Jessie McGuire: Don’t Let Anyone Put You in a Box
Jessie McGuire leads one of the industry’s few women-run agencies. Images: c/o ThoughtMatter
Jessie McGuire, the Managing Partner of ThoughtMatter, acknowledges that most people have not had a boss that looks like her: a five-foot Salvadoran-American with a husky, opinionated voice. She says that when she attends industry events, she goes to great lengths to avoid wearing all black, less fellow attendees think she works at the facility. (It’s happened more times that she can count.)
As the first-ever Managing Partner of the New York-based brand design studio, McGuire’s role makes ThoughtMatter one of the few women-run agencies, a sad reality that McGuire hopes to leverage in championing new perspectives on how to build and grow modern, culturally-resonant brands.
ThoughtMatter is known for socially conscious branding and design work, including the radical redesign of the US Constitution and a reframing of The Met Museum following the early Covid-19 wave, along with partnerships with Viacom and Procter & Gamble. Here, McGuire shares how she traveled from El Salvador, where she was born, to New York City, how she developed her leadership style and voice, and how she and her team are working to diversify the design and creative industries.
ThoughtMatter’s clients include The Met Museum and the Mama Foundation for the Arts in Harlem.
How did you get from El Salvador to New York City?
I was adopted. My mother was a single woman in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was not married and knew she wanted to adopt, which was hard because there were not many countries that would go through an adoption process with a single parent. But there were three countries in the middle of a civil war, including El Salvador. My mother went through quite the process, and eventually she was able to adopt me from El Salvador. When I was 22 months, I flew to Miami to meet my mom, and then we flew back to upstate New York where she lived.
ThoughtMatter designed the identity and website for World of Women, a Web3 DAO addressing gender and diversity disparity in cryptocurrency, inspired by their colorful NFT.
Tell us about your childhood.
My mom raised me as a single mom. She is an elementary school teacher and has been for 40 years. I was an only child, and she gave me everything. My mom has an identical twin sister and I grew up close to her with my aunt and uncle and their two boys who are like my brothers. It’s a close-knit family. My mom talks to her sister every day, and when I was growing up it was like I had two moms.
What led you from upstate New York to New York City?
The musical Rent. I grew up about 200 miles from New York City, just outside of Schenectady, and we went on a field trip to the city and saw Rent. It changed my life. I had never seen anything like it and realized New York City is where I needed to be. I told my mom I wanted to go to college in New York City, and she pushed me towards art school. I applied to all the big art schools and went to Pratt Institute because they offered more financial aid.
Every New Yorker has great stories about their early days. What do you remember from that time?
The diversity. I wrote an essay about this for grad school that, in New York City, I realized for the first time that I wasn't white. I was navigating this world as a Latina and at Pratt I found folks who wanted to celebrate that about me. I spent the next four years realizing there was so much more to the world that was outside of my own upstate New York upbringing,
I learned that visual communication and language have the ability to help people connect in that way. I talk about brands all the time, and I realized just how much of my world was shaped by the brands that I bought and that's when I knew I wanted to go into communications design and be a graphic designer. That’s when I learned the most about myself. I know people say that when you go to college, but I really did.
ThoughtMatter’s identity work for the Harvest in the Square is colorful as the signature cocktails.
Was there a particular moment that changed the arc of your career, or had a profound impact on it?
I have an obsessive personality. When I get into something, I’m going to really get into it. I was working at a design studio in South Norwalk, Connecticut, a long commute out of the Bronx and up and down the Merritt Parkway. On the commute, I listened to Debbie Millman’s Design Matters podcast and I became obsessed. I was also reading Ad Age and Adweek obsessively and Debbie posted she was teaching her first ever graduate program on branding. I had been looking at grad school at the time and, when Debbie announced her program, I applied sight unseen.
The acceptance letter changed the course of my career. It changed the way I look at design and see the power of design. And, with the program now in its 12th year, I’ve had the opportunity to hire their grads.
What lessons did you learn from Debbie that you still use and share with others today?
Something Debbie said that has always stuck with me is about when you’re interviewing with people or looking for a job, people will say they only have like 15 minutes or they only have this much money for the role, but it’s really never about time and money. If someone wants something and they’re excited about it and see value in it, they will always find the money and give you more time.
It seems counterintuitive because these are finite things. But I feel like that has driven me.
When I put together the deck about why I should be a partner at ThoughtMatter, I believed there was no ceiling for me. I just needed to ask for it. I think about this with people who are younger in their career and they think I don’t want to go outside my lane, or outside my box. But who has given you that box? Who put you in that lane?
You mentioned the deck you put together to become a partner at ThoughtMatter. What did you highlight and how did you make the case for becoming a partner?
Being creative is tough. You see things others don’t. You dream big. You think differently and are expected to do it all within the bounds someone else has defined. I don’t know where it comes from, but I have never just accepted someone else’s expectations of what I might accomplish. Yes, at times this has gotten me in trouble. But it has also taught me to keep pushing and be humble enough to admit when I was wrong and learn from mistakes. In the case of ThoughtMatter, I have always operated with an abundance mindset. Roles, titles and ways of operating are always up for discussion. After years of working at ThoughtMatter, our founder kept telling me to treat the studio like it was mine. I sat down and said: “Well ok, how do we actually make it mine, so that words follow actions?” I then approached this as we would a client – go wide, narrow-in and then define.
