Fourteen years, one platform, and a business built to move.
When I was a kid I used to type out my siblings' homework. Not because I was generous. Because it was an excuse to be on the computer.
That never really went away. I'm the person who spent hours coding a MySpace page that nobody was going to look at, then did the same thing to a Tumblr, then went to the Art Institute and learned HTML and CSS properly so I could keep doing it on purpose.
My first real website was for my mother's business. She paid me with a computer of my own, which is still the best deal I've ever made. The one after that I charged three hundred dollars for, and I have thought about that number many times since.
Where I am now
Honolulu, for now. My husband just joined the Army, so "for now" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Which means this business is built to be portable, because it's about to have to be. Everything I do happens in your Squarespace account, from wherever I happen to be sitting. That has always been true. It's just going to get tested.
I homeschool my kids, so I work while they're at school and after they've gone to bed. That's why I hold one build week at a time and don't overbook. It isn't scarcity, it's arithmetic.
I'm still learning. Art Institute, then Flatiron for web development, then Square Stylist for the Squarespace work I do now. There's always another course open in a tab.
Where the name came from
My sister and I went to Paris and decided we'd both learn a little French while we were there.
The only word either of us retained was fromage. I'd like to say that means something profound. It means we like cheese.
Years later, when I was naming this properly, I had two requirements. It had to be a word nobody else had taken, and it had to look beautiful written in cursive. Fromage it was.
Why makers
Because you can't fake it and neither can I.
Somebody who throws pots or sets stones or builds furniture has spent years getting good at a specific thing, and the internet keeps asking them to flatten it into a grid of thumbnails that looks like everyone else's grid of thumbnails.
I know what that feels like from the other side of the screen. I've been making things on the internet since I was a teenager who should have been doing her own homework.
What I want, when someone opens the website I built them, is for them to think: she actually saw me. She understood what I'm doing here.
That's the whole job. Everything else is logistics.
The short version
Fourteen years on Squarespace. Five pages, built in a week. I'll ask you a lot of questions first.
