas. We are capable of such depth when we don't outsource our creativity. My best work has always stemmed from human ideas, sown in the space I give myself to observe, and nurtured to life on the pages of a sketchbook. I don't think creativity is an algorithm to hack or a prompt that can unlock endless potential. Creativity is innately human, it's a powerful form of communication, and I believe it will always be worth the investment.
Imagine what we will create when we allow ourselves to be inconvenienced by the time it takes for our ideas to be grown, crafted, or made by hand.
It is possible to approach marketing in a human way. If you have something meaningful to offer the world and you’re looking for the right person to help you build it, I’d love to connect. Together we can plant the seeds for a different path forward.
