From college to a personal project

- Let's kind of bridge that gap, all right so you go to Ball State and then how do you end up, like, what's the steps that happened between now and when you started You are Beautiful? - So, when I got out of school, that was 2001, and so I moved back home to South Bend. This won't sound important to you but anybody else this will sound very important to but we didn't have a computer in the house. So my Dad would go every morning to check out a Tribune because I really wanted to get to Chicago. But he was like you're not just going to go and then look for a job, like we can't fund your life, you know, you have to get a job and then move. - Right. Well, that's nice that they even been willing to help bridge that gap a little bit. - Yeah, yeah. And that's when we would go every morning get the Chicago Tribune and circle classified ads. And then making me go to the library and either print out and mail in or email my resume to all these different places and that went on for six months. At that point, I had literally given up. I was like I can't do this anymore. - What were you doing in that six months besides that? Were you doing odd jobs, were you creating anything? Were you depressed? - I was working at Meijer, in the paint furniture and hardware department. - For those of you who don't know, Meijer is a large grocery chain, primarily in Michigan and the Midwest now I guess. - And they've got a couple, there's one near Ikea, I've seen, I haven't been to it yet. - I mean they're in Illinois now but I think it started in Michigan. - So there was a really funny moment where they offered me a manager position and this was about that time where I was just really getting defeated by like people just wouldn't respond. So, you know, my dad went and got the Tribune, found this job in Lincolnwood, Illinois and I was like, no I'm not going to do it anymore. And he literally forced me, I think might have even driven me to the library to do it and that's what got me here. - Wow, what was the job? - It was at Publications International which is in Lincolnwood and that point it had I think like 200, 300 people and when it got really big it was up to about 500 people. - Wow. - And so I worked there 11 years. - So what did you do there? - A lot of prototyping of physical products between, sort of like we were the R and D department. Somebody would be like I want to do this but with this on it and it's got to cost five cents. So I would physically make the products and then we would send those prototypes to China and then we'd get a lot of revisions and things. - So this is totally in your wheelhouse? - Yeah, yeah. And then we had to make mock-ups of products so I would make all the mock-ups and we had a big warehouse where all the real products would come in and stuff and we would always find my products in the warehouse because they looked real. - That's so cool. - So, for me it was the perfect job, yeah. - Now, did you start You are Beautiful while you were there? - Yeah, so it basically started when I moved, everything kind of started when I moved to Chicago in 2002. So it was sort of like a nights and weekends thing for a long time.