Piera Gelardi reflects on how embracing playfulness, curiosity, and creative experimentation transformed her life—from co-founding Refinery29 to overcoming burnout—and argues that play is an essential practice for building resilience, connection, and innovation in adulthood.
Piera Gelardi is a creative entrepreneur, writer, New York Times bestselling author, and co-founder of Refinery29, the media company that helped redefine digital media for a generation of women. She joins to discuss her new book, The Playful Way, which explores how play, curiosity, and creativity can help us navigate work, relationships, and everyday life.
Piera Gelardi:
All of a sudden, I heard this clinking sound, and I looked down at my feet, and there was a message in a bottle.
Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, a conversation with Piera Gelardi about the important role of playfulness in our lives.
Piera Gelardi:
Playfulness is a practice. It’s a muscle that you can develop if you want to.
Debbie Millman:
Piera Gelardi is a creative entrepreneur, a writer, a New York Times bestselling author, and the co-founder of Refinery29, the groundbreaking media company that helped redefine how an entire generation of online readers engaged with style, culture, money, identity, and power. Raised on the coast of Maine, Piera grew up in a family that treated imagination as part of everyday life, a sensibility that would later shape everything from Refinery29 to her newest work exploring creativity, connection, and play. Her brand-new book, The Playful Way: Creativity, Connection, and Joy Through Everyday Moments of Play: The Adult’s Guide to Unlocking Innovation, Stronger Relationships, and Better Health, examines how and why playfulness is a source of resilience, curiosity, and experimentation in an increasingly anxious and performance-driven world.
Piera Gelardi, welcome to Design Matters.
Piera Gelardi:
Thanks for having me.
Debbie Millman:
Piera, you grew up in a small town on the coast of Maine, as I said in my intro, in a house where ideas were treated almost like living things and dinner conversations often became brainstorms. A casual thought like, “What if we started a kid’s karaoke club?” would become an hour of naming, strategy, and possibility. Is it true you named your karaoke initiative Kidioke?
Piera Gelardi:
Kidioke.
Debbie Millman:
Kidi…oke? Kidioki? I mean, is it true?
Piera Gelardi:
That was a name my dad came up with. He’s an incredible namer, and I think it runs in the family because we practice a lot. We do a lot of pun games, a lot of naming. And it’s actually really fun because now my daughter and I also do these kinds of brainstorms. So this weekend we were on the beach in Maine, and she was brainstorming an idea for a haunted house called Haunt You for Years.
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Piera Gelardi:
I—
Debbie Millman:
Guess the—
Piera Gelardi:
Genetics—
Debbie Millman:
—are strong, because these names are really good. Kidioke. That’s a strong kid’s brand name.
Piera Gelardi:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Your father was an entrepreneur and an engineer. Your mother was a social worker, an artist, a gardener, and someone deeply rooted in care and community. Growing up between invention and compassion, how did each shape the way you moved through the world at that time?
Piera Gelardi:
Yeah, my parents shaped me in ways that I’m still uncovering. And I think with my dad—I grew up, he was an entrepreneur. He worked a lot. He was away a lot for work, but when he was home, he really prioritized play and creativity with us. So one of my favorite activities was he and I—we did a dollhouse from scratch, and we wired it with electricity. We made miniature books, and we would find things in the recycling bin and turn them into furniture. So we’d take a toothpaste cap and make it into a lampshade. Of course. And so he really showed me that sort of blend of work and play is really vital and really alive, and that it’s important for us to play into adulthood. And he has such an experimental and curious mind, so that really shaped me. And then my mom was someone who was a social worker and very rooted in care and community. She’s the kind of person that brings you a pot of soup if you’re sick. And with her, I think what shaped me the most was her obsession with the dialectic. So the idea that things can be both. And she has children’s eyes—like, eyes of wonder—but she’s also someone who grew up with a lot of trauma and worked with people who were working through a lot of trauma. And so that really shaped me: the way that she could hold two truths that felt dialectically opposed. Also the way that she really used that sort of wonder and curiosity and playfulness to move through the world and to continue to grow and move through hard things.
