We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Margaret Kerr-Jarrett. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Margaret below.

Alright, Margaret thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I always had this vague idea that I wanted to combine my love for writing poetry with work in the commercial sector. Because there was no conventional model for what I wanted to do, building a career took years of trial and error. At first, I thought the only path to success as a poet was through academia, a world to which I never truly wanted to belong (I am not good at politics/following rules/etc.). That endeavor was extremely short-lived; I never had the motivation to truly explore it. I decided to jump into business and use my writing skills in the only area that seemed relevant: marketing. I tried for years to convince myself that copywriting and marketing could work for me, but my heart wasn’t in it — and this was important to me.

About seven years ago I started exploring the visual design world and was immediately struck. This was an industry that, at its best, stressed the development of creativity and craft at a very high level. I realized I wanted to work in design, specifically brand design, but as a writer, using words in the same way the top designers use imagery. It wasn’t art for art’s sake, but it wasn’t the perversion of art for money’s sake either. There were not many writers doing this when I started, so I had to create language around what I was doing and who I was doing it for. While designers were creating visual identities, I was creating verbal identities. While the logo was stressed as the center point of a brand, I was stressing how design and writing can work together to tell a more complete, nuanced story.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Margy Kerr-Jarrett and first and foremost I consider myself a writer and entrepreneur – currently I am the co-founder of Nihilo, a branding agency, as well as a new Tequila brand called Casa Malka, which is launching this spring in the USA. 

In terms of my path as a creative entrepreneur, it really took off just over two years ago when I partnered up with an incredible designer, Emunah Winer, to create our agency Nihilo. In most agencies at the time, writing was secondary to design – a way to serve and enhance the visual imagery of a brand. We founded our agency with a very different premise: that design and writing can work side-by-side as equal partners. This didn’t mean every brand led with both – but rather that through a creative process we could discover what tools would best serve the brands we worked with, whether those be design-heavy, writing-heavy, or both.

We’ve been very fortunate to see success in the short life of our business. We have been invited to speak at top design conferences, have had work featured in many top publications, and, most importantly, have been blessed to partner with incredible clients across industries such as tequila, home health care, high-tech, cannabis, and CPG.

But what we’re most proud of is the integrity with which we approach our work and our relationships. Our clients truly become our partners and our number one goal is to use creativity to its utmost to help them succeed. We see ourselves now as less of a traditional “branding agency” and more of a “creative capital agency.” That means we invest our creative capital to help a business grow – much like one invests financial capital. We see tremendous commercial value in creativity and absolutely love partnering with others who do too.

I am incredibly exhausted as a mother of three and a business owner, but I do love what I do. I get to engage with poetry, strategy, and design on an intimate level while helping support my family and keeping my busy mind engaged with the fast-paced world of commerce. It’s a lot of work, but I do feel incredibly blessed.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

I met my co-founder at another agency about six years ago. We were both living in Israel at the time (we have both since relocated with our families to Columbus, OH), and instantly connected over our shared commitment to incredibly high standards in work and a shared desire to run our own businesses. We both left the agency within a year and built up separate successful freelancing careers. With a vague notion that we wanted to prove our hypothesis that writing and design, when created in tandem, could be an incredibly powerful force, we created an interactive poetry/design website called Two Jewish Women (www.twojewishwomen.com). We made the entire thing ourselves on WordPress Elementor, and then sent it out to our favorite design industry publications. Amazingly, despite us having basically zero reputations in the mainstream design world, the project was picked up again and again. People were fascinated with this world we created between words and pictures, and it served as an affirmation that we were onto something. This personal project turned into the catalyst behind Nihilo – we knew we could create strong, impactful work. Nihilo became the vessel.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

In September, we spoke at Brand New, one of the biggest and most well-known branding/design conferences in the world. We hired our first employee and had a large roster of clients. All was in place for us to scale our agency, and we felt confident in doing so. Then October 7th happened. It’s hard to over-emphasize what a life-shattering time this has been. It suddenly made the successes of branding feel very small and tiring. We struggled to complete projects and ended up letting our employee go. After meeting with our amazing coaches (shoutout to Casa Davka), we decided to take a step back. We focused on being present with the projects we had, and became much more selective in taking on new ones. We really honed in on the type of work we felt most aligned with, and stopped chasing projects, even high-budget ones, that were not aligned with our goals as a company. We took a hiatus from posting on social media and gave ourselves permission to skip newsletters. The truth is, we don’t feel we’ll ever get back to where we were, and we don’t want to. This experience has pushed us to re-focus on what truly matters to us — which is not branding, but people.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.nihilo.agency
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nihilo.agency/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nihilo/