Emily McDowell on Reclaiming Creativity, Navigating Burnout, and Finding Balance

Emily McDowell is an advisor, thought partner, and coach to creative entrepreneurs in the product space, helping to save their time, money, and sanity. As founder of the stationery and gift company Em & Friends, she inspired a sea change in the greeting card industry with Empathy Cards, a more honest and supportive alternative to traditional sympathy cards, and for nearly a decade, some element of her work was in a constant state of “viral.” In 2022, Em & Friends was acquired by Union Square & Co / Barnes & Noble, and Emily exited the business. She is also the co-author and illustrator of There Is No Good Card for This: What to Say and Do When Life Gets Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Love (HarperOne, 2017), and offers unsolicited advice and cautionary tales in her newsletter, Subject to Change, a Substack Featured Publication of 2023.

This week, Barrett talks with Emily about their mutual experiences of burnout, identity loss, and recovery after leaving significant professional roles. Emily shares her journey from a high-stress advertising career to creating a company focused on empathy cards, driven by her experience surviving cancer. Emily and Barrett discuss the rapid growth and subsequent burnout she experienced, the emotional and mental toll of such high stress, and the importance of reconnecting with one's authentic self amidst professional pressure. They cover a wide range of topics, including personal stories of financial insecurity, the search for purpose, self-acceptance, and the balance of ambition with self-care, emphasizing the significance of internal work and the healing power of genuine human connections and new beginnings.

In this episode:

(00:00) - Intro
(05:19) - Emily’s advertising background and first viral card
(11:30) - Navigating business growth and challenges
(18:42) - Merging with Knock Knock and burnout
(27:04) - Barrett’s story of burnout
(32:06) - The aftermath of leaving a successful role
(39:14) - Embracing quitting and self-discovery
(55:53) - Facing setbacks and choosing a new path
(01:01:55) - Redefining success and ambition
(01:13:53) - A shift in self-perception
(01:16:21) - Embracing vulnerability
(01:18:25) - Letting go of burdens
(01:22:14) - Rediscovering self-worth
(01:24:58) - Navigating new ambitions
(01:40:55) - Emily’s beautiful future
(01:41:48) - Who Emily is becoming
(01:45:41) - Barrett’s poem

Key Takeaways

Follow Your Gut and Take Risks: Emily’s journey from a freelance advertiser to creating her own successful greeting card company, Em & Friends, started with a gut feeling. She recognized a gap in the market for greeting cards that reflected real-life situations rather than the overly sentimental or humorous options available. Her success was largely due to following her intuition and taking a risk by creating something she believed in, even without a solid business plan.
Viral Success Can Be Overwhelming: When Emily’s first card went viral on Etsy, it was both a blessing and a challenge. The sudden demand forced her to scale up quickly, which she wasn’t fully prepared for. This experience highlights the importance of being ready for unexpected success and the chaos that can come with it, especially in the early stages of a business.
Adaptability and Learning on the Fly: Emily didn’t have a business background, but she taught herself how to navigate the industry by learning on the go. From figuring out how to create a catalog to managing large orders, her story emphasizes the importance of adaptability and continuous learning, especially when entering uncharted territory.
The Double-Edged Sword of Naming a Business After Yourself: Emily named her company after herself out of convenience, but this decision came with significant challenges. It made it difficult to bring in other creatives and give them proper credit, as everything was associated with her name. Additionally, when she wanted to step back, it was hard to disentangle her personal identity from the business.
Knowing When to Let Go: After years of rapid growth, Emily reached a point of burnout and realized she didn’t want to continue in the same capacity. She eventually merged her company with another, and later sold it, recognizing that it was time to step away. This decision, while difficult, was necessary for her well-being, illustrating the importance of knowing when to let go, even when you’ve built something successful.

Quotes

“ Stories of quitting are okay only when followed by a triumphant return to something. And we don't talk very much about what happens in the space before the triumphant return, or if the triumphant return looks completely different than it did before.” ~ Emily McDowell

“As someone who had had cancer in my 20s, sympathy cards were so terrible. Nobody knows what to say or what to do. So much of the work that I've done has been around helping people talk about the stuff when you don't know what to say.” ~ Emily McDowell

“I’m becoming a person who's becoming every day more comfortable with leading from a place of not knowing, leading from a place of presence and the quality of presence instead of having it be about what I know, or how much I can prove to you that I know, or my list of accomplishments, or whatever. I'm learning that there is power in just my authentic presence.” ~ Emily McDowell

Links