Transcript
Hi, my name is Megan Brame, and I’m obsessed with marketing.
What do you love to do? Can you remember the last time you had a hobby that didn’t involve an ulterior motive, that didn’t involve money or hustle culture, and that made you feel maybe a little bit vulnerable and free to be judged? I want to hear about this story. We all have something that gives us passion. And it’s my goal to reinspire you to find the joy in life by talking with other people about things that make them happiest. I’m Megan Brame.
This is anything but beige. Let’s go.
Hey, guys. Megan Brame here. Thank you so much for joining me on anything but beige. I am so excited to talk to you. This has been in my head for a long time.
And the fact that we’re here talking to each other. Is it’s so cool. I thought for the first episode I should probably tell you who I am. I’ll give you my story and then also let you know what you can expect in the next couple of episodes where the idea for anything but beige came from all that fun stuff. But I guess I should get started with who are you? Who are you listening to? So my name is Megan Brame.
And as I said in my intro, I love marketing.
It’s incredibly embarrassing thing to admit because I don’t know a lot of people who find marketing to be a hobby.
But when I was living in Brooklyn, I had a soap and candle company that I ran for. Oh, I guess about eight years.
And it was very cool to be an entrepreneur. You know, I was, I guess, successful by most people’s standards. You know, I won five industry awards. I had beat out these giant companies when it was just tiny little Megan. And I saw my name in The New York Times. You know, things are very cool.
But I wouldn’t give up control of anything. And, you know, I can turn this into a therapy session, but essentially it was, you know, a fear of losing control, of fear, of spending the money to have other people help me or thinking that I could do it faster.
So I’m just going to do it. And long story short, the company went from a dream career into a job I hated. I hated going into my studio every day. I just had this negative, stressed mindset all the time. It it really began to affect me. And I hated this thing that I had created. So in 2015, I had decided to close it and walk away. I could have sold it and done, you know, the traditional business stuff.
But it was like a bad breakup. I just didn’t want it anymore. I wanted it gone. I wanted some kind of fresh start. And so I shot it down and walked away. But, you know, I still like to think about how am I going to earn a living?
I got to support myself. And I started thinking about my blog that I had I had this blog called Handmade Brooklyn. And it was it started as kind of a way to catalog all the cool stuff. I saw people making in the boroughs and in New York City, all the people I was meeting at craft shows and street fairs.
But. It eventually just kind of diverted into a blog about my own experiences as an entrepreneur. And all the failures, but all the wins, too, and just the lessons I had learned. And so when I was thinking about, you know, what do I want to be when I grow up sort of thinking about how much I enjoyed that and how maybe I could make a go of that. So I started really focusing hard on writing, especially in the digital space.
You know, I wrote articles for Huffington Post and I had freelance clients I was writing for. But also I was still continuing my blog and the blog had changed from Handmaid Brooklyn over to my name, Megan Brame, just because it felt that handmade Brooklyn probably wasn’t accurate for it anymore.
And from there, I’d really transitioned into finding this really interesting avenue that it just intrigued me completely. And it was marketing. It was like talking about the things I had learned about marketing. And I had considered it myself really terrible at sales because I was an introvert and I didn’t really enjoy selling. I was afraid to ask for the sale because my business was very personal to me.
You know, it was all of these things I had created. You know, I had made the soaps and the candles and the packaging and all the stuff.
So I was afraid to be rejected. So I was afraid of selling and. I still knew that I had to, you know, earn some money, so I had realized that while I was afraid to sell, I was incredibly interested in marketing and learning how to have a conversation with your fanbase and what value based marketing meant. And I started listening all these podcasts, you know, like Pat Flynn, smart, passive income Amy Porterfield online marketing made easy.
Tim Ferriss, who is one of my All-Time Gurus. You know, I just started really diving into this world and realizing that it was incredibly fascinating to me. And I had never taken a business class. My degree was in social sciences, which was a deluded triad of history, sociology and psychology. So it one that was a useless degree. But two, it was you know, all of these theories behind successful marketing really intrigued me as someone who had this kind of background, you know, like how color affects us or the way that you have.
Copy that says a certain thing in a certain way to appeal to a certain person. And building an avatar like this was just crazy, fascinating to me.
So I really started to just kind of embrace that, like, OK, I’m a writer, I’m running this blog. I’m talking about my experiences. I’m trying to show other people, you know, do as I say, not as I’ve done. And it started really diverting into marketing and teaching other entrepreneurs how to learn about marketing and do it in a way that didn’t really feel like, you know, intro to marketing one oh one.
And the I came to think of his name. I think the guy is famous for copy.
Ogilvy, the Ogilvy on Ogilvy.
You know, like I finally know, I wanted to show people who were, you know, what I called at the kitchen table, you know, running their business at the kitchen table, who wanted to really do it full time. Like, here’s how you have to learn how to talk to your customer. And it doesn’t have to be scary.
It doesn’t have to make you feel like you forgive me if you’re one of these but used car salesmen, you know, you don’t have to feel like you’re doing gross sales tactics. You have to show the solution that you have to a problem and you have to reframe your mindset. It’s not about being afraid to ask for sales. It’s about solving a problem for someone.
And it’s your it’s to your advantage to show them they don’t have to have this pain point anymore. And so that’s really how I started to reframe what I was going to do. And I started this podcast called Stop Sucking at Business, where I talked way more in-depth about marketing and talked to other people about marketing.
And it you know, I realized that when I was out in the world, if I was at like a party or something and I got an opportunity to talk about marketing, I could just go, you know, like I could talk for ever. And that was probably not the best way to be friendly or to.
