A Conversation With Nora Wolf and Kirsten Larson, Besties In Business Together
On balancing professional and personal relationships, making time for creative practices outside of work, and saying yes to projects
At the beginning of the first lockdown, longtime friends Nora Wolf and Kirsten Larson started Wolf Craft, a creative agency for businesses that aren't a good fit for traditional retainer PR services, often because of cost or content constraints. The two met when they were 19 years old at the Art Institute of Chicago, where Nora explored design, fashion, and video while Kirsten studied architecture. Nora now lives in Brooklyn, and Kirsten has lived permanently in Brazil since 2016.
In Honing Her Craft’s first dual interview—which was so much fun, by the way—Nora and Kirsten talk about the dynamics of being business partners and friends, challenging their beliefs around money, their creative extracurriculars, what makes them say yes or no to a project, and what they each value about one another.
Let’s start with some background info about your respective crafts and how you came to work together.
Nora: Once I graduated, I became a publicist and worked full time for four years at two PR agencies. At the last agency, I watched and thought, “I can definitely do what they are doing.” That was the beginning of Wolf PR, where I focus on the design industry. That includes furniture, textiles, interiors, architecture, and kind of anything that makes a space livable.
When the pandemic started and we were both a little freaked out, Kirsten and I collaborated on building a business around that community. I was going to ask Kirsten to do some social media stuff and then she called me back a day later and was like, why don’t I just come in as partner? I’ve never taken a business partner before. But they say you’re smart if you hire people who are smarter than you. I didn’t really hire Kirsten, but having the opportunity to be partners with her was a good move on my part.
Kirsten: Right after undergraduate school, I moved to Brazil for the first time. I was supposed to stay for a year and stayed for four years. Then I moved back to the U.S. in 2012 to go to graduate school for architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. The plan was always to move back to Brazil, so I’ve been living here permanently since 2016. I have an architecture firm that I founded here with a really good Brazilian friend. Over the course of the pandemic, she decided to totally change her life, move to the beach, and study and teach aikido on a more full-time basis. We still work on a few projects but have become much more selective. Meanwhile, my husband also got a 100-percent remote job. I’d been doing some work on and off with Nora on in-depth design research projects for years, so when she shared her idea, I was like, let’s make it a full business. And we hit the ground running.
How do you balance your professional relationship since you are such good friends?
Kirsten: Nora and I have known each other for 15 years. We met each other as RAs in college so we weren’t really working together, but we were on the same team even before we were friends. Part of both our personalities, and I think our friendship to begin with, is we’re both communicative. We were also clear on our long-term goals from very early on. Part of the reason I wanted to do architecture more as a hobby than a full profession is because my husband and I are in transition to wanting to buy a piece of land in a rural part of the country. Nora and I both want to have a work-life balance lifestyle where I can have a little mini farm and do ceramics, and she can live in Portugal six months out of the year. We obviously want to make money because everyone needs to make money to pay the bills, but we really talked through a lot of those personal goals in the beginning.
Nora: I think that’s right. I’d rather dissolve the business tomorrow than ruin our friendship. We did use a lawyer. She gave us a partnership agreement, and we added quite a few things that dove deep into family planning, sabbaticals, and what to do if someone is dissatisfied and wants to leave the company. That way, the hard conversations can happen in a way that’s not emotional; it’s just business because we talked about it well in advance. And then we don’t do this as often as we probably should, but we have feelings talks in addition to business talks. I think most relationships, not just business relationships, have issues because people don’t know how to talk about things and are anticipating the response to be very negative. We circumvented that whole stickiness by just talking about all the stuff before anything was bad. I don’t anticipate anything getting bad. It’s possible one or both of us might lose steam at some point and want a change, but that’s fine. Whatever. We’ll figure it out. We also know each other’s business. We’re in each other’s lives all the time so there aren’t too many surprises.
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How do you each think about the compensation for your work?
Kirsten: Nora and I are very different. I’ve always wanted my career to be my life’s work. That’s something I’m unlearning during the pandemic. Nora has always been very clear on how her job supports her life and passions. One thing we decided early on is that for the first two years of the business, we’re just going to split everything 50/50. We’ll reassess after two years. Because there’s so much that goes into building a business—maybe I’ll put in a few more hours, while Nora has a few more contacts—we just felt like that was the fair way to do it in the beginning. There could be a different split in the future.
Nora: I could talk for two and a half hours about how capitalism informs the choices I make and I wish it didn’t have to, but I don’t think that’s super useful. But compensation is necessary. Women don’t really ask for what they need or what they want or what they deserve or are paid properly. That’s something I still fight with to this day, but I’m trying to bring better habits into our relationships here. I think we also have the privilege of being in our 30s now. We have a little bit of savings. We have a little bit more ability to say no because we’ve worked for while. That gives us the opportunity to say yes to things we think will be a better investment of our time.
Does your creativity manifest outside of the workday?
Kirsten: Currently, the apartment that I own with my husband in São Paulo is getting remodeled. I got to design it. We’re having a baby in January, we both work from home, and we’re trying to save money because of wanting to buy a piece of land. I got to use a fair amount of my design chops and experience from designing residential spaces for the past five years to fit as much into a 68-square-meter (about 730 square feet), two-bedroom apartment. It should be done in December. I also started doing ceramics before the pandemic, so that’s been a really fun hobby. I’m very inspired by architecture and the different kinds of façade treatments on traditional housing in Brazil.
