Today we’d like to introduce you to Anna Clark.
Hi Anna, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I’m in the business of storytelling, so when someone asks me about my story, my first thought is which one? There’s the version in my resume that looks like I had it figured out all along. And then there’s the backstory. Reflecting on that now, I have new appreciation for the doors that closed and windows that opened to bring me to this surprising new chapter in my career.
Going back to my college years, I struggled to nail down exactly what wanted to become, but I knew the business world would be the place to discover it. Management consulting proved to be an ideal launching pad with excellent training, global travel opportunities, and a chance to learn how organizations worked and how to improve them. During my five years in IT consulting and knowledge management, I was inspired by the continual push toward excellence and professional development, but I missed the sense of connection to culture and purpose. Starting my family prompted a shift to communication, where I discovered the best of both worlds—a career in which I could help CEOs, executives and entrepreneurs inspire performance while helping others use the power of storytelling to influence society.
Since 2005, I’ve partnered with clients in global corporations, universities, non-profits and startup ventures to create communication strategies and content to express core values, vision, identity, history, performance and sustainability. This work has allowed me to probe the minds of innovative thinkers and leaders. The people I interview or write for do not think in narrow or functional terms, but instead look at the world at a systems level. These are people who spend their free time exploring ways to solve societal problems and create a better future. Years of exposure to their expansive thinking has instilled in me a belief that each of us can use our life’s work or business to make an impact and build a legacy.
In 2019, an investor approached me about starting a business that could leverage my expertise to help families and organizations preserve their history and perpetuate their legacies. I was intrigued, so we decided to join forces and launch Heirloom Digital.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
No, but is life smooth for anyone? Each of us has our own unique challenges, and one of mine is that I’m an idealist. As a values-driven person, I jumped at the opportunity to use my storytelling skills and entrepreneurial spirit to help create more meaning in people’s lives. At the same time, launching a company with a social purpose doesn’t absolve me from needing to make it profitable.
And then there’s the challenge of building a new business during a pandemic, which hit only two months after we launched our website. Looking back on this now, I’m proud of what our team accomplished during our first year in business in the midst of a global crisis. Seeing the rapid and devastating loss of life from Covid-19—and with it, the loss of irretrievable family stories and memories—has strengthened our commitment to helping clients preserve their history.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Heirloom Digital?
Heirloom Digital is a full-service partner in history preservation and storytelling for families, founders and organizations. Our personalized, end-to-end service begins with digitizing and archiving important memories, and continues with professional storytelling, artful media production and timeless design.
While many people are content to believe that tucking precious pictures and documents away in the attic is preservation, doing that can increase the likelihood of those memories being thrown away, or at a minimum, never being fully valued. Key tenets of history preservation are access and usability, both of which are important for creating enduring value to others. If you don’t preserve meaningful memories in context and in formats that others can access and use, they are likely to be lost as time marches on, and as people move or pass away.
The beauty of starting with digitizing is that it’s a relatively inexpensive form of preservation. Another advantage is getting to relive special moments. Some people who use our service have shared what it was like to experience meaningful moments for the first time. As one client recently told us after her VHS transfer: “I cannot thank you enough for digitizing these videos. The video of my in-laws’ wedding was from 1964 in Germany and watching them get married brought a tear to my eye. It was like watching a real-life fairy tale. I never had the opportunity to meet my father-in-law whopassed before I started dating my husband, so watching him on video gave me a glimpse into his much younger days! I feel like we now have a treasured piece of our family’s history.” Testimonials such as this show that no act of memory-keeping is insignificant.
Thus far, our team has digitized thousands of items from photo memories to family heritage documentation. Clients also come to us to create heirloom-quality memory books to celebrate big birthdays, company anniversari
How do you think about luck?
The concept of luck has always perplexed me. When I was younger, I equated good luck with getting what you want. As I’ve matured, I’ve come to see luck as getting what you need, even when it may seem like not-so-good luck at the time. I could provide a lot of examples, but I’ll focus on the luck that brought me to this current stage in my career. In 2005, I made the decision to focus my career on furthering environmental sustainability. It took a series of unplanned events to open my eyes to broader outlets for my skills that could lead to more opportunity while still benefitting society. Today, I regard my commitment to conservation as more than a cause I promote or the service I provide. Conservation is equally impactful as a core value, both as a conscious consumer and in business as a founder.
In fact, understanding the benefits of conservation for future generations helped me appreciate the importance of preservation. This expansion in appreciation for what matters in life led me to my new mission to help others preserve what is dear to them—their memories, stories, heritage and history. In allowing my mission to evolve, I discovered an exciting new opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives. Getting back to the question of luck, time will tell if this evolution of my mission translates into a highly profitable business, a highly impactful one, or both. But already, I can see evidence that following my intuition brought good luck into my personal life.
An unexpected blessing of starting Heirloom Digital was having the freedom to spend quality time with my mother in her last year of life. She lost her battle with dementia on July 15, 2020. Prior to that, I saw this family heritage work as a way to help her remember her life. But after she was gone, I found great comfort in the fact that I had stored and organized her pictures in an archive. It made it easy for me to create a commemorative book that has become a cherished keepsake for my father, sister, aunt, and all of my mother’s grandkids. Looking back over her life in pictures helps me feels like she’s still with me, encouraging me as she always did—just as I hope to do for others.
While losing my mother was in no way lucky, seeing the trajectory of our lives intertwine in her final year in this very unique way makes me appreciate the serendipitous outcomes that can happen when we stay open to whatever life brings. Were it not for taking a chance to start this business, I may very well have missed sharing my mom’s final chapter, along with missing some key elements of our family history. I’m grateful that I took the time to capture the stories behind the pictures before it was too late. Now I’m committed to helping others do the same.
Contact Info:
- Email: anna.clark@heirloomdigital.com
- Website: www.heirloomdigital.com
- Instagram: heirloom.digital
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heirloomdigitalllc
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/annaclark
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxeLIcaT3ecdyjPq2_WzV3g?reload=9
Image Credits
Photos by Bethany Jones at Sojourner Creative
