Hi. I’m Monica.

Creative director for two sustainable fashion brands.

Principal Product designer for Everyday Health apps at Ziff Davis.

Life-long learner and adventurer full of love and curiosity about people and the planet.

Certified life coach with the focus on life transitions.

Going through life transitions and interested in life coaching? Schedule a 30-min intro chat with me to see if we are a good fit for each other.

Curious how it all started?

A snapshot of my life experience and life transitions

I’m a Creative director and a Product designer but first and foremost, a life-long learner and an adventurer full of love and curiosity. My passion for sustainable fashion began when I learned about the true impact of the fast fashion industry in 2020. I created two eco fashion brands with the same mission - empower fashion consumers to express themselves while doing more with less clothing. One is an eco fashion styling blog called Sparkpick that curates looks with the garments from trusted sustainable fashion brands. Another brand is SPARK + REBEL, a unisex modular fashion brand. I’m also a Product designer for a digital art marketplace, and my new passions are life coaching and art curation. I’m a grateful mom of four kiddos, and together with my wife Helen we moved to San Diego from Silicon Valley in 2022.

I wanted to share my story not because I think I’ve figured it all out. I still struggle with money, I don't get enough exercise, I binge shop and I don’t know where I would be without therapy. Like many female entrepreneurs, there are gremlins in my head telling me that I’m not enough and that what I’m doing is impossible. I find it challenging to be the mother I want to be while starting a business with a full time job and online courses.

My journey in the US has been quite a ride. My career began with double waitressing in San Francisco (which ended with a serious diagnosis that I’m still living with today), surviving a shady New York neighborhood while trying to escape from a toxic marriage, grinding through a job with a five hour commute for five long years, and crying over four hundred rejection letters before I could switch to a career that offered more than paying the bill. My current businesses are fueled by passion, not by return on investment. 

There are times I wished life wasn’t so demanding, but you either let life tell you who you are, or you can let life show you who you are.

My journey so far has revealed much about myself, but I’m just getting started. As a UX designer, I can honestly say that my life has been the most amazing user experience I’ve ever had.

My story started in Eastern Europe, in the storied city of Minsk. I entered this world at a time of global transitions, which became a recurring motif in both of my personal and professional lives ever since (both driving me and driving me nuts). The infamous Chernobyl disaster, with Belarus being severely impacted, happened just a month prior to my birth in March 1986. The collapse of the USSR followed in five short years, bringing drastic changes to every aspect of life. In order to survive the ensuing political and economic transition, the entire society had to adapt to a set of new beliefs.

One of those beliefs was particularly challenging for me. Despite the increasing power of women in the society after World Word II, we are still expected to stay in the background. Can you guess what my grandma used to say back then to “motivate” me to study well? That I will get more chances to find a man who will be kind enough to marry me, and after that all I should care about is how to cook well and manage the house. Oh, and my favorite one: “And if he cheats, well, everyone does. Just pretend nothing happened and move on. Hang on to your man because you are nothing without him”.

This constantly reinforced misogynistic narrative did motivate me, but perhaps did not have the intended effect.

At the age of ten, having traveled to Europe and experienced a deep cultural shock, I promised myself that I would live abroad, where I could become a woman who can make meaningful choices, and where I could become a woman with both a loving family and a career that fully engages me. 

I’ve always been passionate about fashion. I loved digging in grandma’s clothes in the attic and remaking them, sewing clothing and dolls, making beaded jewelry and crochet tops. In fact, my second business (the first one was gathering, drying and selling medicinal herbs to the local pharmacy) was making sequin appliques on denim. It proved to be popular among high school girls and left me with a lifelong love for sequins. At the age of eleven, I started experimenting with transformable fashion.

But back then, aspiration for a  career in fashion and art elicited responses like “are you kidding me? You want to be a starving artist?”. So, I packed a small bag and went abroad to Moscow to study journalism and PR, which seemed to be the most creative option available considering my passion for writing. I was 18, alone in the big city, confused but with a couple good new friends to share this confusion with. And I really loved writing.

After three eventful years in Moscow and two hundred books on journalism later, my adventure took me to the other side of the world - San Francisco.

As exciting and fun as this ride seemed in the beginning for a 20-year old immigrant with $1000 in the bank, it turned out to be quite challenging at times. In pursuit of financial stability and thrilled by the idea of being a psychiatrist (“Basic Instinct” and Sharon Stone are to blame), I started studying psychology. Trying to make a living at the same time, I spent my first few years in the US waiting tables, often with double shifts. As someone who consistently achieved good grades all through school, there were times I felt humiliated and ashamed of waitressing, but now I see this experience has shaped me into who I am today.