I did a proper immersion into what we’ve accomplished as a studio, looked at our industry landscape and did a few stakeholder interviews (i.e. coffee conversations with peers). I took the time to take stock of what we have accomplished as a studio over the past half decade. What clients have we worked with, what PR have we received, what impact have we had as a studio on communities, businesses and individuals. From this I defined our point of difference, our mission/purpose and looked at what this means for the clients we are focused on working with.
I have found when you are head down doing the work it is hard to also be tracking your accomplishments. Measuring progress is critical to sustained momentum. If you are starting a studio, acquiring a studio, or making a case for your next leadership role it is essential to know what drives you, what your goals are and how both align with a business need. What role are you filling? I believe ThoughtMatter is on a mission to use the power of design to address unmet needs in society. This drives me personally and this is what everyone in our studio has signed up for. We believe a sustainable design business can be built by taking on work worth doing.
I might have meant to create a deck to be passed around, but what I actually created was a vision no one else thought possible – a big dream and a new way of thinking about a design partnership. I’m thankful my business partner understands the creative mindset!
How have you found and defined your leadership style and voice?
Over time, I’ve tried to look at it as a design challenge. I am a formally trained graphic designer and people sometimes ask me if I miss designing. But I believe I am taking on my biggest design challenge yet – designing a Design Business for the 21st Century. As Managing Partner, I am working every day to create the conditions for creatives to thrive and to feel brave enough to design solutions that meet the moment. That challenge has defined my leadership style and voice, keeping me focused on guiding our team in thinking about our communities, as well as how we engage and design for the people that matter most.
2030 is right around the corner and I am on a mission to build, support and shape the branding agency of the future. I believe we must each push ourselves, the industry, and our clients to use the power of design to meet this moment. To do so, we must question our own practice – the role and responsibility of the designer. I believe we are agents of change, and this is what continues to guide me. I certainly don’t have all the answers and I know there is so much more to learn about finding my voice, empowering those around me and inspiring creatives. I am driven to not stop asking how we might build a practice that is open, generous, and in many ways radical in its pursuit of being interdisciplinary and intersectional. My lived experience has brought me to this moment of questioning the dynamics of power and privilege and I have this unique opportunity to change existing situations into preferred ones for those like me, who have questioned their right to belong in spaces that haven’t been designed for us. I feel I was born into this moment, to be here to ask the questions that might make people uncomfortable and, perhaps most importantly, not shy away from the answers. It is a big responsibility and certainly keeps me up at night, but it’s thrilling.
One of your responsibilities is to create the conditions for creative people to be successful. What do they need to do that?
The number one thing is for creatives to feel comfortable to be curious. You can have an amazing resume and wonderful talent and skills. But, if you don’t have passionate, relentless curiosity to keep asking questions and keep wanting to know what you could do better, it's not going to work out.
But you can’t just tell someone to be curious, or that they can be curious. It takes trust that you can actually experiment and take risks to ask a question that is silly or question why something has always been done that way. For us as a studio, we bring people in who want to share their stories with each other, our clients and vendors, and our partners. We strive to create a “brave space” for people to tell their stories. And it’s not just for our capital-C creatives. The person who leads our finances has to feel curious as well.
ThoughtMatter is one of the industry’s few women-run agencies. How are you–and how we can–diversify the design and creative industries?
It’s challenging. When you’re sitting on the outside of an industry or organization, it’s easy to say there’s a diversity problem, right? But when you’re in the hot seat hiring recruiters and motivating a team, it’s harder to figure out how to stop hiring people from the same private art schools.
For me, it’s about pushing our team to seek out new recruiters who can help us identify people who don’t fit the traditional patterns, or having our team attend conferences they might not have thought of attending. The biggest thing that I've learned is that we have to be relentless about it and not give up because it’s so easy to say it’s not my fault and follow the system already in place. You have to really reckon with the responsibility you’re taking on.
I’m at the top of the top and I’ve written that I have never seen anyone like me. When you are the first at something, there’s a lot of responsibility. You must think about how you open doors, pave the way, and bring people along. What if you are the first and you mess things up? If you don’t open the door, does that mean you’re the last?
When it comes to this challenge and others, too often women don’t have permission to fail, to try, to be different. We must be perfect and if we aren’t then we don’t matter. We can’t change minds, perceptions, or let alone hearts. Everything feels too high stakes. So at ThoughtMatter, we try to battle this by welcoming people to bring their whole selves to work and cultivating an environment of respect and representation where brands with purpose matter most. Our values are: We are not perfect. We will get better. We will design a world that reflects the world we want to live in. We create access and equity. We amplify voices. We foster community. We inspire curiosity. We create new ways to build trust. We put this on our website and think about it daily, in our hiring, talent retention, clients, and beyond.
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