“Focus on what you love, focus on what makes you happy. What makes you wake up in the morning?”
Kathryn Lawrie is the VP of Marketing at Springs Creative, and their newly spun-out company Springs Digital. She focuses on leads and revenue generation and handles corporate marketing and corporate communication for the company.
About
Kathryn Lawrie studied art at Winthrop University, with a double minor in art history and psychology. She originally planned to be an art therapist. After graduating, she moved to Columbia, where she worked retail at a jewelry store while learning from the jeweler behind the scenes. She spent months giving her resume to every arts-related employer she came across. Lawrie recalled, “To be quite honest, for a couple of months there, I was walking around town handing out my resume to every art gallery and museum and graphic design contact that I could make, and basically saying, ‘I have a degree in unemployment, can you help me?’” Her persistence paid off when one of her contacts helped her get a position at Scene Weaver, a subsidiary of Springs Creative,
Lawrie has been working at Springs Creative, across multiple positions, for eighteen years. She started out in product development in the graphics department, “really focused on the metadata and the tagging of all of the graphic files and how to resize and rescale things. Just maintaining that graphics archive.”
She branched out into marketing, and while keeping her “hand on the pulse” of product development, was able to improve her e-commerce skills, teach herself cinematography for marketing purposes, and take several trips to China while growing her department. Now, as VP of Marketing, she works with her content development teams and maintains communication between different segments of Springs Creative, and the newly spun-out company, Springs Digital.
When asked what skills young people aspiring to her role should acquire, Lawrie immediately answered, “I think soft skills are essential,” saying that they aren’t something taught in schools. She advises students to be their authentic selves, and “focus on what you love, focus on what makes you happy… what makes you wake up in the morning, and hone those skills.”
She also recommends students check out the designer-guided tours Springs offers of their textile archive, saying it’s “a great place to be inspired.” She promises that “it’s okay to be an aspiring artist,” and that students should never feel like they have a degree in unemployment like she did.
“Go for it,” she says. “Don’t let people shy you away from it.” She also says, “Springs Creative is always open to internships, and so anyone who’s in a creative field can definitely contact us with their resume and portfolio, and we could discuss opportunities for interning here at Springs.” To check out the work of the newly spun-off Springs Digital, follow this link: https://springs-digital.com/creative-services-1.