Debbie Millman:
One of your earliest forms of play was beachcombing along the Maine coastline, and you described learning to find treasure where others saw debris. How early did you begin training yourself to look differently, or was that something that just came really naturally to you?
Piera Gelardi:
I think that practice was almost like my childhood meditation. I had a lot of time to myself when I was a kid, and so I would walk on the beach and look for little glimpses of colored glass or rope from a lobster trap—just anything that caught my eye. So I do think that really trained me from a very early age to be looking for wonder, to be looking around me at all times. And now, as an adult, I live in New York—obviously a very different environment—but I still have that practice of every day I look to see things I haven’t seen on my block. There’s always something new to find, even in a one-block radius around my house. And so I think that just always keeps me engaged. It keeps me feeling like the world—things are changing, I’m moving forward—and I often find a lot of inspiration and ideas from that practice of noticing.
Debbie Millman:
At three years old, you stated you wanted to be a birdie, a ballerina, get divorced, and live in Connecticut. Tell us about those very specific aspirations.
Piera Gelardi:
Yes. So, yeah, when I was three, I was just so smitten with my Aunt Judy, who was divorced and lived in Connecticut and is an amazing artist and just a fantastic, fabulous person. So she shaped my desire to get divorced and live in Connecticut because I just wanted to be like her. And I think I wanted to be a birdie because I wanted to be free and to fly, and a ballerina because I love dancing and expressing myself through movement. So, yeah, those were my three-year-old aspirations. I haven’t accomplished all of them yet.
Debbie Millman:
And there was a time, I believe, you wanted to be a marine biologist.
Piera Gelardi:
Yes. Deeply influenced by living in Maine by the coast and just being in love with the ocean, which I still am. I love water.
Debbie Millman:
You spent summers at camp immersed in writing, Shakespeare, storytelling, even mime. What first pulled you toward creative expression as opposed to biology or dance?
Piera Gelardi:
Yeah. Well, until I went to college, I actually was sort of between the world of science and art, and I was really interested—deeply interested—in both. But creative expression pulled me harder, and I think it was always a way of finding meaning and magic in the world around me, of understanding myself, other people, and the world. And, yeah, it was just a practice of expression and processing and moving through the world with curiosity. And so I’ve done so many different forms of creativity, which is its own thing. Sometimes I think that phrase, “Jack of all trades, master of none,” is so insidious and has lodged itself in my brain. But I also think that we’re here to express, and there’s this amazing Martha Graham quote about how each of us has this life force, this vitality in us, and it’s one of a kind. And if we don’t express it, it just disappears, and the world doesn’t get to experience it. So I think my whole life I’ve felt really pulled by that need to express and explore and see what can come out of me. I’ve done that in so many different ways—through writing, through performing, through visual art, through entrepreneurship. It’s a constant exploration. I’m always wanting to find that next thing that I can try and see what comes out from that exploration.
Debbie Millman:
Well, as somebody that is also pulled in lots of different directions and always wanting to do new and different things, and somebody who’s also thought a lot about that “Jack of all trades, master of none,” what I can tell you—because I’m quite a bit older than you are—is that that’s only an issue when you’re younger. Because as you get older, you keep doing those things, and you keep doing them more, and you keep getting better at them, one would hope. So by the time you’re in your 60s, you actually end up being pretty good at a bunch of different things, which is really cool. It just takes a lot longer to get there than somebody that spends all their time doing that one thing. I love that.
Piera Gelardi:
Right?
Debbie Millman:
That—
Piera Gelardi:
Makes me feel… yeah—
Debbie Millman:
I have to say—
Piera Gelardi:
Overjoyed. Expansive.
Debbie Millman:
Now, I don’t know that I’m an expert at anything, but I do know that over 25 years of pursuing a whole bunch of different things, I have gotten marginally better at most of them.
