Our Origin Story: How Bowda Started
I couldn't walk for six months, so I started a business.
I never set out to be an entrepreneur. I grew up in a military family and nobody ever said I had to join too, but a good, stable government job or the military was what got preached, practised, and modelled, and as a conscientious eldest daughter I of course aimed to follow the path. In 2008 I did what we do, with one small twist: there's a little bit of a rebel in me so I joined the Reserves part time instead of going Regular Force full time, to dip my toes in first, with the plan to go full time once I finished school. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to be, but I knew I was good at communications, had an eye for marketing, and was a certified chatty Cathy, so public affairs seemed like the natural course (even though at the time I couldn't have told you what public relations actually was). Public Affairs Officer was also the only communications or marketing role in the military, so that became the goal. I'm glad they had a word for it, because I didn't yet. I went to Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia, worked part time and summers in the Reserves to pay for it, and somehow made it through with no student debt. Plan A was always to become a Public Affairs Officer, and looking back now, I honestly don't know if that was what I wanted or if it was the stability, security, and family ties that came with it.
Before Bowda was Bowda
Somewhere in there I also got certified as a wedding planner, because I loved weddings, and not just the pretty parts but the coordination, the timelines, the hundred small decisions that add up to one beautiful day, and the fact that the whole job is really about making people feel something on purpose. I didn't have the language for it yet, but that's marketing, and I've been doing some version of it ever since.
Just as I had a plan, life did what it does. In 2011 I had the incredible opportunity to do a university exchange in Mexico, and as someone who had never really travelled, it was life-changing in every way. It's where I came across the word boda, Spanish for wedding, and figured that if you added a little bow you'd have the perfect brand for a wedding planner. It's also where, halfway through the semester, I fell and fractured my heel, badly, and let me tell you, experiencing medical care in a foreign country is something else. Three months later I was heading home in a cast with no plan.
When Plan A disappeared
I couldn't walk for over six months, rehab was a long road, and Plan A went out the window. I was already a reservist, but I was now pretty broken, with chronic issues that would only get worse with time, and going Regular Force wasn't an option anymore. My dad had been posted to Ottawa and I moved in with him because living alone in Halifax with one working foot wasn't happening, and neither was the kind of traditional agency job a communications degree usually leads to. But this was right when social media was on the rise and I was hooked. Combining my degree with a genuine thirst to learn everything about these new platforms, I saw an opportunity to help people and do something I loved from anywhere, even my dad's basement. Service clearly runs in my blood and if I couldn't serve my country full time, I could at least serve brands.
Bowda officially launched in 2013 and instead of making an excuse, I made a business.
Remote before remote was a thing
And because of all this, Bowda was remote before remote was a thing. Not as a perk or a policy, but because I physically couldn't get to an office and it turned out you don't need one to do this job. You need a laptop, a brain, and the occasional content day where everyone shows up in person with good lighting. I also knew that I wanted kids one day and that a business built to run from anywhere would bend around that a lot more gracefully than a commute would. So we were remote from day one, first for accessibility, then for flexibility, and we've always run lean because of it. I'm not going to pretend we saw 2020 coming, but when it hit, we didn't have to change a single thing about how we worked. We sadly watched agencies our size that had grown into office space close their door while we were able to keep going. Being built lean and remote from the start made us sustainable and that turned out to matter more.
Learning to call myself an entrepreneur
The hardest part of starting a business wasn't the work, it was actually the mindset. Nobody in my family had ever run a business and I had spent my whole life aiming at a job that came with a rank or a pension, so calling myself an entrepreneur felt like wearing someone else's uniform. There was no one to ask what a proposal should look like or how to price a month of work or whether it was normal to feel like a fraud every time an invoice went out. I learned by doing it wrong first, more than once, and I kept doing it because the alternative was going back to a version of work that no longer fit my body or my life.
For years I did both at once, uniform part time, including a stretch as a communications advisor with the Royal Canadian Navy advising senior leadership on how to communicate online, and Bowda in the margins, figuring out how to do the exact same thing for small businesses. It turns out it's the same job, just different-sized organizations with the same problem: people who do good work and can't quite say what they do. Eventually I dropped the other hats and went all in on Bowda. The team grew, the service list grew, and for a good stretch of years I ran the whole thing the way I'd built it, which is to say with me in the middle of everything because that's what worked when it was just me and I'd never stopped to change it.
Then I became a mother
Then in 2021 I had my first son and it stopped working overnight. I was suddenly trying to run a business I'd built as a single person while being a person who was no longer single in any sense of the word and the only way through was to get out of the weeds for real. That's when I started rebuilding Bowda so it could run on the team's effort instead of mine. It's also, if you want to know, the whole reason the Mother Founder Movement exists, but that's a different story.
The agency Bowda became
As Bowda grew, I didn't want to hire the way agencies usually hire which is to bring in junior people and push the work through them. I wanted senior people, working around real lives, because that's what I'd needed back on that couch. So that's what we built and it's still what Bowda is. A collective, not a hierarchy, where everyone on the team is a specialist who could run their own shop and has chosen to work this way instead. It's all women, plus one husband, who is also our COO and the reason anything ships on time, and it includes working parents, neurodivergent creatives, and people building real careers around real lives. This isn't a side note so much as the whole reason we're intentional about communication, flexibility, trust, and not selling people things they don't need. We work with businesses, brands, and nonprofits across Canada, from solo founders to national organizations, and the common thread is people doing meaningful work who want their marketing to reflect it. We start every project by understanding how they actually operate because that's the part marketing usually skips, and honestly, that's the wedding planner in me. You can't run the day until you know the people.
Thirteen years later
So that's the story. A wedding planner who never planned a wedding (other than her own), a reservist who never went Regular Force, and a word I wrote down in Mexico that somehow turned into thirteen years, a team I'm proud of, and a business that finally doesn't (usually) need me at 11pm.