Margaret Kerr-Jarrett is a Co-Founder and Creative Director at Nihilo, a branding and packaging studio focused on spirits and consumer packaged goods.

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Where’s your hometown? And where do you live now?

I was born in Indianapolis, IN and now live in Columbus, OH. Though I spent over 10 years living and traveling abroad and am married to a Jamaican, I’m definitely a Midwesterner at heart. I like the big trees, the corn fields, and the open skies. 

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In a few sentences, describe what you do.

I am a co-founder of Nihilo, a branding agency that specializes in spirits and CPG. My business partner and I also co-founded a tequila called Casa Malka, and are working on another mystery spirit brand right now. Stay tuned.

“Nihilo” means “something from nothing,” and this is what we truly do best – create new brands from scratch alongside visionary founders. 

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How and where did you get your start? 

I was always going to be a poet. I can’t remember a time when I ever considered anything else. I was also always interested in business and entrepreneurship. When I realized academia wasn’t for me, I looked to the design world, which was full of artists making very cool and impactful commercial work. I realized that’s where I wanted to be writing, but I didn’t see many people doing what I wanted to do. 

I started partnering with design agencies — and pushing them to bring writing more to the forefront, as a tool that works synchronistically with design. It was great to a point, but I wanted more: more creative agency, and more of a conceptually-driven role in imagining what brands could be. That’s when I partnered with my co-founder Emunah Winer (an incredible designer and my best friend – yes, it can work!) to create Nihilo. 

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How does your background in and love for poetry impact your work? And do you have plans to lean into your poetry beyond Nihilo?

Poetry is craft. There are so many subtle details in a poem that elevate it from “good” to “great” - syntax, line breaks, form (or lack thereof), word choice, musicality…I could go on and on. Such is the same in design, or any artform really. What elevates design from “good” to “great” is often not the large and obvious things, it's the subtle details, the way certain words or images play to our memory structures or signal a category, the ability to practice restraint in the face of a culture that trends towards over-designing and over-explaining. It’s the ability to leave space for imagination, to conjure up an image that may superficially feel unrelated but that hits you right in the gut. It’s about empathy - not “purpose-driven” empathy that tries (most often unsuccessfully) to appeal to our altruism, but the kind of empathy that touches the parts of us we often ignore, that gives them space, that makes them feel seen.

I absolutely have plans to lean into my poetry. It’s actually very painful for me that it's not a regular part of my life – but with three young kids and a couple of businesses, I have had to put it in the waiting room for now. I know it will be ready for me when I am ready for it.

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Your studio, Nihilo, has a rare design + writing partnership. How did you and Emunah meet and how did your agency come to fruition?

We met while working at a small and non-professional agency in Jerusalem. It’s kind of a miracle we found each other. Despite working in different mediums, we approached our work in a very similar way. 

We took a big risk when we started our agency - we both had recently had our 3rd child and had no real experience working in-house at a proper agency or even running a business for that matter. I remember turning off my camera in the middle of client calls (at night, because we were 7 hours ahead of ET timezone at the time) to nurse my daughter. I was bleary-eyed and exhausted but also incredibly energized by this thing that felt so big and expansive and personal.

When we started Nihilo, we thought it was about design and writing working together. Now, several years later, we see that those are just the details of how it played out. 

Nihilo is really about creating expectation-defying concepts that can be translated across mediums. Our very first agency client was an in-home dialysis provider called Decibel. Everyone, including us and the client, thought we’d come up with a cool brand that looked and sounded really good. Instead, we decided to lean completely into empathy. “Kidney disease is hard. And there is hope.” is where it all began. We dove into Reddit and interviewed patients and made the entire brand by putting the “voice of customer” front and center:

“Watching the blood leave my body was scary at first”
“I want to walk my dogs in the snow”
“I want to father a child”

It was a very powerful project that the client (who was very brave) and their customers (also very brave) loved. It was also a project where the execution was more nuanced and pared back, letting the simple words lead in all of their vulnerability and power.

To this day our partnership is our greatest asset and blessing - it’s just a completely different experience co-creating with someone you trust completely. 

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Nihilo has a particular focus on packaging and CPG brands. Did you always know you wanted to work in that industry or did that focus occur organically?

