Chelsea Matthews
Circle: Who is your clientele and how did you find that niche?
C: Lifestyle brands and products are our core which I think just felt like a really natural extension to my own personal interests. I’m truly motivated by brands—what they say, how they visually say it, why people gravitate to them—which I think stems back to personal interest in psychology and consumer behavior to some degree.
Circle: What’s your favorite part about Squarespace the website builder?
C: Sleek, beautiful templates that enable non-designers to feel like designers.
Circle: What do your clients think about the end product?
C: Most often, I hear about how user friendly the back end is for them to manage. That is always a huge challenge for any company when they’re getting a new website—actually learning how to manage and use the back end.
Circle: What led you to join Squarespace Circle?
C: One of our websites—the Another site, actually—was featured as an example for the Bend template. Because of that, it exposed us to a lot of amazing members of the Squarespace community, and ultimately landed us as a Circle member in the very early stages. I don’t think I fully realized what it meant to be a Circle member until I started to become privy to all the great insider intel you garner from forums and community updates.
“I realized that Squarespace was really the best solution for both what I do and for what a lot of the brands I work with do because of the level of design and taste.”
Circle: How do you engage with the Circle community?
C: I credit myself as a fly-on-the-wall within the Circle community, a total looky-loo gathering intel from designers and developers who are way better at what they do than I am. So with that said, I’m much more observant and look to the community to teach me by way of their questions and posts.
Circle: What Circle perks or resources do you use most and how do leverage them?
C: I think it’s two things. One is feeling like I’m an insider in the information I’m privy to (early releases or new products), and can then share with my clients. The other is my ability to learn from extremely creative and talented people sharing insights and asking questions to the community.
Circle: How do you leverage the 20% discount with your clients?
C: We like to pass it through to them as a value-add. It makes them feel special.
Circle: How do you manage to do so much when you have so many passion projects going on–your Shape Shift Report with creative insights, the Sessions podcast, and most recently your cafe, Highly Likely.
C: Every single one of my businesses were brought to life digitally thanks to Squarespace. When we first started, we were really focused on content development for social media. Then, we really brought in what we were doing to higher level brand campaigns which have taken us around the world at this point. What started as just me is now a little over, I think, 17 people.
Special thanks to Chelsea for sharing her story.
Find out more about Chelsea’s work on her website.
