“At Mungy, we’re here to partner with you and build a productive relationship, to put best practices to work for you and your audience. Our superpower is merging strategy and design to best present your brand to your market.”
Tom and Susanna Sharpe came to the Berkshires filled with specific intentions and open to a new path for their life as a couple and family.
Mungy (in Stockbridge) is a handcrafted full-service studio that offers “creative strategy and branding, all aspects of design and content creation, as well as ongoing brand management.” Starting with a truly family-inspired, home-grown business with Susanna creating and developing all of the digital designs and Tom creating and developing the business relationships, they have recently grown to a seven-person global team offering an innovative approach focused on “purposeful design that reflects the community and clients you serve.”
A partnership rooted in creativity and relationships
Coming from a long line of artists, Susanna’s creative passion is no surprise. Her Swedish grandparents owned a rug company, her mother studied fashion design in Paris and created amazing quilts, and her dad loved woodworking and other creative outlets. They were also entrepreneurs. “I didn’t really understand the traditional way of living,” she confides.
When she was 18, she moved to the States to live in and explore southern California with her aunt and uncle. That led to taking classes in graphic design at a local community college. By the time she was 22, she had become general manager at an Irish pub (where she and Tom met). In that role she worked with a website designer to build the company website. “I thought this is so cool,” she admits. “Pretty soon I was working with the designer and taking more classes. Naturally, I had a good eye.”
Tom grew up on Long Island, in a culture that revolved around “business, banking, and finance,” with the end goal being achieving a successful career in the city. “I remember feeling out of place,” he recalls, “being more motivated by what I wanted to do and where I wanted to live than by making money.” After college he moved to California, where he met Susanna and spent a year traveling the world. When it was time to ‘get a real job,’ he put his resume (which was all about traveling) on Craig’s List. John Reinhold, owner of Skyhook Stairs and Rails, read it and was intrigued enough to hire him—an opportunity he says gave him incredible business training and insights.
Berkshire beauty and community beckon
Both Susanna and Tom share a deep belief that the Berkshires are a wonderful place for starting a business. “Support from the general community and specifically from the business community is so strong,” Tom says, “and there is such an interesting mix of people from different places, all filled with worldly experience and all truly wanting others to succeed, to do well and thrive here.” “When we began attending networking events, there was a clear excitement,” Susanna adds. “It felt like a natural incubator, and there was genuine enthusiasm from people we didn’t even know as we got started.”
Given that Susanna is from New Zealand and Tom grew up on Long Island, you might wonder how they landed in Stockbridge in a small house and a growing business in their garage. It wasn’t a straight path. “We had moved here from San Diego in 2009 when our daughter Solana was born,” Susanna begins. Living so far away from both of our families, part of the motivation was getting closer to Tom’s family, but we also had a good friend in Great Barrington and were struck by what a beautiful place it was to raise a family.” Even before the post-COVID addition of more young families, the small community and rural nature of the Berkshires felt right. Plus, they both loved to hike.
A winding path to starting their own Berkshire company
During their first few years here, Tom held a couple of different jobs while Susanna did some freelance work on the side. “It was a super busy time for our family, with three kids under the age of six, all two years apart,” Susanna notes. When Tom’s former boss offered him an opportunity to come back to San Diego, integrate into the business (which had grown substantially), and see where it would lead, he took the bait—the professional opportunity to work directly with Reinhold, who had 20+ years of international business experience (which he freely shared with Tom) and promise of sunny weather (rather than perpetual mud season) being too good to pass up.
So they moved back to San Diego. “But it didn’t take long to realize that it wasn’t where we wanted to raise our kids,” Susanna says. Tom’s parents had always told him “Find something you love to do and go for it—don’t just settle for any job.” When Tom told his boss and mentor about his decision to return to the Berkshires, John added to that line of encouragement, saying “Focus on things you’re interested in, where you can apply your strengths and grow, and in this you’ll find something you’re passionate about.” “This helped me to think about possibilities in a different way. I didn’t have to necessarily find something that I was passionate about in every way but rather find a passion (building relationships and growing a business) and apply it to something,” Tom explains.
