She was a film director in training, working on indie sets and squeezing into cabs with other broke twenty–somethings on awards nights. Then she took a customer support internship at a little New York startup, fell in love with building internet brands, and eventually quit to sell swimsuits on the internet.

That is Melanie Travis, founder and CEO of Andie Swim, and she might be the most “abnormally confident” person I have ever met.

In this episode we talk about how a deeply awkward work offsite at a lake with all-male leadership turned into the spark for Andie, why being queer and an only child shaped her default setting as a leader, how a film-school brain translates into building businesses, and why she still heads to her oil-painting studio after work to stay sane. We also get into the messy middle: buying a second brand, guessing wrong on a big color launch, teaching yourself to love spreadsheets, and holding people’s livelihoods without letting it consume your entire identity.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you are “too sensitive” or “too artsy” or “not finance-y enough” to be a founder, Melanie is your counterexample.

In this episode:

• The wildly awkward work retreat that made her realize swim needed a safer, smarter brand

• How she went from customer support intern at Foursquare to founding Andie

• Why she describes herself as “abnormally confident” and what that actually looks like day to day

• Nature vs nurture: growing up an only child with two art-world parents and a gay dad

• What film school taught her about directing a team and seeing the whole story arc

• The honest story of acquiring Richer Poorer and immediately disagreeing with a big buy

• Coconut Milk vs Rainforest: when your team goes deep on a color you personally hate

• How she taught herself to love finance and why monthly close is now her favorite meeting

• The difference between being a “hero” founder and being a world-class number two

• Painting in oils, $56 screw-top wine, and why a studio saved her from burnout

She left Goldman Sachs and Revlon to sell kitchen tools. Eight years later, she voluntarily killed her best-selling cutting board because new research showed she could do better for customers.

That's Eunice Byun, founder of Material, and this conversation is one of my favorites.

While everyone's chasing growth hacks and viral moments, Eunice is building an "old soul" brand. Human customer service. Thoughtful design. Products you actually reach for every day. And a lifetime warranty that's just "reach out and we'll help.”

We talk about why she only designs the must-haves (not the nice-to-haves), how she's built 8 years of loyalty through word-of-mouth instead of ads, what happened when she hid her pregnancy for 6 months at a startup, and why being a mom made her a BETTER founder.

In this episode:

• The moment Eunice knew she had to leave corporate and bet on herself

• Why Material only makes products that pass the "reach for it daily" test

• How she partnered with materials scientists to redesign a hero product from scratch

• Why word-of-mouth creates stickiness that ads can't buy

• What her daughters taught her about grace, empathy, and leadership

• The "dance of the kitchen" philosophy behind every design decision

• How to build customer loyalty that actually lasts (hint: it's not about transactions)This is for anyone building something different and wondering if "different" is good enough. Spoiler: it is.

What if your brand had a creative director in the cloud?

In this episode, I sit down with my boss and Lica’s co-founder/CEO, Priyaa Kalyanaraman, to unpack what we’re actually building and why it’s very different from yet another “type a prompt, get a pretty picture” tool.

Priyaa has been working in AI and design long before it was cool. From building presentation design agents at Microsoft to experimenting with social creatives at Snap, she’s been obsessed with one question:

How do you give everyday people and brands a “personal storytelling agent” that actually understands taste?

We get into:

• Why so many AI image tools create visual slop (and what’s missing under the hood)• How Lica trains a model to think like a designer, not just mimic a camera• What “brand DNA” actually means in model form, and how we keep visuals on-brand over thousands of iterations• Why Priyaa refuses to sell “fire your team, just use AI” and instead leans on a crawl–walk–run rollout with clients• How AI is becoming a great neutralizer for small e-comm teams who want to play at the same level as legacy fashion houses• What this all means for photographers, models, and designers (hint: they’re not going anywhere, but the job changes)• Her favorite thought experiment for anxious creatives: What if we could distribute your brain to millions of people and you got paid for it?•The ethics question everyone asks: when do we have to say it’s AI? and how she thinks about honest use vs deception

If you’re a founder, marketer, or creative who’s curious about AI but allergic to hype, this conversation is for you. We talk frankly about the limits, the opportunities, and the very human problems we’re trying to solve for brands and their teams.

Listen to this episode of Creative Got Me on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube and let us know:

What’s the one part of your creative workflow you’d love a “personal storytelling agent” to handle for you?

What happens when you put a 30-year tech pioneer in a room with someone building AI for the next 30?

In this episode of Creative Got Me, I sit down with David Cost, VP of Digital & Ecommerce at Rainbow Shops and former co-founder of one of the internet’s first price comparison sites, PriceSCAN.com. David has quietly been at the front of every major tech wave so far: personal computing, the early web, mobile, and now AI. He’s seen the dot-com bubble burst, watched Google out-compete his startup, and then turned all of that scar tissue into a playbook for modern retail.

