We were lucky to catch up with Georgia McElveen recently and have shared our conversation below.

Georgia, appreciate you joining us today. Looking back on your career, have you ever worked with a great leader or boss? We’d love to hear about the experience and what you think made them such a great leader.

One of my first jobs out of college was working with my best friend Julia Sloan for Mona Patel at Motivate Design / UX Hires. I’ve been very fortunate to have the majority of my bosses be very strong female leaders. Mona’s drive, talent, intelligence and confidence inspired us all everyday. I learned so many things about how to be a good boss from her (such as quarterly reviews + the compliment sandwich). She empowered us and challenged us to go outside of our comfort zones.

The best thing she did for me though was when I was offered another job and I couldn’t decide if I should take it or stay with Mona at Motivate. The other job was related to my background in the arts and was a very exciting startup opportunity. While I loved working for Mona, the work at Motivate didn’t always feel aligned with my passions. When I brought it up with Mona, she was very understanding and open to the discussions. She helped me make a pros + cons list over lunch one day. After making the list, she looked at me across the table and said, “It’s really not that big of a deal I promise you. This is not going to make or break the rest of your life”.

There have been other times in my career since then when I’ve had to make a pros + cons list and I think about the fact that it’s not that big of a deal in the larger scheme of things like Mona taught me. The path is the goal and I’ve enjoyed every moment along the way and I’m happy where I’ve landed, but I also know I would’ve been happy going some of the other directions too and that’s ok!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have always been drawn to art. I took classes at the Art Institute in Chicago during high school and focussed primarily on painting. When I got into Parsons, I decided to major in Design & Technology to turn my art into a career that seemed more stable but still creative. My best friend and I founded a company called Gin & Juice Design when we graduated where we worked on branding and websites for nonprofits & startups. We both had our day jobs at the time and ended up having to focus more on those in the end.

After working at a gallery in Chelsea, I transitioned over to an auction house where I ran a digital design team. I started working with Alessandra Branca on the side sourcing artworks for her clients and then eventually moved to Chicago to help her launch Casa Branca. Casa Branca is routed in quality, craftsmanship, and authenticity. We want to support artisans all over the world. Our brand is all about color and pattern. When we designed the collection we wanted to make mixing and matching color and pattern less intimidating so we made sure to color coordinate across all collections to make it less intimidating. We hope to empower designers, artisans, and bring joy into the design world.

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

I love the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I recently discovered it a bit late to the game and found the exercises to really help me think outside of the box and to get out of a creative rut and back into the creative grooOoOove.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

When we started the Casa Branca instagram we didn’t have a ton of visual content to work with, so I took the double drawn border of our logo and used it to start building photo frames for our web, email, and insta. The double frame on our insta makes it instantly recognizable and unique to our brand. I began by filling with mostly inspiration imagery to start telling the brand story and give some background/history. Now that we have more content from our own photo shoots, we can sprinkle in inspo here and there to continue the conversation of inspiration and historical context. We also decided to have themes per month/season depending on what we have going on at the time with events and launches, so that the images flow together in a color gradient creating a visually satisfying scroll.       

Contact Info:

• Website: casabranca.com
• Instagram: casabranca
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/casabranca

Image Credits
Carmel Brantley and Gabriella Imperatori-Penn