Taking a diversion to gain a broader perspective, they spent nine months in New Zealand with Susanna’s mom. “It was a good time for us to step back and get more intentional about the kind of life we wanted to create for ourselves and our family,” Susanna explains. That intentional time planted the seeds for more creativity and determination about choosing where they wanted to work from and how they wanted their work life to be—including when they wanted to take time off. “We’d always wanted to work for ourselves and began to think more seriously about how to make that a reality,” Tom adds.
Creating their own model and building their portfolio
“That was when the idea for a new business model struck them. They had tried selling and designing websites but now began imagining a subscription model for building websites and building clients. True to their family focus, they sat down with their kids (then 3, 5, and 7) and asked them where they wanted to live. “All three in an instant chose the Berkshires,” Susanna smiles. “That felt right to us, too,” Tom affirms. Fortunately, they had rented their home in Stockbridge, rather than selling, making the return a little easier.
You may wonder if Mungy (pronounced mung-hee) is a Te Reo Māori word (the other language spoken in New Zealand). It is not. Nor does it hold any meaning tied to solving problems related to web design. “It is actually the word our daughter Solana used to refer to watermelon, and we liked the way it sounds,” Susanna admits. It was chosen a bit randomly as they were coming up with a name for their LLC, but both felt good afterwards about the fact that it incorporated their kids into the business. “The desire to be purposeful about our life and take a risk to start our own company began with our family, and the name fittingly reminds us every day why we’re doing this,” Tom explains.
With a clearer sense of what they wanted to build but no portfolio to help them build it, they set out to find clients the old-fashioned way—one door and one client at a time. “Brian O’Rourke (of Brian O’Rourke Carpentry in Sandisfield) was my first sales meeting,” Tom explains, “and he immediately said ‘I’ll sign up!’” Tom took that as a sign that their plan was going to work. “From there I started driving to every town, stopping in every business—to sell our digital product!” he laughs, noting the irony and admitting “I didn’t know any other way to do it.”
That first client very quickly led to another client, and another. By 2019 they had reached a very high volume (around 30 clients, nearly all based in the Berkshires). “Wow, we’re really doing this,” they thought. But true to hiking and running a business, just as you reach a peak, you see the path and direction you’re heading more clearly. Susanna was starting to feel the creative burnout of the repetitive cycle: design, build, launch. In addition, to make ends meet as a start-up company, they were renting their house on Airbnb on weekends, so their family life was becoming more chaotic.
“We didn’t have many resources when we started, so we used our own savings to start the business,” Tom admits. “Instead of taking out a loan, we were shoe-stringing along, working 50 hours Monday to Thursday and spending Friday and Sunday cleaning and recleaning our house.” They began wondering, How are we going to build the company and keep Susanna’s creativity and our family life strong?
They realized that they needed a designated office space about that time (their house feeling smaller than ever with a growing business and three growing kids). “Whoever built our garage must have had a really small car,” Tom says. “We couldn’t even open our minivan doors.” Too small for a car, perhaps, but not for a business. They converted the garage to a studio in 2019, six months before the pandemic.
Pandemic painting and gardening inspire transition to a new model
Then COVID hit. “We were set up really well for being able to support our clients during COVID,” Tom states. “And we got even busier because having a digital presence became a necessity for most businesses. Our restaurant clients relied more than ever on their online presence.”
Susanna was spending a lot of time in their house and began using the house as a canvas. Her goal was to keep her creativity alive during the isolation and heightened business demands of the pandemic. But as she began planting beautiful gardens around the entrance to their home and painting murals on the interior walls she realized the importance of drawing people in—and applied those same creative principles to her digital design.