Piera Gelardi:
I think you’re really amazing at a lot of things.
Debbie Millman:
I don’t know—
Piera Gelardi:
If I go that—
Debbie Millman:
Far, but I do take real comfort in that. And I tell a lot of people this. I remember being at a job interview at Condé Nast, my very first job interview, and the woman looked at my portfolio and said, “Are you a designer or a writer? You have to pick one.” And I really believed her, and I think that’s why I ultimately didn’t get any job, because I couldn’t pick. And I’m glad now. At the time it was harder, but 40 years later, not so hard.
Piera Gelardi:
I had that exact same experience. I went to a job interview at one point, and they said, “What’s your five-year plan?”
Debbie Millman:
I know. I read about that. Tell the listeners that story.
Piera Gelardi:
Yeah. They said, “What’s your five-year plan?” And I said, “Well, I want to try as many things as I can and figure out what I’m good at and what I love doing and pursue that.” I don’t remember exactly, verbatim, what I said, but it was definitely the wrong answer. I did not get the job, and I realized that you’re supposed to have a straight-line type of answer, and I’m not a straight-line kind of gal.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. When I train my students—I have an undergrad class that I train on how to get jobs—I tell them when they’re in an interview, pretend you’re on the witness stand. Really short answers. Yes and no. One example. That’s it. Otherwise, you talk too much, you get in trouble, you don’t get the job. Let them fill in the silences.
Piera Gelardi:
I need that advice.
Debbie Millman:
You discovered Sassy magazine as you were growing up. How did you find it, and what did it give you that you weren’t finding elsewhere?
Piera Gelardi:
So my mom’s best friend, Diane Jenkins, who passed this past year, she was this incredible potter and artist and someone who was just so… she was so deeply connected. And I think she saw me as a queer teenager in Maine, and she saw kind of, like, my eyes darting around for the exit sign. I knew who I was, but I was trying to figure out what to do with that knowledge. And she gave me, for my birthday—for my 13th birthday—a subscription to Sassy magazine. It was so intuitive of her. The subscription to Sassy magazine really changed my life. It really gave me this window into New York, into this group of women who were making content that was real, raw, and relatable, that was challenging the status quo, and that made me feel really seen for the first time. And I think it was a huge influence on me—definitely an influence on me wanting to move to New York. Then it was a huge influence as I was building Refinery29. I sent her a thank-you letter a few years ago for the gift, telling her how much it shaped me. Then she sent me a letter back, and she said she had no recollection of giving me this gift whatsoever. But that was kind of her energy. She was just so intuitive and connected and really, really saw me in a way that I needed to be seen at that time in my life.
Debbie Millman:
Shortly after, you took your first trip to New York, and you’ve written about how something really profound shifted inside you at that time. Can you talk a little bit about what happened during that trip?
Piera Gelardi:
I was a teenager, and I came to New York, and it was just so expanding. It just shifted something inside me. It gave me this sense of possibility and of momentum and of my life moving toward this very tangible goal.
Debbie Millman:
Talk about going to Jerry’s and seeing Stephanie Seymour.
Piera Gelardi:
Yeah. So I came to New York with a friend who I knew in Maine, but she was from New York, and so she was more connected to the city and was able to take me around. Yeah, I remember we went to SoHo, went to all these cool boutiques, and also, fashion-wise, I was just so excited to see these independent designers, these independent boutiques. And we went to Jerry’s in SoHo, and we’re sitting there having lunch, and sitting there was Stephanie Seymour, the model who I knew from Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain” video. I remember she was wearing a turquoise-and-green sundress, just looking absolutely stunning. And I was just so starstruck and wowed and amazed by this place where you could just go have lunch and see Stephanie Seymour. I also remember visiting my cousin Michael, and he knew so many people. He was in the creative world, and we were just walking around his neighborhood in the East Village, and he just kept seeing people and saying hi. And I was like, “It’s such a big city. How do you know all these people?” And he said, “You don’t live in New York. You live in your neighborhood.” And so that was really helpful to me, too, when I did move here, to feel like I was in this big place, but the people around me—the people that I went to school with, my friends—the neighborhood was a little hamlet within this big place.
