It wasn’t hard to say yes to Symbology, a company committed to employ and empower women from West India and the Gaza Strip.

My time at Symbology introduced me to start-up culture and my love-hate relationship with being “on” 24/7 – a blessing and a curse which would later become a definitive factor of where I would choose to work in the future.

Here, I discovered the importance of voice through social media in small business and engaging with customers and influencers. Methods I used included: email marketing, newsletter outreach (thanks, Mailchimp), 240 character tweets (thanks, Hootsuite), and #INSTAGRAM. With the help of a strategic social media calendar, and the algorithm in our favor, we managed to increase 50% above our intended goal for Instagram.

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Thanks to our friends from 1789 Venture Labs, we also created QR codes that would redirect to videos of the artistan through a campaign, Behind the Seams. These QR codes were later printed on product tags.

When I applied, the first thing I did was send a proposal to change web content.

Marissa Heyl took a chance on me, putting the fate of the website in my hands. Aside from pop-ups and trade shows, Symbology’s primary outlet of sales were generated online. Rebranding it would significantly affect the company’s image, but also its numbers (in sales, engagements, and impressions).

We needed to transform the bright country clubesqe color palette to something reflective of our Symbologists – bold and sexy. After toning the web fonts down to two, and creating a minimalist direction, we migrated our WordPress-based platform to Shopify. For an e-commerce business, that’s a lot of data. And trust me, it took more than a week or two!

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This was a huge break for me. Imagine, a girl who spent hours playing with Microsoft FrontPage in the fifth grade actually using the skills she learned to help contribute to a brand. And not only that, but a fair-trade business that would reach and impact talented artisans thousands of miles away. I realized:

• The beauty of traditional block printing, screenprinting, and embroidery;
• Exposure to STEM opens up new doors for business – and allows you to be creative;
• The significance of video marketing for storytelling;
• Learning how to lean on others. Cross-pollinate tasks with those you share a vision with, learn from them, and be okay with help in times of struggle.

Looking back, I’m humbled to have taken part of Marissa’s vision and the families whose lives have changed because of the opportunity given to these artisan women, wives, and mothers.