Nora: I really wanted to start doing ceramics too, not just because of Kirsten. I just wanted a studio to go to, but the pandemic took that away. They’re starting to do some in-person stuff, but I’m really wary of that even being fully vaccinated. I also love to do live drawing classes. I did some online, but it’s not really the same. When a naked person is smushed into a computer screen, it takes away a lot of the adventure of drawing a figure. My apartment is basically designed. I’m going to try to redo the kitchen. But I don’t own it so it’s not really the same adventure that Kirsten is going through. I just work out, go on hikes, read all the time, walk around the city, and see my friends. I don’t have a creative outlet right now, but I’m fine with that. Maybe I’ll get back to making at some point, but it feels hard to be stuck inside my apartment and make a mess.
Do either of you have big, long-term goals? Kirsten, I know you mentioned the farm.
Nora: I want to fully stop working in like, five years. And I’m not sure that’s totally possible, but it will for sure be in 10 years. I think it’s rude that we’re expected to work as hard as we do during the healthiest and the most mentally present years of our lives. We’re ostensibly given the years where we start falling apart to do what we want. It’s like, everyone approaches those years at a different mental and physical capacity. But I don’t really think I was put on this earth to just grind as hard as I’ve been grinding. I’m trying to exit as soon as possible from that. There are people who I would like to work with on projects that wouldn’t be financially motivated. It’s very hard to do good when you have rent to pay. You can contribute a little bit, lots of people do, there are ways around that. But I think it’s hard for me to do that work when I have bills.
Kirsten: I’m not in the position of being able to retire in 10 years because I came to Brazil and went to grad school. Nora got out of college and immediately started grinding and has lived in the same apartment for almost 15 years. She never moved into a bigger apartment just because she started to make more money. Nora has been really interested for a long time in understanding how to save money and how to invest money, and she has helped other women figure out their own retirement savings accounts. It’s always something she’s been really into for a long time.
So Nora. What’s a piece of advice that has shaped how you view investing?
Nora: I don’t know if I can say advice verbatim. A lot of what I’ve learned was through absorption and just being naturally curious. The thing that I will say about money in general is that it’s purposefully obfuscated by big money institutions. Investing is not really that hard. You can get into it and make it really complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. These financial institutions just use fancy words. To get started with investing, literally, just throw money at it, see what happens, and course correct. You can make a ton of mistakes before you’re in hot water. I didn’t wake up and know how to do this stuff. I look back at choices and was like well, at least I learned something from that. I think there’s just a lot of intimidation when it comes to investing and that’s a non-gendered thing. There’s no reason for it except that it’s a feature of the system.
What makes you say yes to a project now in your life?
Kirsten: We’re not yet at the two-year mark, so we’ve basically just been saying yes to anyone who will work with us because we’ve been learning so much and building services, whether it’s a course or strategic communications project, that are really helpful. So many creative businesses are just not that skilled at telling their story in a way that’s clear. For that part of the business, we’ve basically just been saying yes to everything. I think it’ll take a little bit longer to say no to people who are a pain to work with.
Nora: I’ll add that we’ll say yes if we think we can help them do the job and if they have realistic expectations for how we can help them. Like Kirsten said, we’re trying to build out the part of our business that’s product driven. It’s not always going to be a service. At that point, they will decide if they want to work with us or not.
If you run a product-based business and want to better understand how to get your work featured in holiday gift guides, sign up for Wolf Craft’s on-demand digital workshop all about pitching gift guides.
What’s something you each value about the other?
Kirsten: When it comes to work, I think we’re a good match because Nora is very deep in her skills and I’m a little bit more broad. Because she has been working in design PR for so long, she is so good at helping creatives, whether it’s a ceramicist or an industrial design firm, and identifying what the media wants from them and what they need to do in order to get their stories told. It feels like it’s almost second nature for her. She’s very good at translating a creative person’s brain and processing that into something that the media is interested in, which is ultimately what our business is about.
Nora: Kirsten grinds very hard. And I don’t know if it’s always the healthiest thing for her mentally, but she has pushed our business so that what I thought we’d get done in three and a half years is done in half that time. She’s also very respectful of boundaries. I don’t ever feel nervous to say I’m struggling and need to slow down. She’s able to work around my road blocks and understands that I’m a person with stuff going on. I’m very thankful for our ability to adapt to each other’s styles instead of getting frustrated by them. Also, she is the best researcher and explainer of information. Like Kirsten said, I have a deep knowledge of my field that’s very intuitive at this point after a thousand years of doing it. Kirsten jumps in with no knowledge and presents information in a way that our clients get inspired by. Her brain connects the dots in a really cool way.
Before you go…
Listen: Journalist Ann Friedman interviews fashion designer Miranda Bennett in an amazing podcast episode about body positivity and sustainability.
Comment: HHC readers are having a discussion about how to ask for more money. Add your tips to the thread.
Support: Jessica Lipsky, who was featured in HHC Vol. 3, is promoting her new book, It Ain’t Retro. Show our gal some support and order your copy today.
