As Creative Director and leader of design, Kate is a creative force who ignites our team towards a collective vision. She leads from excitement, always, and she’s never too cool for the room. After beginning her creative career in print, she transitioned to agency work, then in-house at OpenTable and Simple Finance, where she led major rebranding projects.

In her own work, she’s deeply inspired by the work of Sister Corita Kent. She’s seen at least twenty seasons of reality tv series “Survivor,” has a knack for fixing up old houses, and aspires to one day actually love gardening.

Nick leads writing, strategy, and the studio’s jelly bean selection at Saint Friend. He worked agency-side at Wieden+Kennedy, NORTH, and Liquid before leading creative for brand teams at a nonprofit and Simple Finance.
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As an avid people-watcher, he loves finding common ground between people. Perhaps surprising for a former all-district tuba player, he finds inspiration in quiet places like museums, bookstores, and record shops. You can usually find him reading or writing poetry.

Riane is a double Aquarius, high glam dog mom to Finn, and lifelong fan of Dolly Parton. She grew up between the US and the land down under. When she’s not bringing sunshine to our small and mighty team with her whip-smart creative insights, she loves stirring a Negroni, cooking up a storm, and getting obsessed with her hobby of the month.

You’ll find Clarissa in the studio jamming to Joni Mitchell’s Blue or one of her many chaotic playlists. She’s a lifelong dancer and lover of reality tv dating shows who reads a lot of Mary Oliver (“she just gets it”). When she’s not hanging out with her beloved fifteen pound cat Kevin, she spends her free time lounging beside the river and searching for Portland’s best bar fries. Hailing from a California beach town, Clarissa’s sunny outlook keeps our team smiling.

As a former democratically-elected class clown, Ashley finds the humor in the horror and uses it to build bridges through her writing to better understand and connect with others. She finds both her joy and creative inspiration from time spent with friends (ideally on a porch with a glass of homemade lemonade), picking up some Linda Gregg, or turning on some Talking Heads. She defines her friendliness as a midwestern specialty— hailing from metro Detroit where she tends her forest of houseplants and collects enough snapshots of vanity plates to make a coffee table book.