We did always know we wanted to work in CPG, but it took us a while to get there. When most of our leads were tech companies, we took a gamble and made some projects that did not exist and put them out there into the ether. We subscribe to the idea that you should make what you want to make more of. 

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In Nihilo’s short life, you’ve managed to garner huge press, awards and speaking events. Do you have any advice for writers or designers looking to break out and get noticed?

Ignore all the advice you see out there. Be an artist who understands business and marketing, not the reverse. Look to culture, history, art, and literature as your inspiration, not other brands. Stop trying to impress other people; impress yourself. Find the people who are doing the kind of work you want to do and form relationships with them. An open canvas is not always the best way to work – having constraints will push you in directions that you never would have thought of on your own. 

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Can you tell us a little bit about the writing process at Nihilo. And how it might be different from other agencies?

At Nihilo, we always start with a core concept. That’s usually a sentence or two. From there, we go very very wide before narrowing in. Whether I personally am working on a project or we have another writer leading, we first like to see a breadth of work exploring a concept from every angle. Then we work as a team to narrow, refine, and explore how different pieces of writing can work together with the design as it grows and develops into a complete identity system. 

I truly have no idea what it’s like at other agencies, so I would not know how we compare. 

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You’ve always been vocal about being an Orthodox Jewish woman. How does your culture and religion impact or shape your creative process? (feel free to skip if you don’t want to speak to this)

My spiritual journey in life is certainly reflected in my creative journey and vice-versa. It would feel disingenuous to try to separate them. 

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What (or who) are your go-to’s for inspiration or trends that influence your work? Brands? Literature? Thought leaders?

Poetry is my first love and the first place I turn when I need to sort through my own thoughts and feelings. It's also a gateway to culture that helps me source inspiration for my work. Recently, I’ve also been finding a lot of good material in the world of psychology, particularly in attachment theory and other theories that attempt to explain how humans connect with each other and with themselves. We built one brand based on Joseph Campbell’s hero journey. 

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What are some skills beyond good writing that make the biggest difference in your work?

I love to learn new things. Mastering subject matter is a very large part of what we do and there is little I enjoy more than diving head first into new industries to learn absolutely everything I can. The ability to absorb and synthesize extremely varied subjects is a gift I don’t take for granted.

Finding the right people to work with is also a skill, albeit one that takes a ton of practice. Knowing how to find and work with good partners is the hardest and also the most gratifying part of what we do. That kind of collaboration - with each other as founders, with our design and writing partners, and with our clients – that’s the source of all the magic.

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What’s one thing you wish more people understood about our industry? What do you wish would change?

I wish more people understood that the goal is to be yourself - not to look like someone else. If brands would lean unabashedly into who they are and be willing to approach their branding with real bravery, we’d have a much less bland world out there. Trends or norms or expectations are irrelevant.

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Nihilo just launched a new cannabis brand called All Purpose Flower. Can you tell us more about the brief for the project and why it was something you wanted to do? (would love to showcase images from the project!)

The brief was to create a name and identity for a low-potency cannabis brand that “Midwestern moms” (AKA, us) would want to buy. The brand would be a throwback to the days of yore when we used to smoke schwag in the high school parking lot, or to put it simply, “when you could still smoke the whole joint.” With the legalization of cannabis came a massive wave of higher and higher potency products, and there is a significant and growing demand for a more mellow product.

We had so much fun naming this brand. Some of the options on the table were: Mothership, Promised Land, Toast, Potluck, Defacto…it took a couple of rounds to land on All Purpose Flower, which was perfect and completely spoke for itself. Definitely a magical moment when that one surfaced. 

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What do you hope people feel when they experience this brand? 

We want people to feel at home.  We want people to feel light. We want people to laugh. We want to touch that fine line between nostalgia and irreverence in a way that makes people smile. 

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Lastly, what’s next for Nihilo and where can people keep up with you?

We love working with founders - and we love being founders ourselves! We want more of our client relationships to feel like co-founder relationships and less to feel like “we hired you to make the brand” relationships. We don’t want to scale but do want to make even bigger, bolder work. We want to continue to help our clients reach higher levels of success, and faster. 

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