The Cost of Care

I run a values-driven creative business inside an economic system that doesn’t seem to reward care, ethics, or vulnerability — the very things we try to center every day at Edelmade.

With our small team of four, we often talk about what it means to lead with care in our work. It’s not that we think other studios or leaders don’t care, it’s that the system we all operate within makes it incredibly difficult to practice care in a sustainable way. Even the most empathetic, well-intentioned people I know sometimes feel like they have to leave their empathy at the door when running a business. The system demands efficiency, speed, and profit; softness, slowness, and ethics rarely make the metrics.

How do you care deeply in a system that isn’t built for care?

For me, that question has been present since the very beginning. After graduating college, I jumped headfirst into a finance career at a Fortune 50 company. Over the next eight years, I learned the ins and outs of corporate life — just enough to keep climbing the ladder, but never enough to convince myself I belonged there. Each morning in a cubicle clad in grey upholstery, I’d flip open my Lenovo laptop and work through endless spreadsheets. It was stable, predictable, even “successful” by most measures. But most days, I felt like I was checking pieces of myself at the door just to get through it.

As I approached 30, it became unsustainable. The culture around me was clear: deliver more for less. Higher profit. Greater efficiency. Better operating metrics. But at what cost?

For me, the cost was fulfillment, creativity, and eventually, my sense of self. Over time, that hollowed out into a deeper unhappiness. Something had to give.

Starting Edelmade with my husband was, in many ways, an act of resistance. It was a way to carve out a small corner of the economy where we could prioritize care, creativity, and equity — not perfectly, not always easily, but intentionally. We knew we couldn’t change the system overnight, but we could design the conditions of our own work.

That’s what “the cost of care” means to me. It’s not about being better than anyone else. It’s about understanding the trade-offs, making sometimes difficult choices, and the ongoing practice of holding onto our humanity inside a system that doesn’t always leave room for it.

What Care Looks Like in Practice

Running a business with care is a series of choices, many of them uncomfortable. It means questioning the default settings of capitalism and deciding, over and over again, how we want to participate.

For us, care shows up in a several key ways:

1. How we pace our work

We don’t build timelines around “the fastest possible turnaround.” We build them around what allows us to think, iterate, and protect space for full lives outside of work. It doesn’t mean things move slowly — it means they move at a human pace, and we have a rule that we do not ever ask that our team work nights or weekends.

2. How we choose clients

Not every project is a fit. We look for partners who also care deeply about others and the impact their product, service or business is having on their community at large. We also look for those who value our process and our input, not just the end product. This sometimes means turning down lucrative opportunities — but we’ve found the right fits always lead to stronger work and happier clients.

3. How we treat our team

With just four of us, every person matters deeply. We encourage each other to bring our full selves to work — not just the polished, “professional” parts. That means making room for softness, vulnerability, and personal lives alongside the deadlines and deliverables.

4. How we scale (or don’t)

Growing a team means growing revenue — and in a business like ours, sales can be unpredictable. We never want to be in the position of laying someone off because a major client contract ended (something we see all too often in large agencies). That’s why we’ve chosen to scale slowly and intentionally: adding to our team only when we know salaries can be sustained, and building cash reserves to weather unexpected downturns.

5. How we think about profitability

This ties in with #4 — our choice to grow slowly and stay small. We value the intimacy of a tight-knit team and still doing the work. In general, within the business world, scaling is framed as the path to higher profits, but that usually means re-entering the capitalist meat grinder we set out to leave. For us, profit isn’t the first priority. Of course, being profitable is essential, but many other things — our people, the quality of our work, and our values — matter more.

None of these practices are perfect or fixed. They’re ongoing — and often challenging — negotiations with a system that wasn’t built to accommodate them. But together, they create something that feels sustainable and deeply fulfilling — something that allows us to keep creating, keep caring, and keep showing up.