Today we’d like to introduce you to Meg Seitz.
Hi Meg, We’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. Before we get into specifics, let’s briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today.
I graduated from Kenyon College in 2005 with an English degree and needed to figure out where or how to start my career. There was a lot I wanted to do, but I needed help finding an excellent direction and path. For my first year out of college, I did odd jobs – like retail – and some freelance writing; in freelance writing for a boss with whom I had interned the year before, I started to see the power of strategic and creative thinking put into words, quite literally, copywriting. In 2007, I accepted a teaching job in Charlotte, North Carolina – I moved from Pittsburgh, PA to Charlotte, and taught 9th grade English, 12th grade English/World Literature, and two sections of Yearbook. Everything I know about business and people, from teaching high schoolers. Teenagers are themselves fast and furious life lesson teachers! One of the biggest lessons I learned was teaching Yearbook – the Yearbook staff, which was about 10 girls, were responsible for raising the money to produce their Yearbook, so they were – in theory – the first/earliest entrepreneurs, both makers of the work and sellers of the work, balancing two different roles within the same project or class. My solution to that overwhelm was to create two sections of the class – the editorial/creative side and the business/sales side. The students loved it – and we added twice as many students to the program. Then, I realized I liked this world of creativity and business – how the two worked together. I knew I’d always be a teacher, but not a 9-5p classroom teacher. I left teaching to work for Lululemon, the athletic apparel company. At the time, the country was recovering from the recession – and I decided to go for a stable job to take a chance at an opportunity with a (at the time) little-known athletic apparel company that needed three people to help build its brand presence in a new market – Charlotte. This role is where I learned how to be entrepreneurial – the company needed movers and shakers who wanted to hit the ground running to sell and build the brand boots on the ground. That was me. We worked hard for a good year – and the showroom we had opened in 2013 would now grow to a full-scale retail store in the heart of shopping in Charlotte. We were building the brand even bigger – with three times the number of people. It was an exercise in both branding and people. At that point, I knew I was hungry for a new challenge, so I applied and was accepted to a business school at Wake Forest University. At WFU, I started to put together the pieces of what I do today. I would watch classmates, most often men, who were strong at accounting and finance, give these mock presentations that rooted everything in numbers and spreadsheets – I knew from both writing, teaching & brand building – that I wanted more of the story. I wanted to tell the founder’s story, the story of the potential business, and the story of the data. That was the beginning of the shop, the company I started as a side hustle in 2013 and took full-time in 2015. Today, we work daily with companies worldwide, navigating the business and the creativity of their messaging and communications; our spin on communications goes back to the people piece – we want copywriting, communications & branding to feel as human as possible. I joke that sometimes I feel like we are creating Yearbooks for businesses around the globe – which harkens back to how I got started.
Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, has it been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Just like with anything in life, some seasons have been smoother—or harder—than others. As a business owner, the biggest struggle has always been getting the people piece right. It’s hard to find talented, hardworking, and resilient people in it for the marathon with you.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
After almost 20 years of writing for and with other people and businesses, I conquered one of my biggest creative fears – I published my first book in 2023. “You Are Something New: Life Lessons to Radically Change How You Show Up in Business” is one of the works I’m most proud of because, after years of cheerleading other people’s writing, I needed to flip to script and do it myself. I learned much about myself, my process, how I think and write, and what I would do differently in the next book. That’s really what sets me apart – I’m constantly changing, evolving, growing, learning, putting myself out there to try and learn something new about myself.
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
I’m about as agile and resilient a person as they make me. I’ve always said I’m an entrepreneurial marathoner, meaning I’m in it for the long haul and will move, shift, grow, and change with the times.
Contact Info:
- Website: tothshop.com
- Instagram: @meg_seitz
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/megseitz/
- Other: megseitz.com
Image Credits
Julia Fay Photography