Debbie Millman:
I know you went to NYU. What was your first-entry neighborhood around your school experience?
Piera Gelardi:
Yeah. So I went to NYU, but the summer before, I went to the RISD Pre-College program, and that shaped me in a huge way, too, because the people that were there were so inspiring. They were from so many different places. It felt very queer. It felt very held. And when I moved to New York, I knew a lot of people because a lot of the kids that had been in the program with me were at different schools. So even though I went to NYU, I had a lot of friends at SVA, Cooper Union, The New School, and Parsons. So I came with a community, and that really meant that my New York entry was so fun and so immediately social. But, yeah, coming to NYU, I was living in the East Village. I lived in the dorm for one year before I moved into an apartment, also in the East Village.
Debbie Millman:
You came to NYU with an intention of majoring in studio art. Were you, at that point, considering becoming a fine artist?
Piera Gelardi:
Yeah, I was. And a couple of things happened. I found the practice of being a solo artist to feel a little bit too solitary for me. And at the time I was living in New York. I was working as a babysitter, I was going to school, partying a lot, and I decided to get an internship at a magazine, kind of influenced by that experience of loving Sassy magazine and also wanting to see if there were other ways that my creativity and my art skills might take shape. Also, I had no idea how to become a fine artist, and it was only the last week of school that there was any conversation about how you actually make money—or make a living—from being a fine artist. So I was already thinking, how am I going to make money, like, when I was a sophomore? I got an internship at this magazine, and that ended up becoming my first job as well. And in it, I really loved collaborating with different people. I loved the whole process of coming up with ideas and bringing them to life across the written word and photography and design. And so even though I had thought I would be a fine artist, I ended up shifting into working in publishing.
Debbie Millman:
The magazine that you interned at and then eventually got a job at was City Magazine, and you eventually became the photo editor. What kind of opening did that editorial work give you creatively?
Piera Gelardi:
Yeah, I actually started as an intern there, and because it was a very small staff, I ended up getting to work with the editors, the design director, the creative director, even the sales director. So I got to have—because it was a super, super small team, I think there were six or seven people—I got to really see the whole process of how the content came together and how the ideas came together, and even how it was sold, how they brought in advertisers. That was really fun for me because I always had multiple interests, and I love exploring creative expression in these different forms. So I got to really do that and see that 360 degrees of bringing an idea to life in a multidisciplinary way.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve described the office above a SoHo bar as casual, unconventional, and psychologically safe. Brainstorms could get weird. People could sound foolish without consequence. That’s pretty progressive. How rare does that kind of creative environment feel to you now?
Piera Gelardi:
Well, it was very formative, and I actually didn’t know that that was not the way most places were. So I worked there, and then I started Refinery29, so I didn’t really have an experience of anything different. I went to art school, and that’s the environment at art school. It feels very open to ideas, very exploratory, experimental. And then I went into this magazine that was very unconventional. I mean, it was above a bar, and there was definitely a lot of crossover between the bar and the office, shall we say. Yeah. It was a really fun brainstorm environment because we would just throw the craziest ideas out there, and everyone would laugh. And I got to see this pattern emerge where someone would say something totally ridiculous. We’d all burst out into laughter, and then—boom—brilliance. And I realized how laughter is such a conduit to creativity because of that moment of openness and of the subconscious connecting ideas behind the scenes. And so that was something I really tried to replicate when I had a team of my own and I was starting Refinery29—how do I create those types of environments where we’re free enough to say the bad ideas so that we can get to the really good idea?
Debbie Millman:
While you were at City Magazine, you met Christine Barberich there, someone who would eventually become one of your business partners at Refinery29. What was that first meeting like for you? Was it very electric?
