With Josh Clarke behind the mic this week we’re talking about personal journeys, making good, and rebranding failures as experiments.

Josh is the founder of Clarke Studio and Make Good, but his story goes back many experiments before that. Josh grew up knowing he wanted to be some combination of Mr Dressup, Bob Ross, and Marty McFly. Once getting over the news that Mr Dressup was just tracing all that time we talk about Josh’s early desire to go into architecture, which later evolved into an experiment with structural engineering.

We’re deliberately shedding the “favourite failure” analogy this time and instead reframing them as experiments. As Josh explains an experiment is an object - it can fail, it can succeed, but the goal is to learn. After learning that structural engineering wasn’t Josh’s calling he entered a career in the non-profit world, working with the homeless and helping people in need, which he says completely changed his life.

“I was running on fumes for many years and then those fumes ran out.” He recalls the struggle of taking on the stress of his clients and the toll it took on him, and going on a journey with PTSD as a result. Having grown wary of the concept of a self-made man and the all or nothing approach it would be time for Josh to take on his next experiment.

Josh heavily engaged with Calgary’s craft beer community, planning to start a brewery of his own and completing an enormous amount of planning before realizing it wasn’t that he wasn’t to have a brewery, but to be a part of that community. Next Clarke Studio would be born, a freelance design brand specializing in brand identity design. There’s a good chance you’ve drank a Calgary craft beer out of a can that Josh designed.

In addition to Clarke Studio Josh would form Make Good, a combination of all the learnings form his previous experiments. Make Good’s mission is to empower young people to positively shape the world around them. So far Make Good has engaged in a project with the youth of Cochrane to improve mobility accessibility in the town and worked with Mitford School on Project Mental Wellness.

Let’s Meet For A Beer!

Alberta Beer Festivals: website | twitter | instagram

Clarke Studio: website | twitter | instagram

Make Good: website | twitter | instagram