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

Kylen, appreciate you joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

We have been best friends since we were babies and have wanted to start a business since at least middle school. We are both artists, creatives in our own way, and honestly life just looked so different than we expected almost ten years after college. We reached a moment in Sept. 2023 where we were in our thirties, each completely burnt out and unfulfilled with the career paths we had been on for a decade. We were floating in Nora’s little pool, talking about all of the ways our lives could be different and circling the dream of collaboratively designing websites. Turns out there’s no time like the present!

Nora was in-between jobs at the time and Kylen was threatening to quit her corporate job on a daily basis, so the timing seemed undeniable. It felt like a big jump, definitely more of a risk than finding a “real job”, but we are each other’s lifelong hypewomen, we just knew that we would figure it out together. By November 2023, Woven Digital Design was officially in business!

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?

As we said before, we are two lifelong best friends. We grew up separately; Nora in Pittsburgh and Kylen in western NY, but got to see each other regularly because of the strong friendship between our dads and families. Getting to work with your best friend every day is the best thing in the world, and we cannot recommend it highly enough, it’s amazing. We are each other’s biggest fans, and that has made pretty much every business-related decision an easy one.

We started Woven Digital Design as a way to support small businesses in our community. We have seen the owners of our favorite small businesses struggle with a seemingly endless to-do list and so often their digital presence falls to the wayside. Our services of website design, hand-illustrated branding, and search engine optimization (SEO) were designed to meet a business owner where they are and help them grow to achieve their goals.

This is a crowded industry, and even in Pittsburgh where we are based, there are a lot of other great website designers doing similar work. What sets us apart is our unique working relationship and the energy we bring to every single project. It is such an honor to work with these powerhouse small business owners who inspire us to follow our dreams and reach for our goals. Our friendship-fueled working relationship carries into our client interactions, creating lively meetings and lasting working relationships with past clients. Basically we are a lot of fun to work with!

We are most proud of our finished work! The websites and branding we design for our clients speaks volumes. Getting to take a step back and admire our hard work AND getting to see it work for the client is such an incredible feeling. We recently redesigned a website for our local yarn store (we are both knitters, so that was a win in itself) and after the redesign, their online sales grew by 400% in 4 months. There’s not a better feeling than that!

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

We are both multi-faceted creatives, which historically meant we would cram our free hours with creative projects, side hustles, and freelance work, leaving very little time to actually enjoy our lives. Flexibility is one of the driving forces behind Woven Digital Design. We want to build the lives of our dreams, and incorporate time for our other passions, within the “9 to 5” framework.

Nora worked for a decade in non-profits while also growing her practice as a fiber artist and developing a freelance illustration business. Kylen was working in corporate tech while building a following as a knitwear designer and establishing herself as a knitting technical editor. We were both so burnt out and completely exhausted that creativity and inspiration felt like a joke. Starting Woven Digital Design with this perspective; really prioritizing flexibility and work/life balance, has been a game changer on all fronts. We have been able to nurture and grow this business, while also tending to our other passions and achieving goals in those lanes as well.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

At the risk of sounding like a (very sappy) broken record, the most rewarding piece of all of this is working with each other. We have dreamt of this for so long, and having the opportunity to build something like this together is worth all of the risk and hardships. We make each other laugh all day long, and that’s something we have wanted since we were itty bitty.

Additionally, working for ourselves and getting to rebuild our relationship with “work” has been incredibly healing for both of us. The path to recovery from burnout is long and bumpy, but giving ourselves the time and space to balance Woven with our other passions has been such a gift.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wovendigitaldesign.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wovendigitaldesign/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wovendigitaldesign