Piera Gelardi:
It was very intimidating. I was an intern, and she’s older than me, so she was the—I don’t know what her title was. I think it was executive editor. And so I started off with her giving me assignments and me executing them. She would say, “You need to call and fact-check this story. It’s a travel story in India.” And here I am trying to call places in India and fact-check these businesses and do these different things. But over time, she came to really trust me and trust the creative collaboration, and I started being more of a thought partner to her on things. Yeah. So we collaborated and became close when I was at City Magazine as her intern. And then, when we were starting Refinery29—actually before I was officially involved—my co-founders were asking me if I knew anyone who might want to be an editor. And I said, “Oh, you should talk to my old boss.” I didn’t think that she would be interested, but I thought she would know a former intern or former assistant that she would recommend. And they surprised me by telling me that she wanted to be part of it, but that she only wanted to do it if I was going to be officially involved. I was involved, but not in an official capacity, just because I like ideas and I like working on things and building things. And so, yeah, it was thanks to her that I got officially involved in Refinery29.
Debbie Millman:
One of your first collaborations, pre-Refinery29, was a magazine about creativity and entrepreneurship, and you worked on it every Sunday for nearly 18 months. You created a fully realized, written, photographed, and designed 250-page prototype. What was the name of the magazine? I couldn’t find that anywhere.
Piera Gelardi:
Sorry. You go so deep on research. I love it. I love it. Yeah. So before Refinery29, when I was still at City Magazine, I had the entrepreneurial itch, and I knew I wanted to create something of my own. And so I was working on a magazine called Team Rad, Let’s Get Awesome. And it was a magazine that was all about the spirit of creation, all about the spirit of people just running with an idea and making things. So we had different kinds of stories in there—stories of artists, of wild things that people created, like spontaneous events. And it was a very joyful, very exuberant publication. But what happened was that the three of us making it—we were all creative people with design and photography backgrounds. None of us really knew how to get something funded. We didn’t have funds. So we just made this whole magazine, and we had all these ideas for all these bells and whistles. We were going to have die cuts and flexi-discs in the magazine—all these things. And we made a whole 250-page publication—written, designed, photographed—and we relied on our whole big creative network to create it. And then we had no way of getting it made because none of us had money, and we didn’t know how to get money. I was calling everyone I knew that had a connection to a brand and trying to get people to sponsor it. But eventually we just kind of got… kind of like the band disbanded. I wanted to put it online and make it a digital publication, but my friends that I was doing it with thought that that kind of cheapened it, and so it just never got made. And then, meanwhile, I started working on Refinery29, and that ended up kind of pulling me in a totally different direction.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that—and you refer to it as a failure. You said that the failure taught you to start smaller and iterate instead of perfecting in private. You’ve also talked quite a bit about how you are wired toward perfection. How hard was that lesson for someone that is so wired toward perfection?
Piera Gelardi:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I think that the practice of playfulness and experimentation—a lot of my core practices in life are workarounds for my quirks and my wiring. So I’m definitely really wired toward perfection. I have to do a lot of things to work around that and actually put work out. So creating that magazine and having it not get made really felt like a huge failure because I got so many people involved. We threw a big party for it. We were talking to everyone we knew about it, had a lot of creators contribute to it, and then we couldn’t make it. And I really felt very ashamed. I really took it very hard. But it was also a good lesson in learning to… I think if we had done it in a different way, if we had put it out as a zine and, instead of making 250 pages, done a smaller page count, printed it cheaply, started to build an audience for it, and started to get the ideas out and the practice of it, I think we would have also had something to show brands. And we could have done smaller parties, brought people on board for those. And so it was a really good lesson. And then, when we were starting Refinery29, that was the lesson. It was like, just put the work out there. Learn from it. Hear what people have to say. Find the people that will help you get the thing done in a small way so that you can build on it and go bigger. And so that’s really been my approach since that failed magazine. I have to do a lot of things to psych myself up to do that, even on a small scale, but I know how to do it now. And so that’s the practice.