But it was my passion, you know, it was something I really loved. In 2016, we moved to upstate New York because we wanted to buy the house and have the dog in the yard and all of that stuff and kept it that in Brooklyn we’re not crazy Rockefeller’s or anything. So I decided to go back into the corporate world because I felt like a very adult thing to do as a homeowner. And I got a job as a director of marketing and I had no, I guess, professional corporate world experience, you know, like I had jobs before as a project manager or things like that.
But I know that what sold them on me was I was just talking off the cuff about marketing and I just went I started talking about value based initiatives and whatever questions they had, I didn’t stutter in positive. I was just so confident because I knew well, I loved this and that she really conveyed into the job interview, you know. And so I did that job for two years. I got laid off because the job moved to North Carolina. And I did a couple of other stints in corporate marketing, but I didn’t love it.
It was just so it wasn’t me, know, I just I can’t be in that world, I guess.
And I don’t say that from my own place of regret. Believe me, I’m very happy to be an entrepreneur. And so I went back into this and said, OK, I’m going to be an entrepreneur again and I’m gonna start really just leaning into loving what I do. And what I do is marketing. And I love marketing. I love talking about marketing. And you’re probably like, I don’t care about marketing anymore. Megan, please just tell me what the rest of this podcast is about.
But that’s the segue into this. So the idea for anything but Beige came up with from a meeting I had with my doctor was just my yearly checkup.
It’s not a meeting, but I realized that he was wearing cowboy boots. And, you know, I live in upstate New York.
So I was like, well, these are really cool. And he looked down and he kind of blushed a little bit. He said things and he mentioned that he was into square dancing and blew my mind.
I didn’t know anything about square dancing, so I kind of asked him a couple of questions and he started talking about it and he kind of let himself go and open up about this thing that he really loved. And as I learned about, you know, the the politics of square dancing and the others, a square dance and community, and there’s like a hierarchy and like, oh, this is so fascinating to me. And it was things that I had never known about before.
And that really made me think there are so many people in the world that have passions that they’re embarrassed about a little bit or they. Yeah, they don’t like to talk about because they feel vulnerable or, you know, they don’t want to be judged, but they truly. Truly love what they do. And so I wanted to create a platform for that. You know, he’s thinking about how I can. Create another platform for my blog. The Beige House.
I started thinking about, you know, I don’t want to do a whole podcast series about home decor because I don’t know how to do that in an audio way.
Like, let me talk to you about colors while you can’t see the colors.
So it doesn’t help, you know, so I started thinking about, like, what is the way that I can create more value for people who are interested in the beige house or not have no idea about the beige house, but are looking for ways to feel more confident or to embrace their passion or people who feel lost and feel like they lost their passion and they don’t have a joy in their life. And how do I help people reconnect with that?
And so that’s how anything but beige came about. The name for the record, Beach House was the name the domain that I had bought for my home decor blog before we’d actually bought a house, because I all the houses we were looking at were beige. And I was like, there’s most we’re gonna buy a beige house. We bought a blue house.
So you never make plans. But I started thinking about, well, OK, I have this domain now. So what does the beige house mean? And to me, beige feels like neutral. It feels like a zero, you know, like it’s not up. It’s not down. It’s just beige.
It’s an uncomplicated or, you know, I mean, like it’s just it’s neutral. And so when I rethought the beige house, I thought about beige in the sense of starting at zero and turning this house from a neutral beige, if you will, house into a house that was our home and it matched our aesthetic and it matched our loves and made it some place though we wanted to be. So that’s the same for anything but beige. You know, to me, anything but beige means anything but neutral.
It means finding this passion and this love and this just intensity for something truly something that you absolutely love.
And you could talk about it for hours if you were only given the chance. Anything but beige is that chance.
So what you’re going to hear in upcoming episodes are interviews from people who have these incredible passions for writing and sustainability, overcoming disabilities, sex, money, just crazy, crazy stories.
And I loved talking to all these people. And I still do, you know, this is still happening. But I want you to listen to all of these episodes and think about what they bring out for you. Are they intriguing subjects for you? Are they ones that you’ve never thought about being passionate about?
Or can you just hear in the voice of the person I’m interviewing just how much they truly love what they’re talking about? I’ve noticed it multiple times, and I hope you’re able to notice it, too. So that’s the journey we’re going to take on anything that beige.
And I’m going to come in every now and then with my own stories, or I would really love to do a monthly Q&A with you guys so that we can really make this a conversation with everyone. So that’s what anything but beige s going to be about. And I hope you’ll stick around, because I would really love to see you here. Would you do me a favor and subscribe to the podcast? It really matters, especially in the beginning of any kind of podcast where we’re trying to get, you know, as many people interested as possible so that we can help as many people as possible and would really appreciate that.
And you’re also going to hear at the end of this request for a review that also really helps new podcasts, if you have a minute. I would really appreciate it. But in the meantime, I that’s me. That’s an eating Lebech. I will talk to you guys next week.
Hey, guys. Megan here, before you go, I would love to ask a favor of you. It is so helpful to have reviews on new podcasts as it really helps iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, all of those guys find out that you’re really enjoying it and that they should show it to new people. So if you wouldn’t mind just leaving a quick review about what you think about the podcast, I would really appreciate it. Thank you so much again.
next week on the next episode…
My creative voice was so loud at the time that I felt even worse by doing this research, because my creative voice thought that I’m gonna make the wrong decision and my creative voice will not have a chance to speak again.