Confessions of a Graphic Designer

After traveling in New York for several days to attend a Verizon Summit (#vzsummit), and enjoying meals at fabulous restaurants there, I returned, craving home made comfort food. Just before the trip, I roasted a pretty sizable pumpkin (uncarved), yielding a two large sheet pans of delicious pieces of roasted pumpkin. So before heading into Alki Surf Shop on Saturday, I searched for a pumpkin soup recipe, and found one that looked good, but I didn’t have some of the ingredients. Never one to let a missing ingredient stop me, I forged on! The original recipe, Thai Pumpkin Soup with Coconut Milk, called for lemongrass, fresh coriander, vegetable stock and coconut milk. But I didn’t have any of those things. So here’s what I did: Terri’s Pantry Pumpkin Soup Ingredients: 2 TB Olive Oil 1.5 medium onions, diced 5 cloves of garlic left whole 3.5 lbs. of roasted pumpkin, diced* 1 tsp ground coriander 2 tsp curry powder 2 TB fresh minced ginger** (which BTW, was f...

It’s been a year since my husband, Kahuna Dave, and I opened our store, Alki Surf Shop, in West Seattle. The past 12 months have been filled with lots of laughter and learning, and we’ve met thousands of great people from nearby and all over the world. We’ve made new friends, rekindled past friendships, and love being a part of the Alki Beach community. It feels like we’ve been on a business “graduate school” crash course. We're smarter store owners now, and continue to evolve. Among some of the things we've learned: How to create a positive experience for people who visit; how to identify products that make sense; and how to work more effectively with suppliers. My husband's vision of "Hawaii-Beach-California" is fun, and comes through clearly in our store, from the fixtures to the colors and raffia and bamboo trim. One of the things I made a conscious effort to do is to incorporate my friends in the creation of our unique space. We’re constantly hear...

It’s been said, “Life’s a beach,” and in our case, it’s true! Eleven months ago, my husband, “Kahuna Dave” and I launched our store, Alki Surf Shop on Alki Beach in West Seattle. It took extraordinary effort and thinking to create such a unique place. It’s not just the fact that the “physical plant” is fun and adorable, but we go further to make sure our customers have a positive experience in every way we can. As Kahuna Dave says, Alki Beach is Seattle’s playground, and when you’re there, you’re having fun. It starts with the music we pipe out onto the sidewalk. We actually see people outside on the sidewalk dancing before they enter our store. We have an incredible UE Boom bluetooth speaker, which acts like a pied piper, drawing them up into our space. And when a customer leaves, we often give them something extra to remember. Our stock-in-trade is genuine Alki-branded tees, hoodies, and tank tops, but we sell all manner of beach essentials: sunglasses, sunscre...

My sister, Melissa, has been on a mission to clean out our childhood home. During the course of unearthing some truly terrible pottery by yours truly, she came across a variety of artifacts as well as some notes written by our mom. We lost our mom to cancer eight years ago. She entered  Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, and about a week later, she died. It was just like our mom to be selfless, and not trouble us to care for her over the course of a long, drawn-out illness. I think we all expected her to get well. She had celebrated her 88th birthday that year — a special year in Japanese culture. My brother Dave, and his wife Carol, treated everyone to a limousine and dinner at  Canlis for a very special celebration. It was truly amazing. Quite a few years earlier, I had an idea of asking my mom to write a family history. After looking at a number of books on the subject, which made the process look daunting, I found a format (it was the dot-matrix days) print...

What's more important? Building a brand, or serving your customers? Happy buyers are essential to making your business succeed. Without customer service, it doesn’t matter if you’ve created a great brand. Ignoring buyers or potential customers is counter-productive to the ultimate goal of attaining success. That being said, a strong brand identity is like a way-finding system for your customers, so it’s very important, too. It signals what you do, how you position yourself and lets your customers understand how you fit into the marketplace, and how it relates to them. Customers encounter your brand and should quickly understand a brand’s personality and position among competitors and decide whether there is a good fit. That’s how the Graham Cracker Cookie Crumbles Some of you know, my husband, David Horsfall , and I opened Alki Surf Shop  in Seattle seven months ago. It may be February, and so what if Boston is buried in 100 inches of snow ( @chillie31512 )?...

Rejection sounds negative, but it can play a positive role in choices we make. It can force us to pivot in a new direction and help us develop skills to adapt and succeed. By changing our focus to something we hadn’t planned, rejection can lead us to a better outcome than if we’d simply been handed the thing we wanted. In pursuit of happiness? Last fall I learned of a great job with one of my local design clients. They were looking for a communications director who could write, work well with others, and organize the department. Plus it was a bonus if they had design and social media skills. I’d had my business for a long time and, thinking I might be an ideal candidate, I vigorously pursued it. Five months of meetings and interviews led me to become one of two finalists. The search culminated when I had a 9-hour successive interview with about 40 people. After ruminating three weeks, they emailed to say neither of us were chosen, and they were going to start the search anew....

Why We Need to Digital Detox Our Irrepressible Need to Be Connected From the moment we adopted the smart phone—a tiny, life-altering portable computer—the need to stay connected intensified. Our devices provided us with instant connectivity. And with the introduction of social media, the time we spent connecting practically doubled as we kept up with daily news of not just real life, but also virtual friends. It’s extraordinary how technology enables us to have our family and friends as close as our pockets. But our devices can be like a spoiled pet—needy and demanding. Digital Day-cation In September I posted a tweet about Jake Knapp's year, free of digital distraction from the iPhone. A Twitter friend, Adrian Lee, saw it and tweeted me to say he was going to give it a try for 24 hours. I didn’t think about it too much until he wrote about it. He did it! I was so impressed! Social media relationships, as those in real life, thrive when you are present an...

How the heck did we make this dream happen? If you're walking along Alki Avenue SW near 59th and see this sign, come up and say hi! Alki is Seattle’s favorite beach, and although thousands of visitors flock here each year, branded items have been hard to find. We saw an opportunity to fill a need, and that's when we decided to move from online to brick and mortar. Today Alki Surf Shop has a ton of Alki-branded merchandise (clothing, souvenirs, consumables), with more Genuine Alki shirts and hoodies than anywhere else on Earth. Due in part, to a little bit of luck. In May of 2014, thanks, to our neighbor, Sandi Bender, we came upon a rare opportunity to rent a retail space right in the heart of Alki Beach. And so the birth of our store began. We change up this display to show different merchandise. It must work because customers buy things right off the mannequin. Neither David nor I have a lot of retail experience. I worked at several stores in high s...