Debbie Millman:
I think the fact that it’s a finished magazine means that it was just unrealized, as opposed to failed.
Piera Gelardi:
That’s true. I think failure is a really harsh word. It’s like Corita Kent said, “There’s no win, no fail, only make.”
Debbie Millman:
Right. One of the things that I found so interesting as I was living your life through my research was your stance that perfectionism could be its own obstacle. And that really sort of stopped me, and I’ve been pondering that because we are people that are creative. We do want things to be perfect. I’m constantly sort of moving things in my house to make the visual sort of perfect, but that is a real way of kind of removing some of the joy.
Piera Gelardi:
Yeah. I think it removes the vitality, that pure expression. It’s sort of like how often our first thought is our best thought when you’re in a creative process. And when we start to perfect and slice away, it’s death by a thousand cuts. But also I think it starts to shrink us and shrink our expression, in a way. And similar—I think it’s similar, actually, to sort of that cool police voice in our head that tells us, “Don’t be cringe. Don’t put yourself out there.” That and perfectionism, where it’s like, “I don’t want to make a mistake. I want it to be just so, or else I’m not going to show it.” Those are shrinking forces. And I truly believe that our life force, our spirit, is here to expand us. And so we have to find our workarounds for those voices and those forces that try and shrink us and make us smaller and tighter.
Debbie Millman:
You founded Refinery29 in 2005 with four people, $5,000, and a belief that emerging designers deserved visibility. How and why did this idea first enter your collective minds?
Piera Gelardi:
Well, we were living in New York at the time, and there were so many amazing independent designers and boutiques. And they didn’t really have a place to market themselves. The big magazines were focused on the big brands that brought in the big advertising dollars, and the digital media space was very nascent. It felt very exciting and fresh. And so we had this idea initially to make this—it looked like a mall map. It was a map of the 29 best independent designers and boutiques in New York. You could hover over it and look inside the store, meet the owners, see some of the things that they sold, and that was the first thing that we released. And it was interesting because people told us, “You’re never going to be successful. There’s a reason these magazines don’t write about these small designers. It’s because they don’t have marketing dollars.” But what ended up happening was that that was our community of people. At first, a lot of people also thought digital was cheap at the time, and they didn’t really trust it. They didn’t think it was worth doing. But the designers and boutiques started to see that people were coming to them through finding them on Refinery29, and we started having parties at these stores. And so they ended up being our first collaborators, our first advertisers. Even our first investor was Steven Alan, who had multiple boutiques in New York. And so we grew from there. So we launched with this map, which was great for day one, day two, day three, and then there was not really a big reason for people to come back. And so we ended up also being a failure on, like, day three of starting our business. The traffic tanked, and it was like, “Oh, time to try something new.” But that was kind of the ethos. We saw what wasn’t working, and we were able to… I loved working in digital at that time because I had worked in a magazine, and you don’t get immediate feedback. Maybe you get a letter from someone or an email from someone, but for the most part you just put it out—you don’t know. And I loved the immediacy of seeing… at that time it felt so exciting to see, “How many people looked at this? What are they saying? What are the comments?” I moderated the comments for years. And so then it was like that process of, like, okay, this is working. This is not working. What do we do with that? What can we create? What’s the next thing we’re going to try? So then we started doing more daily content and experimenting and seeing what resonated with the audience, and built from there every day—throwing spaghetti at the wall every day.
Debbie Millman:
You described those startup years as doing absolutely everything—photography, analytics, comments, design, writing. There was a phrase you and your co-founders used: “No job is too low.”
Piera Gelardi:
Truly.
Debbie Millman:
And Refinery29 began around discovery, around independent designers, but evolved into something much larger: money, health, identity, power, culture. When and how did you realize your audience wanted more? And where did the confidence to keep going into those new areas come from?