“I started reflecting on the websites we’d created and wanting to bring the real world into the digital world. Just as a physical space has a feel, a website has a feel,” she explains. This was a turning point for Mungy. “We were constantly adapting and trying new things, “ says Tom, “but now our central question became How can we offer more value to our clients? COVID gave us the time to dive deeper into that—to step back and ask ourselves If we continue down this path, is that where we want to go?”
Tom, who has always been very drawn to relationships with older people with more experience and wisdom, credits several local mentors who’ve shared advice about business and life over the years—David Curtis and four or five others. “I consistently meet with my friends and mentors to discuss ideas—and their insights play a significant role in my decision-making,” he acknowledges, adding that their parents have been a big support system, too. “At the same time, Susanna and I always default to what feels best to us,” he clarifies.
Running all areas of their lives in a meaningful way is the goal, and they do a lot of hiking and walking with the kids in order to reflect and strategize together. “We feel fortunate to have this unique partnership,” both agree. “Our strengths and weaknesses are very different from each other, but our core values are very aligned,” Tom shares.
Beyond the coffee meetings and walks, they rely on books and podcasts. Books like “Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage” and “Shoe Dog” (Phil Knight’s memoir); podcasts like NPR’s “How I Built It” with Guy Raz. (Those weekend trips down to Long Island to vacate their house provided plenty of listening time!) “We learned one or two things with every podcast and took those bits and applied them,” Tom notes.
Rather than hiring a consultant to guide them in their transition, they did an audit of their business themselves. “It was pretty simple,” Tom says. “First we looked at all of our clients and asked ourselves Are we providing great service and value? Followed by Are there any that don’t fit our new path? Then we looked at the numbers,” he adds, highlighting the fact that he loves creating spreadsheets and running different scenarios to make forecasts.
“Susanna is now able to approach new clients, engage in purposeful conversations, and create an experience about them but for their audience,” he acknowledges. “The website needs to represent Guido’s, for example, but the experience is built for their audience,” he emphasizes, adding “That’s meant a lot more upfront work but better results and a better experience for us and our clients for the long-term.”
An expanding global client market and creative team
“We’re in a good place right now,” Susanna shares. “We’ve made some big shifts toward making the business more sustainable, like expanding our clients outside the Berkshires and building our team so it’s not just a ‘bootstrapping couple’ operation.” Their team now includes a team of seven, with Susanna as Creative Director; Tom as Relationship Builder and Manager; Lucy (based in New Zealand) leading Branding, Web and Graphic Design; Denise (based in Portugal) as Webmaster and Designer; Jennie (hired initially through Berkshire Interns and now based in New York City) as Sales and Marketing Coordinator; Don as Lead Developer; and Ashley as Project Coordinator and Administrative Assistant.
Their capable team works with clients to help them define their brand and ensure it is authentic to them, relevant to their audience, and different from their competitors. The services they offer—from foundational brand voice and identity to websites, eCommerce, and brand management (all aspects of design and content creation) ensure that they’re “a creative partner that can meet you wherever you are in your journey, helping you become who you seek to become.”
“I don’t know what will happen in the future, given AI and all of the other changes that are impacting the market,” Tom relates, “but we’re very happy and excited about the transition we’ve made.” September has been a crazy month, with seven new leads already and a new website launch happening as you read this article. But this family-centered team has figured things out—thoughtfully, intentionally. Susanna’s creative, entrepreneurial background combined with Tom’s genuine love for getting to know people and building relationships are putting their company at the forefront of the digital marketing business here in the Berkshires.
“We really want to build on—and have a positive impact within—the Berkshire community,” Tom stresses, bringing things full circle. “By investing more time and energy upfront, we can help our clients better serve their clients.”
“When I was a kid, I always loved moving my bedroom furniture around,” he interjects. Susanna admits to being quite similar. “Neither of us like things to be static—whether it’s our living room furniture or our business life, we try to keep an open mind. Mungy has given us an amazing life in the Berkshires and the gift of time with our kids. If the path changes, that’s cool, too,” she adds.
Things are always changing, but Susanna and Tom—and Mungy—are on a good path and heading in the right direction.
