A re-introduction. Hello!

Sometimes in the ether and ephemera of social media, we don’t remember how we found each other and don’t know each other’s stories but we know there’s a tug. A pull. A recognition. A kinship.

We share something – a perspective, an aesethic, a worldview, remembrances, outlines, kind-lines, through-lines, a mutual passion for baby elephants (h/t Roxane Gay) or mini-pigs (before Instagram, WHO KNEW??!).

So let’s remember and remind each other who we are.

I’m Kelly Diels. I’m writer, lover, fighter, mama…and feminist marketing consultant.

I think with the world as it is there’s a tension between ‘feminist’ and ‘marketing’ but that there doesn’t have to be – and that’s my work, both with entrepreneurs and in my critique of what I call ‘The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand’.

I want to change our world so that it is more feminist and just, and change lifestyle marketing so that it doesn’t rely on leveraging inequalities in order to work.

I believe that neither have to be that way.

I work on making marketing something that’s thoughtful, celebratory and starts with questioning our assumptions about persuasion, consent, money, femininity, our culture, capitalism.

For me, personally, the last two years have been tender, glorious, spectacular, and spectacularly awful. I figured out my work, my lane. I wrote A LOT. I risked rejection (and lo, it came with a vengeance) and wrote what I knew to be true. I mentored. I made. I admitted to myself that I’m more earnest than I am smart-ass; that I care too much to be cool and SO BE IT.

Also that I like black and red together even though someone who has way better taste than me once told me it was her least favourite color combination and as a result I STOPPED USING THAT COMBO FOR SEVEN YEARS CAN YOU BELIEVE IT???

She wasn’t trying to limit me and doesn’t even know that happened but what happened was instructive: I believed more in her taste than my own.

I digress. But not really.

And here I am, in black and red. Hello.

There’s more to this story and this post and I’ll be sending out the rest of it on Sunday in my newsletter. If you’d like to read it, you can sign up here.