Piera Gelardi:
It all came from having a curious, experimental mindset and putting an idea out there, seeing what came from it, and then using that to jump off the next experiment. This is such a small example, but at the beginning we were all style. And then we thought, let’s see if our audience is also interested in beauty, which seems kind of obvious because it’s like a right-next-door neighbor. But we said, “Okay, let’s try three different beauty pieces and see what happens.”
And they outperformed our fashion content by three times. So then it seemed very clear, “Okay, we’re going to give our audience more beauty content.” So then we thought, okay, we’re really interested in having a new perspective on sex and relationships. Let’s try three different stories on sex and relationships and see what happens. And again, it was like 3x the beauty content.
That was our approach, was always: What are we interested in, or what are we hearing from our audience? And let’s try it out and see how it goes and what we can learn from it. And sometimes the experiments wouldn’t work out, and it wouldn’t be a topic that really would catch on for our audience. And sometimes it would, and we would go from there.
Debbie Millman:
At its height, Refinery29 had hundreds of employees, $100 million in revenue. You won a boatload of Clios and Webby Awards. You were on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list five times. You spent four consecutive years on Inc. magazine’s 500 Fastest-Growing Companies in the U.S. What was it like to have that type of meteoric rise and capture sort of the zeitgeist of the time in that moment?
Piera Gelardi:
I have so many words. It was so many things. It was thrilling, of course. And I got to do some of my most exciting and biggest creative work, like launching 29Rooms. And it was really challenging. We had this slow build, actually. The first eight years we were building and iterating and growing. And even though it was growing, it felt gradual. And then, at the eight-year mark, we became, quote unquote, an overnight success, where other people thought we were an overnight success. Other people thought we popped off. And all of a sudden there was more pressure. We were bringing in people from more corporate backgrounds, and those playful qualities that I had of experimentation and curiosity and taking those risks… All of a sudden, with the new pressure on us and being surrounded by people that were talking in jargon and knew these business concepts that I wasn’t familiar with, I started to feel like the art school kid at the adult’s table. And I started to feel who I was and how I operated was not the right way.
And so, in that moment, I started to pack away some of those playful qualities. I worried that if I asked a question in a meeting, it would be instantly obvious that I didn’t know the answer. I worried that if I floated a big, wild, imaginative idea, I would look unrealistic. If I brought humor and levity, I would seem unserious. And so I started to try to conform to this idea of what a successful business owner, executive looked like. It was a really difficult time where we were growing so fast, and I had to learn a lot. I had to pick up a lot of new skills to get to that next level. But right in that moment was when I basically put away all the skills that got me there.
And I crashed in that moment, actually. I experienced this really big burnout because suddenly I didn’t have those qualities that really were the ones that helped me to learn and to grow and to be improvisational and work with what was going on. So in that moment, I found myself laying on my apartment floor, crying about what a failure I was in a moment when the outside world thought that I was an overnight success. It was a really important moment, though, because it was a moment where I thought I wasn’t the right person for my company anymore. I was seriously considering if I was going to need to resign because I just didn’t think I had what it took. I was fortunate at the time to be working with this coach, and she said, “Why do you think that the qualities that got you here can’t get you to that next level?” And so she said, “What if you actually lean into those qualities more? What if you lean into that curiosity, that creativity, that levity and joy, and that imagination, and see what happens?” And so I did that. And it was when I leaned into those things even more and valued them that I was able to really go to that next level with more alignment and more connectivity to the people around me, and actually expanded my creative thinking in a big way, too. But it was everything. It was so… that moment, that meteoric growth, was a lot of excitement, a lot of fun, a lot of pressure, and a big growth moment.
Debbie Millman:
Is it true that you wrote a list titled Ways I’m Failing Right Now at that moment?
Piera Gelardi:
Yes. So in that moment I was so depleted. I was so overworked and underplayed.