We get into:

• How a tiny 3-person dev team at Rainbow makes tech bets that let them compete with giants like Walmart

• Why the iPhone, not the browser, was the real “great equalizer” for e-commerce

• What he learned trying (and failing) to use AI to replace people, and why using it to assist people was a home run

• The first time he saw “real” personalization work at scale, sending 100,000 unique SMS messages instead of one mass blast

• How he thinks about risk, experiments, and knowing when to kill an idea without killing your appetite for trying again

If you’re a founder, marketer, or operator trying to make sense of AI without losing your mind (or your job), this conversation will calm you down and challenge you at the same time.

Listen in to learn how to treat AI like the next Excel: not a threat, but the tool that quietly separates the people who stay relevant from the people who get left behind.

You see the polished brand. You don’t see the brother who wired $5,000 at midnight because he believed in a tiny baby-hat idea.

In this solo episode of Creative Got Me, I tell the story behind Kinship, the kids hat company I started in 2016 while pregnant and living in San Francisco. I share how my brother became my first hype man, investor, and co-founder… and how everything changed when he passed away from COVID in 2020.

There are some things you can “figure out” in business: how to build a tech pack, how to find a manufacturer, how to ship a product. And then there are things you can’t hack: like grief, or losing a parent to addiction, or trying to keep building while your inner world is breaking open.

Along the way, I zoom out from my own story into the bigger picture:

• what we never see behind the brands we use every day• the quiet grief and failure sitting underneath so many “success stories”

• why these long-form conversations with founders (Heidi, Jess, Dave, Katerina and more) have changed how I work

• how motherhood has made me better at storytelling, not less serious

• why I chose to step into one of the spiciest spaces right now: AI-powered creative at Lica

I also talk honestly about AI: the fears I hear (“I never want AI to be considered art”), why I still chose to take a seat at this particular table, and how I think we can use AI to support e-commerce brands instead of flattening them.

Full episode is live on every platform.

We were taught how to succeed in college, our careers, and promotions along the way. We were never taught how to build and succeed in our intimate relationships.

In this episode of Creative Got Me, Monique sits down with sexologist and Wonderlust founder Natassia Miller to talk about the conversations most of us avoid: sex, desire, intimacy, and how all of that quietly shapes our work, leadership, and creativity.

Natassia shares how she went from a buttoned-up finance career to becoming a sexologist who speaks openly about women’s pleasure, long-term desire, and the realities of modern relationships. She explains why the most vulnerable conversation you’ll ever have is about sex, and how learning to be honest in the bedroom can transform the way you communicate in the boardroom.

They dig into the mental load women carry, why so many “successful” people feel disconnected at home, and how Natassia designed her Wonderlust intimacy card deck after realizing that the biggest barrier to better sex isn’t technique—it’s being able to talk about it at all.

You’ll also hear about:

• What Natassia’s mom did right with early sex education

• Why our sex ed was “salmonella prevention,” not pleasure education

• How to think about intimacy like a founder: goals, structure, and tiny experiments• The “cringe mountain” every creator has to climb to find their real voice• A dead-simple date-night framework to bring curiosity back into long-term relationships• Why so many women don’t “want sex” as much as they want less pressure and more help

This episode isn’t raunchy or clinical.

It’s honest, grounded, and surprisingly practical.

If you’re a founder, creator, or leader who wants deeper relationships and better communication at work, this one will stick with you.

Miki Agrawal has built three wildly successful companies (THINX, TUSHY, and now HIRO) by talking about the things no one else will: periods, poop, and plastic.

In this episode, she opens up about how she turned taboo into trust, scaled without VC, and why she believes creativity (not capital) is the most undervalued force in business.

She shares the exact 3-part framework behind every one of her brands, the story of how a Friday “thinking day” led to a diaper that breaks down in landfills (with mushrooms), and why the recycling model is fundamentally broken.

If you’re trying to build something bold, this episode of ‘Creative Got Me’ is for you.

Dan Cox didn’t start Wellthy by staring at Shopify dashboards or growth charts.

He started it behind the counter of his nutrition stores in Las Vegas and Southern California… listening to people talk about their bodies, their insecurities, their energy levels, and their fear of trying “one more thing” that might not work.

That daily, face‑to‑face exposure shaped everything about how he builds products today.

In this episode, we talk about what gets lost when brands go digital too fast and how Dan used his brick‑and‑mortar experience to build a DTC wellness brand that feels unusually human, trustworthy, and grounded.

We get into why most supplement packaging quietly repels customers, how marketing shortcuts destroy long‑term trust, why trial beats persuasion every time, and how fatherhood changed the way Dan runs his company. This conversation is about building brands that people don’t hide in their cabinets and businesses that founders can actually stand behind.

