Allison Kelley Joins the Dirigible Team

Meet Allie, our new Digital Content Designer!

Allie is our new Digital Content Designer, adding sparkle and shine to our visual marketing materials and social media for our clients.

Allie moved to Madison to work at Building Brave. Building Brave is a local startup founded by former candidate for Wisconsin governor Mary Burke, with the aim of building a mobile mentoring app for women. Building Brave was a huge shift for Allie—she’d previously worked as a marketing coordinator at a commercial real estate and development company in Rockford—and she loved the change of pace. From Building Brave, she was ready to try working in an agency environment, so she joined Pilch and Barnet as a marketing production coordinator.

In addition to her professional career in the digital content design arena, Allie freelances as a wedding photographer, and runs HeyAllie.com, a thrift shop fashion blog.

HeyAllie.com is the centerpiece of Allie’s personal and professional brand, chronicling her “journey of authenticity and creativity” since her high school days, when the blog was lovingly called ThreeDollarFashion.com. “That’s how I learned how to use WordPress,” Allie explains. “Both my parents are former or current agency owners. So when I was in high school, my dad sat me down and said if you want to do marketing communications, let’s set you up with a blog.”

The blog focuses on thrifting through the lens of “everything that sets my heart on fire: color, photography, art, and polka dots.” Allie’s obvious love and talent for both writing and thrifting intersect artfully on the blog. From early on, she says, she loved the idea of creating her own space on the internet.

It’s very creatively liberating to be in a role that’s like, hey I know you’re talented…let’s do the thing.

We’re so thrilled that Allie’s most recent move is to our team here at Dirigible Studio.

Allie was drawn to Dirigible for the opportunity to develop personally and creatively in the role of Digital Content Designer, and the chance to work with Dirigible’s diverse client base. Being able to work more closely with Dirigible’s Creative Director and Partner, Kindra Goehler, was also a huge pull for Allie. Kindra and Allie had worked together before, when Dirigible was doing the marketing for Building Brave.

“I’ve always been very inspired by Kindra, and looked up to her as a business owner,” Allie says. “When we worked together at Building Brave, she taught me about WordPress and how to use our site.”

The Building Brave site was built on one of Dirigible’s custom WordPress platforms, and to learn the ins and outs of it, Allie took a WordPress bootcamp with Kindra. During that process, Kindra ended up being one of the first people to look at Allie’s site when she launched it in 2017. Allie resonated with Kindra’s business philosophy and appreciated the kind of creative energy Kindra cultivated in the agency.

“I think because it’s such a huge shift from where I come from, working at a larger agency company and later at a nonprofit, it’s very creatively liberating to be in a role that’s like, hey I know you’re talented…let’s do the thing.”

Likewise, Kindra’s experience working with Allie at Building Brave was what made it clear to us that she’d be a good fit for our small, collaborative, creative team.

“Allie is creative, hard-working and intelligent, and she’s a huge asset for our clients. I’m so glad she decided to join Dirigible Studio, and I can’t wait to let her loose on some top-secret projects we have in the works!”

Kindra Goehler, Creative Director

I’m clearly not a very minimalist person.

There are so many things that make Allie excited to join the Dirigible team. “I feel that I have a major opportunity to develop personally in this role,” she says. There’s something to be said for working for a super small team, she says—it creates a need to cultivate everyone’s talents to their full capacity, even talents that might otherwise take a backseat. Having a small team creates the need to utilize everyone’s resources more fully.”

And she looks forward to the things she can bring to that team—both in the short run and the long run. “Being new and bringing a new set of eyes, it gives you kind of a fresh perspective—you’re able to bring fresh energy where it’s needed.”

“And I love to inject positivity and energy,” she says. “I’m clearly not a very minimalist person. I’m a ‘sparkle sprinkler.’”

Being in a tin tube is weird.

Just for fun, we asked Allie the obligatory “design-firm-named-after-an-airship” question. The question goes something like this:

“Do you have any notable experiences or associations with being in an airplane—or any other airborne vessel?…(Perhaps a dirigible?…)”

Her answer went a little bit like this:

“I vomit every time I fly on a plane. At first I thought it was motion sickness, but it’s very much anxiety. It started when I first went to Europe and experienced my first very bad episode with turbulence. Now, I usually have to be sedated on airplanes.”

The challenge? Allie is clearly very adventurous and wouldn’t want a fear of airplane travel to hold her back from going to all the places she wants to go in life. She once described her experience thrift shopping in Santiago, Chile as the time when she was the happiest. So she figured out a way to work with her fear.

“I listen to a lot of interviews with pilots that say ‘I feel safer when I fly than driving on a highway.’ So when I flew to Santiago and we hit turbulence, I was like ‘it’s just bumps on a highway.’ Being in a tin tube is weird.

With that experience behind her, the sky is now the limit: “My boyfriend has a lake cottage in East Troy, and there’s a skydiving place nearby, so I’ve thought about going. I think it would just be cool to do it, to overcome fears.”

Skydiving, flying in a tin tube, and joining in on this little airship we call Dirigible—they’re all things that call for overcoming fears. We’re so excited to have Allie on the Dirigible team, and one of the many reasons is that she’s clearly committed to pushing past barriers, charging ahead, and overcoming fears. Hey, Allie—welcome to Dirigible!