Brand Journey— Bess Creator, Christy Mack’s, Story: New York Childhood (Part 1)
Christy credits where and how she was raised for shaping her earliest experiments in creativity and doing good; laying the groundwork for her love of artistic + humanistic branding and eventually Bess.
Christy describes her childhood growing up outside a tiny New York Hudson Valley town, “We lived in a small white house with black shutters next to a horse farm. Our house sat on a few acres with neighbors few and far between. My younger sister Jill and I were each other’s best friend and playmate. We filled our free days with creating. I realize now I learned how to develop my inner creative world and trust in it at an early age because of our endless escapades.”
Christy and Jill coined their favorite childhood pastime as “playing play.”
“Unbeknownst to us, what we were really doing was inventing and producing the kid equivalent of long running television series, movies, theater plays, and musical productions to fill our days,” Jill muses. “Because it was just the two of us we had to function as the screenwriters, set and costume designers, directors, actors, singers, dancers, and producers to pull it off. We would spend day after day, week after week, even months, conceiving our latest and greatest.”
Elaborate storylines would indeed go on, maybe even for a year if Christy and Jill were attached to the characters they invented. They turned the family compost pile, creek bed, small apple orchard, grassy lawn, country fields, and even tulip tree into performing stages. Christy and Jill had a captive audience in each other, their parents and adopted dog, Honey.
Jill gives us an indication of what you might expect when stopping by their childhood home when she reveals, “We also couldn’t pass up opportunities for sharing our creations. If you were invited to our house for dinner, a birthday party, Easter, baby shower, first communion, New Year’s Day, whatever, you bet you’d see a Christy and Jill performance.”
Christy elaborates on the connection between her childhood and current work when she says, “Brands are like characters, you have to define who they are and tell their story over time. You have to make them perform beautifully in the world and move their audience.” She continues, “Little did I know our ‘playing play’ was my earliest training for creating brands.”
Christy’s upbringing wasn’t only focused on creative play. When she popped up from playing, she took notice of the importance her middle class parents placed on looking out for others.
“Early on our parents made Jill and I aware that the playing field for people isn’t always level or fair,” she explains. “Our mom and dad modeled how to seek opportunities to support others and not just sit on the sidelines. They also taught us gestures big and small mattered, and that you didn’t need to have a lot yourself to begin giving.”
Christy goes on to describe some of the ways her parents influenced her philosophy on philanthropy, “I have memories, starting around 8 years old, of my parents giving away fruits and vegetables from our country gardens and clothing we outgrew or no longer needed to feed and clothe families in our community. I will never forget the day they gave our two-door, white Ford LTD with its vinyl navy blue roof to our school bus driver, Betty. The act of giving away something of such high value, and not expecting or asking for anything in return, to help a mom in need will stay with me forever. It led me to always think about those around me who have less, and how to use my position to support them.”
Doing good, inclusion instead of exclusion and creative exploration were strong threads of Christy’s upbringing; threads that would be woven into her future brand work post university and eventually into Bess.
