I grew up in a restaurant, though "grew up in" undersells it. The Goose Hollow Inn opened in Portland's Goose Hollow neighborhood in 1967, founded by my grandfather and eventually taken over by my mom. By the time I came along, the place was already a neighborhood institution: a pub where regulars had their tables, the staff knew the orders, and the building itself seemed to belong to the block as much as any house on it. My mom opened a café next door the year I was born and named it after my grandmother's maiden name: the Fehrenbacher Hof, a nod to our relatives' bed and breakfast in southern Germany. Two businesses, one family, one community. That was my childhood.

By age four, I had a tip jar set up on the counter and was taking orders with the help of our staff. Although our clientele was kind to tip me their spare nickels and dimes, what I got instead was something more useful: an early, bone-deep education in what makes a place feel like it belongs to people. A brand, I came to understand long before I had the word for it, is the feeling someone gets when they walk in and already feel known. I loved the business completely, and I also started noticing, young, where the story it told didn't quite match the soul behind it. Those two things – love and constructive dissatisfaction – have never really left me.

I became a barista at 14. A manager at 17, hiring, training, and handling the books while finishing high school. When COVID hit, I helped my mom rebuild the model from scratch, co-engineering a takeout operation that kept the community fed and the doors open. Hospitality, I learned early, is a discipline and labor of love.

I left for the University of Oregon as an Advertising major, and my undergraduate years pulled me in directions I hadn't anticipated. I spent them working part-time as a production coordinator for live sports broadcasts (ESPN, FOX, CBS, the PAC-12 in its final chapter). I stood on the sidelines at Big Ten football games. I sat in production trucks during MLS broadcasts reaching nine million viewers, where a missed cue was not recoverable. The electricity of live production — storytelling and logistics and real-time pressure all compressed into a single window — was something I fell in love with immediately and completely.

My senior year, I earned a spot on Upstream Advertising, Oregon's competitive student-run agency. We built a full campaign for Tide from the ground up: research, strategy, creative, production. We took it to regionals in Boise and won Best Creative. That same year, I traveled with a cohort of advertising students to tour agencies in New York. Both experiences did what the best experiences do: they made something abstract feel concrete and close, and set me on the path I intend to spend the rest of my life building: I want to be in a room full of people who care deeply about making things, solving hard problems for brands worth believing in.

I finished my degree with three months in Spain, living with a host family and becoming fluent in Spanish through the reliable method of having no other option. Study abroad delivers on its promise. I also found out something about myself: I can land somewhere completely unfamiliar, figure out the shape of it, and be great.

Then I came back and got to work.

Freelance contracts followed — social strategy, content, copywriting, videography — building relationships with founders and CEOs across CPG, DTC, and hospitality. One of those clients was Lucille Health, a nutrition startup where I grew their Instagram from 80 to 1,700 followers in four months and built a content system generating 200K+ impressions a month. The follower count is the easy thing to cite. What actually mattered was working for a brand with a genuine reason for existing. The strategy gets cleaner. The copy gets more honest. The work earns its place. Lucille recalibrated what I want to spend my time on.

Alongside the freelance work, I came back to my roots with new tools. As a Community Marketing and Partnerships Specialist for Broken Yolk Cafe, a 42-unit breakfast franchise, I run local activations, manage partner relationships, and own performance reporting across active campaigns. I doubled same-store catering revenue year-over-year by building an integrated outreach system that didn't exist before I got there. The hospitality industry raised me. Now I get to build for it.

Restaurant kid. Broadcast coordinator. Competitive advertiser. Strategist. Franchise marketer. The thread running through all of it is the same one I found at four years old, standing behind a counter in my family's pub with a tip jar and a lot of confidence: I believe the best brands make people feel like they belong to something. Everything I've done has been, in one way or another, about learning how to build that.