TL;DR – Meredith Smith (she/her) is a writer and content strategist in Seattle, WA
The short of it is, Meredith’s superpower is storytelling. Since the aughts, Meredith has worked, designed, and written for the Web and adjacent platforms. With a background in linguistics, media, and business, Meredith is best known as a content strategist with an eye for story-driven content design that drives engagement. Her body of work lives at the intersection of marketing, product design, and user experience.
An alumna of the Hugo House in Seattle, WA, Meredith’s fiction and poetry, as well as entertainment and editorial work, has been seen in The Cryptonaturalist, The Gravity of the Thing, Tor.com, Bust Magazine, and elsewhere. Her projects have been covered favorably in Buzzfeed, Seattle Metropolitan, Now Smell This, Fragrantica, and beyond.
She recently completed a long form horror novel tentatively titled Unfamiliar Territory, a modern revival of The Blair Witch Project inspired by her own experience as a content creator on the Internet. She is the founder of Common Meter Press, a micro-press that seeks to elevate the analog zine and chapbook movement.
The whole story
Growing up in a rural community in the dustbowl region of Texas – and isolated from her peers due to a congenital heart defect which made her parents fearful that, if the wind knocked her over, it would kill her – Meredith fell in love with writing and music purely out of boredom and loneliness. It turned out she had something of a natural affinity for creativity. (Or maybe just a lot of free time.)
After failed attempts to sell her Daria scripts to MTV when she was still in Junior High, Meredith became the editor of her High School newspaper, literary magazine, and member of the poetry club. It was there that she blossomed as a writer, learned how to build her first Website and work with Adobe Creative Suite, and saw the beginnings of what would become a long career as a professional Elder Millennial.
An editor for the Texas Tech University Press handpicked Meredith out of the High School media trenches. At the press, she began building her marketing and design chops. Later, a theatre professor suggested her campus play reviews required for class were good enough for the student paper. It turned out, they were right. She continued to work for the student paper, radio station, and other student-led media organizations (albeit some of them, unsanctioned). A DJ and Webmaster for KTXT, she ran the grrl variety show and was a morning show host.
One night at a Kinko’s on the East side of town, Meredith discovered the underground movement of zines – kids making and distributing their own handmade books of poetry, personal stories, and comics. She was hooked, and started a zine distro and DIY press called Sweet Anthem Press. Meredith wrote more than a dozen zines and published chapbooks from her fellow poets in the English department in the early aughts. She found likeminded friends and built a community through post office boxes the world over.
After a pesky open heart surgery delayed her coursework about six months, Meredith spent a semester at the University of Washington to catch up to speed. In 2006, Meredith moved from Lubbock to Seattle permanently. She spent her days in tech news, indie radio, and media, and nights running a fragrance geek community on LiveJournal with an Internet friend she met while making zines years before. She began to develop her own perfumes, and another friend from the community who worked at a Big 5 fragrance house suggested they were good enough to sell. It turned out, they were right.
Sweet Anthem Perfumes was born in 2007. The perfume brand became an indie cult favorite by 2008. Her “excuse to have an eCommerce Website,” as she would call it, became her full-time job in 2010. With more than a handful of viral moments, the brand was often sold out in the pre-Instagram internet. Meredith launched a collection with Anthropologie. She dominated the “vegan perfume” and “Seattle perfume” SERPs pages. Publications from Seattle Metropolitan to Now Smell This to Ca Fleur Bon to Buzzfeed and more favorably covered Sweet Anthem’s seasonal fragrance releases. She launched one of the very first beauty subscription boxes, before BirchBox. Her fragrances could be found in stores from Seattle to Milan. At its height, Sweet Anthem boasted a 6-figure business with street retail in Seattle.
When Meredith found out she was pregnant in 2014, the doctors told her pregnancy might kill her. It turned out, they were wrong. But, in one of the most difficult decisions of her life, she chose to focus on motherhood and her health instead of the high-pressure job of running her beloved startup. The company was acquired by new ownership, and continues on in Portland, OR. today, where it enjoys better tacos.
In 2018, Meredith returned to the workforce. With a clean bill of health and a new stent to boot, Meredith put her parachute on and returned to the world of Web content. While she wildly switched industries from wellness into automotive, the brief remained the same: high quality Web content that met human people where they were (and searched). Her content quickly ranked at the tops of SERPs and in Google snippets. One former boss called her the “queen of localization.”
Now, Meredith is a highly sought after content strategist and creative director for digital platforms that support large and small businesses. In her copious free time, she does her best to participate in the local creative arts scene. As such, she also writes fiction, poetry, and music. She has launched Common Meter, a micro-press that seeks to elevate the analog zine and chapbook movement. Common Meter’s books can be found at Barnes and Noble and in indie bookstores across the U.S., including the famed Powell’s.
She has new writing forthcoming in a new regional anthology, and is planning to write a guide for the best public bathrooms in Seattle for parents.