Timestamps

00:00 Living behind the supplement counter

03:01 Why customers don’t actually want “protein”

04:40 The moment Dan realized trust mattered more than sales

06:10 Why doctors told customers to stop taking supplements

07:56 The problem with translating in‑store experience to a website

10:22 Packaging that makes customers feel embarrassed

16:04 The Expo West failure that reshaped the brand

18:31 Weight loss, vulnerability, and real customer moments

21:45 How fatherhood sharpened Dan’s focus

23:00 Why Dan refuses fake marketing claims

26:53 Bootstrapping vs raising capital

30:23 Why trial is the best form of marketing

38:26 Why Dan still answers customer emails himself

41:23 What founders lose when everything goes digital

45:11 The future of Wellthy and retail expansion

How do you take a stand as a brand without losing your customers or your credibility?

In this episode of Creative Got Me, Michael Stars co-founder and CEO Suzanne Lerner joins Monique for a raw and unfiltered conversation on what it really means to build a values-driven brand that lasts.

Suzanne has done what few founders ever do: she’s run a successful fashion brand for 40 years, never taken a dollar of VC, kept 75% of production in LA, and built her company around real social impact—from reproductive rights to racial justice.

But this episode goes deeper than business.

Suzanne opens up about:

• The 3AM moment she decided to support abortion rights (even if it meant losing customers)

• How she and her late husband built Michael Stars from nothing

• Her decision to stay independent and say no to outside funding

• How grief reshaped her leadership• Why real brand activism isn’t a marketing campaign

• What she’s learned from 40 years of doing the right thing, even when it’s hardYou’ll walk away with lessons on integrity, longevity, and building a company you’re proud of without ever selling out.

If you’re a founder, marketer, or someone who gives a damn about doing business differently and building with purpose, this one’s for you.

⏱ Timestamps

0:00 – Suzanne’s 3AM decision to take a stand on abortion rights

3:00 – Co-founding Michael Stars with her late husband

5:00 – Why they refused to take venture capital

8:00 – How she keeps her husband’s legacy alive in the brand

11:00 – Building community through kindness and connection

14:00 – Her advice to new founders (and what most get wrong)

17:00 – Why 75% of Michael Stars products are still made in LA

20:00 – The financial reality of doing business ethically

22:00 – How resale (via ThredUp) fits into their sustainability mission

24:00 – What most brands get wrong about influencers

26:00 – Why customers can feel authenticity

30:00 – How Michael Stars balances trends with timelessness

35:00 – Choosing which social issues to speak on (and which to avoid)

38:00 – The truth about the VC funding gap for women

40:00 – How anyone can start funding women entrepreneurs

44:00 – Suzanne’s wild career path, from typist to global fashion CEO

48:00 – Her advice for finding purpose (and staying grounded in it)

How do you take a stand as a brand without losing your customers or your credibility?

In this episode of Creative Got Me, Michael Stars co-founder and CEO Suzanne Lerner joins Monique for a raw and unfiltered conversation on what it really means to build a values-driven brand that lasts.

Suzanne has done what few founders ever do: she’s run a successful fashion brand for 40 years, never taken a dollar of VC, kept 75% of production in LA, and built her company around real social impact—from reproductive rights to racial justice.

But this episode goes deeper than business.

Suzanne opens up about:

• The 3AM moment she decided to support abortion rights (even if it meant losing customers)

• How she and her late husband built Michael Stars from nothing• Her decision to stay independent and say no to outside funding

• How grief reshaped her leadership

• Why real brand activism isn’t a marketing campaign

• What she’s learned from 40 years of doing the right thing, even when it’s hard

You’ll walk away with lessons on integrity, longevity, and building a company you’re proud of without ever selling out.

If you’re a founder, marketer, or someone who gives a damn about doing business differently and building with purpose, this one’s for you.

⏱ Timestamps

0:00 – Suzanne’s 3AM decision to take a stand on abortion rights

3:00 – Co-founding Michael Stars with her late husband

5:00 – Why they refused to take venture capital

8:00 – How she keeps her husband’s legacy alive in the brand

11:00 – Building community through kindness and connection

14:00 – Her advice to new founders (and what most get wrong)

17:00 – Why 75% of Michael Stars products are still made in LA

20:00 – The financial reality of doing business ethically

22:00 – How resale (via ThredUp) fits into their sustainability mission

24:00 – What most brands get wrong about influencers

26:00 – Why customers can feel authenticity

30:00 – How Michael Stars balances trends with timelessness

35:00 – Choosing which social issues to speak on (and which to avoid)

38:00 – The truth about the VC funding gap for women

40:00 – How anyone can start funding women entrepreneurs

44:00 – Suzanne’s wild career path, from typist to global fashion CEO

48:00 – Her advice for finding purpose (and staying grounded in it)