Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Astrid Storey. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Astrid, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry? Any stories or anecdotes that illustrate why this matters?

Job postings for graphic designers read like a wishlist for an entire creative department—branding expert, UX/UI designer, animator, social media strategist, copywriter, web developer, and somehow, also a marketing analyst. Oh, and all for the price of an entry-level salary with “must have 7+ years of experience” tacked on. It’s the ultimate creative unicorn fantasy, except the only thing magical about it is how out of touch it is. Graphic design is already a highly skilled profession—asking for everything else on top of it is just corporate trying to get champagne results on a tap water budget.

Are there designers that can do all of those things? Yes. But most companies in Corporate America are not willing to pay the salary of someone as gifted as that—it’s one of the reasons I own my own business.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Astrid Storey. I’m an immigrant and came to this country as a newly-minted graphic design graduate in 2003. I have a four year art school degree in graphic design and a Corporate America-provided education in digital marketing. I own Storey Creative, a one-person specialty studio in Denver, Colorado where I help mid size companies and late-stage startups with the creative and marketing overflow they can’t handle in-house. My differentiator is: I am an approachable design professional who is eager to partner with my clients to provide creative solutions to their marketing problems. I do so transparently and focusing on delivering an enterprise-level solution to every project. I’ve been the person hiring on the corporate side, so I have shaped my business, my processes, my interactions and even my contract to be the perfect contractor I feverishly looked for but could never find.

The thing I am most proud of is first, my child, a brilliant 14-year old with an old soul, and second this business I have been able to build for myself and my family.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

Art school is not business school. A four year Bachelors in Fine Arts does not graduate an entrepreneur. So every single lesson about running a business; from finding the right CPA, to how to best protect my personal assets from the business are the product of leaning into my network. Very early on, I understood the important of outsourcing the key parts that could break my business if they weren’t done right: I hired a CPA on year 2. And shortly after, I hired a bookkeeper. When I needed contracts I had a lawyer custom-draft mine based on my specific needs. When I was ready to use an onboard/offboard CRM platform, I hired an expert. Why should I spend my own billable time trying to learn something from scratch when there’s a professional who specializes in exactly this who can do it better/faster and honestly cheaper than I could.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

I did not set out to be a business owner. I got there by accident. I started working as an in-house designer in a publishing company; and it turns out when all your friends are getting married and having babies someone needs to design all the invitations and announcements. That’s how it started. People at work, or friends or family members were in need of something I could provide. Then the print broker we used at the office asked if I could take on some production work for some of his clients who didn’t have a designer. I said yes, calculated a quick hourly rate and started what I fondly referred to as “the second shift”.

I worked “the second shift” at home after work every night and weekend for the better part of a decade; until 2014 when my CPA was doing my taxes and alerted me that I had made more than half of my income for the year from “the second shift”. It happened to be the same summer my kid was doing the dreadful pre-school to Kindergarten transition and we realized that for her to attend the school I preferred, someone would have to be home full time for pick ups and drop offs.

So I gave notice at the cubicle farm, and set up my shingle as Storey Creative. I never looked back.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.storeycreative.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/storeycreative/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/storey-creative/

Image Credits

Kate Milford. Kate Milford Productions.