ABOUT

I've been on welfare and in boardrooms. I've built companies and burned them down. I've been a firefighter, a bartender, a single mom on food stamps building a skincare company out of my mother's basement that somehow ended up in Whole Foods — which sounds inspirational until you know I was also bouncing checks and eating ramen while negotiating international distribution deals. I somehow convinced Pepperdine to let me into their MBA program without a bachelor's degree, which either makes me impressive or delusional. Jury's still out.
I didn't have a simple childhood. But my stepdad raised me as his own — even after he and my mom split, he stayed. He chose me. He's 78 now and lives with us. He drives me absolutely crazy and I love him. That's the version of love I learned to trust. Not the fairy tale kind. The kind where someone just keeps showing up and you keep letting them.
I got fierce young. Probably too young. Armored up and kept going because that's what the women in my family have always done — my mother, her mother, and her mother before her. A deep lineage of women who refused to stay down and refused to shut up. My mom always said my will was stronger than hers. I took that as a compliment. She may not have meant it as one.
That fierceness built a lot of things. It also cost me something. But that's what the articles are for.
Saint Kay started because I kept having the same conversation — at dinner tables, on park benches, after two glasses of wine — the kind where someone says the thing they've been holding and the whole table goes quiet for a second. I finally thought, maybe I should just turn the mic on.