My twenties took me even on a wilder ride. Combining two low paid jobs and studying organic chemistry at night was exhausting and impossible. Exhaustion and emerging drinking habits, a serious health problem, a toxic marriage and an unexpected pregnancy rapidly led to total break in career and education.

Emotionally beaten down and facing substantial medical expenses with no savings, I started questioning the entire concept of the American Dream I came here to chase. 

It was at this lowest point that I was offered my first full-time tech job in Silicon Valley. With the enormous support of my close friends who believed in me, I managed to get back on my feet again. I spent the following eight years in engineering working on interesting products and projects of which I’m proud of, but it bothered me that the job itself had little room for creativity. So I started looking for this creativity elsewhere - in art - and discovered art direction, fashion styling and filmmaking, which I did for a few years as a side hustle.

After a few years, I decided to take a leap of faith and fully transition into the world of design and art. By then I’d married Helen, the love of my life, and we had our first child together, Marcus. Two years later we took on the challenge to have a second child, possibly as the result of sleep exhaustion. Unexpectedly, this was when creativity really entered my life. When I got pregnant with our daughter Alice, I started having this almost physical urge to paint and to do fashion again. Someone recommended an art teacher, Larisa Zaiko, with experience in both art and fashion. Larisa not only taught me art and sewing but more importantly showed me that artists are not born but made and that anyone can learn to be an artist, just like we learn any other skill. I decided to go back to school and study graphic design and UX design at an evening school at UC Berkeley Extension.

My classmates were amazed that I made it to the final design class straight from the hospital, two days after I had my fourth baby. I was determined to begin my career as a creative professional.

Two years, four hundred job applications, and a significant decrease in self-confidence later, I was finally able to transition to product design and started working on a VR art project at Google in 2018. It was my dream job and it allowed me to begin my design career.

Everything changed in 2020, but it wasn’t just Covid for me. I watched a documentary called “The True Cost” where I learned about the true impact of the fashion industry. How was it that I had never heard the fact that the fashion industry is comparable to the oil industry in terms of its pollution? That there are children working in the garment factories for as little as a couple of dollars a day? This documentary opened my eyes to the skeletons in my own closet as a consumer and forced me to confront the shopping addiction I’ve developed after leaving Moscow.

Even though I had virtually no time at my disposal between my full time job and my young children, my training in journalism cried out for an outlet.

I realized that it’s not just about fashion, it is about the Art for Change movement that I am passionate about.

It’s about claiming my right to shine as a woman - something I promised that little version of myself a long time ago. Blogging seemed to be a good way to start a journey into sustainable fashion and art. With the support of my best friend Ksu, in 2020, we opened our own first small and very slow business - an eco fashion blog Sparkpick. Our mission was to help fashion consumers “spark sustainably”, which meant to curate looks with the garments from trusted sustainable fashion brands. 

Running Sparkpick has been an amazing experience and I continue to learn from the journey. We are a very close knit team united by the idea of sustainable consumption, personal styling, and art for change. Has this business been profitable? Nope. However, I’m fine even if it never becomes profitable, because it means more to me than a business. I believe in its potential for creating positive change in our society, however small. Working on a blog and being around the eco fashion buzz has also opened the doors to sustainable fashion and digital fashion. 

The “child” brand of Sparkpick - SPARK + REBEL - was created in 2022 based on the concept that we developed when working on the blog DIY content. SPARK + REBEL is a modular unisex sustainable fashion brand that lets us do more with less clothing.

We started with a digital collection on DressX (a digital fashion marketplace) that featured eight admiral jackets. We are now working on our debut collection of physical modular eco clothing which is planned to be launched on Etsy early around Christmas 2023. Garments in this collection are vegan and made from organic cactus leather we’ve been experimenting with. Learn more about the SPARK + REBEL here.

Both businesses are progressing steadily and I prefer to view them as a hobby and not a job. I found when I focus on what I’m doing in the present moment, there is a space of resourcefulness and ease that assures me everything else will come when the time is right. Besides, I’ve been really enjoying my Product design job at SuperRare on a mission to democratize the art market.

I’ve come to think of myself as a successful individual not because of my education attainment or professional achievements - those are just trophies my perfectionism had driven me to get.

Success to me is no longer measured in grades or money but rather by reaching a certain level of awareness and in acting upon this awareness.

It can be as simple as being grateful for another day we get to wake up in the morning and to live as big as we want to be.

Climate change is a serious crisis for humanity, but it is also an opportunity for us to evolve beyond the 19th century industrial mindset. I believe that sustainable fashion is my way to contribute and be part of the solution.

Love, Monica ❤