Kathrine & Jeff here, two of pretti.cool’s founders. Now that we’re seven years in, we thought we’d finally give this newsletter thing a try, so here goes...something!

If you’re new here, you might not know that we started in the summer of 2017 as an excuse for a group of Houston creatives from various artistic disciplines and backgrounds to meet up on the regular and shoot the sh*t over beers. We even (almost) started a podcast called Three Beers Deep, because, well, obviously all of the good(?) ideas came once we were all...three beers in. Mind blowing, we know.

Eventually, our larger meetups narrowed to a group of seven regulars who each happened to have a creative practice under our names. If you’ve ever attempted the founder life, especially as an artist or designer, it’s well...hard. Especially if you’re an introvert who hates to self-promote and just assumes the work ought to speak for itself. So there we were, seven introverts essentially tired of all of the self promotion, looking for an outlet to feel less...alone? (Ouf, that sounds sad lol.)

After getting to know each other a bit better, we realized that with our powers combined (synergy!) we had a more diverse set of skills that might actually be worth putting to the test. Since we all had companies named after ourselves, we wanted to create something totally separate from anyone of us, something that could just flop — and it wouldn’t matter, since it wouldn’t have any of our names attached to it. The freedom to fail. 

Imagine that! Creating something fun, together, just because! With no one to stop us! What a dream! lol.

But then we needed all of the practical, logistical stuff figured out...like a name. Something that we could also get a website address and social media handles for. A lot of beer was drunk (drank?), and a lot of bad ideas were thrown out. And then *cue the music* somebody thought out loud, “I just want it to sound pretty cool, you know?” We all nodded in agreement. And then someone else said, “Well...can’t we just call it that — Pretty Cool?”

Initially, we all laughed, and said, nahhhh that’s dumb. But out of curiosity, we looked up if there was an available url. Of course it was taken, but pretticool[dot]com — using “pretty” with an “i” — was available, and we were still like...I don’t know, maybe. But then(!), someone saw that .cool extensions existed — did you know that seven years ago? We didn’t, and probably still wouldn’t have, had we not gone down this rabbit hole.

And that, kids, was how pretti.cool was born. We decided to keep the dot in our brand name, not only for consistency’s sake, but also because it was right amount of silly, like calling something the bomb dot com. We are all millennials(ish), so it felt appropriate.

Jeff and Kathrine at a holiday pop-up in 2017.

Consider this newsletter an invitation to the cool kids’ table — which, let’s be honest — didn’t include any of us in junior high or high school (except maybe Erick, one of our founders), because we were obviously too cool as the artsy weirdos to be invited. (Shout out to everyone else who spent their lunches in the art room eating with their teachers!)

But, seriously, being a little weird is what got us here. We’re going to use this newsletter to show more of what’s going on behind the scenes, offer unsolicited advice, and highlight some stuff we come across that (we think) is cool/weird/interesting.

Hope you enjoy!

Kathrine + Jeff Gilmer, co-founders