How This Entrepreneur Created A Work Culture Around Mental Wellness

Monet Bush is a mother, business owner, and mental health advocate. She is the creator of Earth & Olive, a marketing firm that markets and brands for the wellness world, specializing in companies and organizations that want to make the world a better place. I spoke with her about her career journey and to learn more about how the company builds wellness into its own culture. 

Jess Cording: What is wellness design?

Monet Bush: It’s actually a term that we made up! Wellness design mixes graphic design, marketing—everything that we do at Earth and Olive within the wellness world. We like to make sure that people know what types of clients we’re trying to attract.

Cording: What inspired you to do this work?  

Bush: I started out in corporate design, working with all types of clients, and throughout those opportunities, I got to work with some wellness brands and health-focused organizations. Just seeing how marketing and graphic design could align with people that these brands were trying to help and reach felt so much more fulfilling. Knowing I had the tools to help reach people and align them with products that could actually help them long-term was where that switch came and how I got into the wellness side of things. 

Cording: What is your process like for working with clients?

Bush: We offer full-service branding and upkeep services like social media marketing and brand application. A new branding project always starts with understanding who our client wants to get in front of and aligns with their overall branding ideas. The branding process is collaborative—we join a client’s needs and wants with our knowledge of how they can reach their goals. We help you make sure they’re landing on solid ground with all the tools and hands on deck to keep them moving forward. There is a pre-design phase, a design phase, and a post-production phase. We use our design and marketing knowledge to create solutions that resonate and surge client retention and sales based on merging these outcomes.

Cording: What inspired you to found your own company? 

Bush: I originally started a company called Modern Monet. I was just taking whatever work I could get to make sure I could support myself on my own so I didn’t fail. I worked on that brand for about seven years and through that, I went on a path to healing, understanding my value and my worth. I also started better understanding the needs of others around me. Like when they’re talking to me and telling me what they want, seeing if our values aligned, right? For me, as I started to choose who I was working with, it always ended up being wellness clients. That’s when I knew I could pivot. We’re not trees—we can move, get up, change, grow. So I did a rebrand and within two years I had surpassed the sales that I made in seven years of working in this space that didn’t align with who I was becoming as I leaned into uncovering my true values, what’s always been in there. So that’s how Earth & Olive was born.

Cording: You also make wellness and self-care part of the company culture. Can you tell us about that? 

Bush: My own mental health requires a lot of pivoting, screening, assessing what I need and doing that so that I can create the best work possible. I was not able to do that when working in spaces where they don’t work like that, which is fine, but I had to realize I didn’t need to fit this mold to be successful. Learning that really helped me define my boundaries. I could say, this doesn’t work for me, so what does? When I wrote those things down, it pointed straight to entrepreneurship, which is not, to say, easy, or that it’s always going to be on your schedule, but you do get a better handle on understanding that you get to build something that is tailored to what your goals are.

That was really powerful for me. From growing up in between overseas and the States, I also realized there was this hustle culture here that drives people into the ground. At first I had it drilled into my head that was how to survive here but then realized it’s not for me. Taking mental health days, that’s something huge for my company. Anybody that works with us as a contractor or full-time has unlimited days. We make sure that our work is done, but you don’t have to work in certain time limits, unless there’s a meeting or something like that, and if you do need someone to cover for you, you can do that without us looking sideways. The culture creates a safe environment for someone with mental health issues that are known or unknown.