Blog

03/26/2019

Erin taps the creative energy of Seattle’s grey areas

By Katy Nally

Erin taps the creative energy of Seattle’s grey areas

What’s the worst that can happen? That six-word ethos has propelled Erin McCaul across careers, countries, and cliffsides until it landed her here at 2A as our consultant for web projects. As you might have gathered, Erin isn’t afraid of much. Like her sci-fi role model, Sarah Connor, she terminates challenges with her ability to see problems from all sides and turn up creative solutions.

The left side of the road

Just after college, Erin found herself on the other side of the Pacific, teaching English to a classroom of students in Japan. She didn’t speak Japanese, she didn’t know anyone in the rural town of Kunisaki and she had never driven on the left side of the road before. But none of that stopped her. She broke her students out of their shells, made friends with her neighbors, and developed an affinity for her egg-shaped car. She even successfully set up a wireless router relying only a manual in Japanese and her intuition.

The limitless grey areas

But she couldn’t stay away from the Pacific Northwest for long. See, Erin likes the grey areas in life (Seattle included) because they give her room to roam. She doesn’t like to be boxed in when it comes to problem solving because she enjoys exercising her curiosity and trying unexpected solutions. And Seattle’s tech industry was just the place for her grey-area approach to flourish. First at the SEO software company Moz, and now at 2A, Erin has unblocked developers to construct marketing assets and deploy them across channels. When problems arise, Erin gets a twinkle in her eye and calmly tells her crew, “this is just our chance to get creative.”

The granite way forward

While solutions to marketing challenges might be murky, the path forward looks crystal clear compared to the obscured, craggy route up a 15-pitch climb in Squamish, BC. That’s Erin’s happy place, and where you’ll find her on the weekends—with chalky hands atop giant granite boulders. With an outdoorsy spirit rooted in a what’s-the-worst-that-could-happen attitude, Erin crushes climbs, then tops it off with some trail running. And lucky for our clients, that boundless energy extends to their projects as well.

Need someone to think outside the box to solve your marketing challenges? Erin’s happy to wade through the muddy grey areas and dig up solutions.