Life went on, we kept working various jobs, some good and some not. Matt successfully helped open a restaurant in a haunted mansion. Beau started more seriously honing in on his love of interior design with projects around our house and for local clients, and began managing an art gallery in the Garden District. We adopted the light of our literal lives, a 6-pound angel fur baby named Fox, who still makes our hearts melt every morning when he does his in-bed stretches and every evening when he falls asleep on whichever one of our limbs is the most still.

We continued making this blog a thing and posting about our daily - often mundane - lives. Sometime in the beginning of 2016 we started getting actual work through this site and for other partner companies. At first it was trickling in, and then like a very fortunate avalanche our schedule was filled with creative tasks and photoshoots and planning and trying to organize everything. There was a point at which we looked at our checking account and realized through the blog alone we had enough money to live on (scarcely) for maybe a few months. Beau quit his gallery job, Matt followed suit three months later. We had a very modest sum in our checking account and thought it was an OK idea to celebrate our new self-employed freedom by taking a month-long road trip across the country, from New Orleans to Los Angeles and back. It was 2016. It was a risk. It was dumb. It was very fun.

We didn't know it then but things would actually turn out OK. We continued getting work, and took on jobs for everything from food photography to, at one point, designing a full six-unit apartment complex. We learned how to use our accounting software (kind of ) and how to confidently be our own bosses and know our own value and along the way developed relationships with many recognizable brands and the people who keep them running. It was a whirlwind, and we learned more in that first year of freelancing than we probably did in our entire time in college (heh, sorry @ college).