I knew that this idea had to be a book years ago, maybe three or four years ago, but it
felt like this little seed that was planted under the ground and little by little that
seed was growing into a little seedling until it finally popped out of the ground.
And I was like, now is the time.
It was clear to us that from the very beginning that Everything Is Figureoutable––that
was the title.
So then the question is, what should be on the cover of this book?
We have a very strong title.
Everything is Figureoutable is a phenomenal idea and that alone is electrifying.
But then you have Marie, who is this huge personality and, you know, she's recognized
around the world and she's such a force of nature.
The fight at the beginning of the process was do we lead with the title type because
that's such an important message or do we lead with Marie, a picture of Marie, because
she's so well known and loved?
I wanted the cover to be powerful and fresh and exciting and inviting and something that
you haven't seen before.
And I also wanted it to have a little bit of like a push and pull to it where it would
take a moment to kind of understand everything but from an emotional and energetic and design
perspective that you are actually drawn in and that's a pretty difficult thing to deliver
on when you have such a confined space.
In this process it was kind of strange because usually we do everything in-house and our
internal team is completely set up to help execute all of Marie’s like great, crazy
ideas, but this was really different for us because we had to team up with an external
team with our publisher and we didn't know how that was going to go.
I brought in ideas from me and my team.
Marie brought in ideas from her and her team, so I thought I was just going to come in and
present to Marie and I come in and the table was all laid out with ideas from Marie’s
amazing design team.
So I thought this could be really bad or really good, probably nowhere in between.
It's going to be one or the other.
It was all about having that trust between our teams that really led to us feeling like
we can hand over this incredible baby that Marie had been working on for two years at
that point to be like, all right, it's time to birth this thing.
Whenever you're throwing out ideas, you just have to put it all out there, even if it seems
crazy.
So I mean we had, we had a few things from the cover created out of like puzzle pieces
to make text out of like a maze.
I think Marie's arm coming out of like a giant pile of crumpled up paper.
It would...
We've, we went to some wild places.
The first time I saw rough sketches, I'm not gonna lie.
Basically my heart fell into my stomach cause I was like, oh no.
That was like the little fearful part of my brain talking.
But I had total faith that we will get there.
So once we got over the hump of sketches and first round designs, which did not feel like
us.
I went back and forth.
I had many conversations in my own head about whether or not I should be on the cover.
Rather than deciding in advance that we knew which direction was best, we gave ourselves
permission to go full steam ahead in both a text conceptual based cover and then a cover
that actually had me on it to see which one in practice was actually going to feel the
best.
And then we wound up going back one that we all collectively felt was the best.
It's her words, it's her brain, she's really magnetic and I wanted everyone to be drawn
in by what her message is and there was no way to separate Marie from the message.
At the end of the day, we could not have a cover that was just words.
Like it was Marie, it was her mantra, her message, her call to action.
She had brought in a mood board and one of the things on that mood board was a cover
from Vogue.
And it had Vogue, Vogue, Vogue repeated over a model, sort of twirling and dancing.
We really liked something about it.
To do something that is so unconventional but that's exactly who Marie is, what Marie
stands for and what she asks of all of us to stand up and do something that's unconventional
and I'm really taking a risk when it's needed because it speaks to your gut.
Everything is figureoutable.
This is an approach to life that can make you virtually unstoppable.
We rounded up a cover shoot in record time.
It was actually happening in the middle of our B-School launch.
We got this one day, we've got these number of outfits, and we need to nail the one shot,
which anyone who's ever take photographs knows you have to take hundreds, if not thousands
of images, in order to get that one where you know the body in the face and everything
is just emoting the exact type of vibe and feeling that you want to have on your cover
forever.
We went into fittings working with the great Elsa Isaac.
We wanted something totally different and so it was really cool to just experiment and
try these colors and pieces that we'd never tried before.
We started playing with colors and we started playing with jewelry and we started putting
those things together and we just let it all go at that point and started having a lot
of fun.
She'll put on something and you'll know.
Like you'll know like she's feeling this one and then she gives more to the camera.
So you kind of already know which one has the most chemistry out of the bunch.
You know when I got back to the office and was able to start looking through the photos
and it was a thousand plus amazing photographs.
This isn't even the design phase.
This is just culling the photos, which I was managed to cut down to only 300 amazing photos.
Before, you know, maybe we just need to go with a more conventional cover, this is just
maybe too challenging.
But this one kept coming back.
And then eventually after quite a lot of soul searching, Marie just put her foot down and
said, you know, this is really our cover and nobody here could really disagree with her
because well, when you look at it, you could see the power that it has.
Oh my goodness, when I finally saw the final cover, the one that we actually went with,
it was like, it was a full body YES.
I was like this is it, this is what this has to be.
It got me really pumped to take the book out to the world.
If you just wrote this down on a piece of paper, everything is figureoutable, that's
an incredible tool to answer.
It's about tenacity.
It's about creativity, it's about commitment.
How committed are you to making something happen?
It represents hope, right?
Because then you realize that, hey, okay this isn't the end.
And I think once you can tell your mind that it's not the end and that just opens up a
window and a life full of possibilities on how you can make it happen.
To me, it's a mindset and it's a way of going into this world knowing that you are capable
of anything you put your mind to, to creating a life that you want to have.
This is the one idea that I would want to leave behind because it has been so utterly
impactful in my life and in the lives of those I'd have an opportunity to share it with so
far.
You've got these awesome dreams in your heart that you want to see come to life and have
them live out to the world in a way that you're proud of.
You cannot rush the process.
It takes time.
It takes a team.
It takes lots of iterations.
It takes lots of kind of standing back and feeling things and then it takes kind of standing
up for your vision too and standing really confident in how you want to be perceived
and how you want your ideas and your messages to live out to the world and the impact you
want them to have.
So patience and also the power of your conviction for who you are and what you stand for.
I think those two things.
It's really important for every modern-day creative.