15/05/2026
A small snippet of my talk at yesterday, a talk about being a woman in design.
And naturally, I rewrote my talk on the train to the event yesterday.
I realised the reason I got on social media in the first place was because I had a dream.
On my fist day of college I really thought I was gonna walk out, get a job at a leading agency, work my way up to creative director, make partner and evetually start my own. Super easy, right?
Then I found out that only 12–17% of creative directors are women. 20% of agency partners are women. And 0.1% of agency owners are women. I realised my dream was gonna be WAY harder and I felt like I had no real female role models (a problem I thankfully no longer have! Shoutout to all of you!)
This was back in 2022, and to top it off, every junior role I looked at wanted 1–2 years of experience I didn’t have.
So I did the only thing I could think of. I started this account.
I would come home every night from uni and practice what I’d learned that day, determined to get better, obsessed with improvement. I got to grow my business simultaneously as I learned, in the hopes of graduating WITH the experience I needed.
Overtime, that’s changed and my process looks completely different now that I’m not burning myself out for content. However, that determination and drive and obsession doesn’t go away.
I’ve never really talked a lot about my background, or why I work myself into the ground. But when I sat down to write this talk, I realised, the unique thing I can actually speak to is this.
Building something from nothing as a student in Scotland, where almost nobody was doing it the way I wanted to, until I found .thepinkpony and everything shifted.
I got to talk about the chip on my shoulder. Where it came from. How it grew. And why I’d never get rid of it because it’s the thing that allows me to do what I do.
Turns out that’s a more interesting talk anyway. And I’ll definitely be using this analogy again! So stay tuned, dudes.
Thank you to POV! I was honored to be up there with these other incredible women who are all such an inspiration! .delahooke
