About (Emily’s Version)

In 2012, I founded Em & Friends —as Emily McDowell Studio—with $7,000 in savings, tenth-grade math skills, an abundance of ideas, and just enough ignorance to believe in my vision completely: greeting cards for the messy, imperfect relationships we really have, not the ones we wish we had. Most cards at the time were the latter: gushing poems, “best-dad-ever” type of sentiments, and I struggled to find cards in stores that reflected my reality.

At the time, I was coming off a decade working in advertising, and I had an Etsy shop as a side hustle where I sold prints of my illustrations. The first card I ever sold, a Valentine, was a crash course in going viral. Etsy put it on Facebook (a big deal in 2012), and it became their most-shared post of the year, was picked up by several publications, and spent several months on and off the front page of Reddit. I sold 1,700 of that card in a week, took that as proof of concept, got to work, and launched a complete wholesale collection three months later. Within a year, my work was in a thousand-plus retailers. 

The brand’s growth trajectory accelerated from there: national retail, global distribution, over 120 sales reps, a 7-figure e-commerce business– and all this was before the viral launch of Empathy Cards in 2015, when our revenue doubled overnight. Empathy Cards, a more supportive approach to “get well soon,” became an international news story, with organic coverage in hundreds of major outlets in 22 countries, and they’ve been cited many times as the catalyst for a sea change to the sympathy card industry.

Throughout this period, I also did all our PR and marketing; as a former ad agency copywriter and creative director, I had the skills to tell and sell my story more effectively than anyone else, and our official marketing budget was $0, which I was very proud of at the time. We were profitable and growing, and our products were everywhere. I was living a life everybody seemed to want—and it was also destroying me, because I was doing 17 people’s jobs, in a constant state of overwhelm, and living on cortisol, adrenaline, and quad-shot espressos.

In 2018, Em & Friends was acquired by fellow indie brand Knock Knock, and I became a partner in the joint venture, co-leading two brands under one roof. With this shift, I happily let go of my CEO role (and several others), and focused on creative direction, product development, and training a team to write and illustrate our products. In 2022, Em & Friends and Knock Knock were acquired by Union Square & Co., the publishing division of Barnes & Noble, and I exited the company.

For about seven years, some element of my work was in a near-constant state of “viral,” which sounds like a dream, and in many ways it was. But without the inner and outer resources to support that kind of visibility and “success,” it also often felt like a nightmare.

I learned an infinite number of lessons in the last decade, but this is one of the biggest: If your growth trajectory isn’t sustainable for you, it’s ultimately destructive. If your business model requires you to ignore and override your human needs for any significant length of time, it can only be so profitable before it murders you—and itself. The hierarchy has to go like this: Your needs -> the needs of your business -> the needs and wants of your customers. 

Since 2019, I’ve been engaged in the process of healing from burnout and navigating chronic autoimmune disease, learning to work with my nervous system and expand my capacity, and studying the cycle of change. By “studying,” I mean spending multiple years flailing around in the dark confusion of liminal space, a formless blob with an email account, so what I’m saying is this part wasn’t a choice. But it was ultimately the best thing that could have happened to me.

These days, I’m loving my work as an advisor, coach, and consultant to product businesses and the people who run them; I’m the expert I wish I could’ve worked with earlier in my career. My work is about 70% advisor (help, how can I do this thing better?) and 30% coach (help, how can I feel better in my business/figure out what I want/handle this transition?). In 2024, I graduated from Martha Beck’s Wayfinder coach training program, and my background uniquely suits me to support my clients and mentees in all aspects of their business, from the most creative to the most spreadsheet-driven.

Business aside, the older I get, and the more chaotic our world becomes, the more interested I am in supporting people in shedding stale identities and toxic cultural conditioning, and finding their way home to the grounded joy and freedom of their original factory settings—because the more I practice this myself, the better my life feels.

I live in Portland, Oregon with my fiancé Daniel, my teenage stepsons Otto and Oliver, our cats Aquarius and Action Sports Bryan, and an ever-growing collection of low-maintenance house plants.