I wrote this list that I found years later that said, Ways I’m Failing Right Now. And it was this laundry list of basically every aspect of my life. I said I was failing as a leader, as a creative, as a friend because I wasn’t available, as a daughter. I was trying to get pregnant for years. I was failing in my fertility. It was this horrible list, and it really represented where I was in that moment, where I was just so depleted and lacking. I was lacking perspective. I was lacking self-compassion. And I was just really brittle and burnt out.
Debbie Millman:
Do you credit the coach with giving you the tools to be able to begin to see yourself differently, or do you feel like there were other aspects that you had to learn in order to, as you put it, see your own gifts as gifts?
Piera Gelardi:
I think that my coach, Katia, she really helped me to look at what had gotten me to that point and what my gifts were, and also to remind me of my own practices that had helped me in the past. She asked me a lot of questions. She was very curious. And so once she started to ask me what had helped me in the past, I actually started to build essentially my own bespoke set of creative practices that I can lean on and use in tough moments. So I told her that dancing and movement really helped me. And so she said, “Great. If you have these moments where you’re feeling really pressured, can you do something with that?” So I started doing what I call a shake break. So I’ll do a quick one-minute free-movement dance break before a pitch, a presentation, a podcast interview, to get out of my head and into my body and just move through the nerves.
I also navigate a lot of depression, anxiety, and so she helped me to see that creative expression is really helpful for me in those moments. So I have this flash-expression practice, which is either writing or drawing about my feelings in a moment as a way to move through them instead of getting stuck in them. So through that moment, I actually saw both the gifts and qualities that I had that I wanted to bring into my work, as well as kind of the unique coping strategies that I could lean on in those moments where I felt really pressured.
Debbie Millman:
I believe that your idea and concept for 29Rooms, which was 29 rooms in a warehouse that were designed as physical spaces, was originally not welcomed. Was the push to make that happen—and then its ultimate grand success—something that helped you begin to understand that your gifts were gifts?
Piera Gelardi:
That was a really pivotal moment. So we were, at the time, celebrating our 10-year anniversary of Refinery29, and the executive team at Refinery29 said, “We want to celebrate this 10-year anniversary, and we want to do it in a way that’s going to be disruptive, the way that our brand has been disruptive in the media space. We want to do something that invites our audience in and is inclusive during Fashion Week, a time that has typically been exclusive, because that felt very natural to our brand. And we also wanted to thank our audience for our success. And the other thing was, how do we do this in a way that’s going to bring in brands and press and be this big moment?” And so it was a really exciting brief. I took it back to the creative team, and we had so much fun brainstorming, “What are we going to create?” My favorite exercise that we did is I asked everyone to come to the brainstorm and tell us about the best nights of their life.
So people came with all these amazing stories of, like, “You show up at this location and you think, ‘Where the hell am I?'” And then you go through a secret hallway and end up in this space. People told these stories of magical art installations and unexpected performances.
And in the ideas that people brought to the table, there was such a surprise-and-delight, unexpected quality to it. Through these series of brainstorms, we came up with the idea of 29Rooms. So we wanted to, like you said, take over a warehouse, fill it with 29 different rooms, work with artists, celebrities, and brands to bring the rooms to life, and to bring our digital content and the themes that we talk about to life in an experiential way where our audience could come through and express themselves. Really, basically, an adult playground. We were so excited about it and went into the executive meeting, and me and my team presented. There was initial excitement, and then someone said, “I don’t know. Maybe we should just have a cocktail—”
Debbie Millman:
Party.
Piera Gelardi:
And it was like a—
Debbie Millman:
Pin in a balloon.
Piera Gelardi:
Pin in a balloon, just all the air coming out. But it was also a moment where I leaned into my playful skills, and I didn’t shut down. I said, “Okay.” I got curious. I asked questions.
I said, “Okay, what are the hesitations? What needs to be true in order for us to feel excited about this idea, to feel like this idea is possible?” Through that, I learned the real hesitations.
People were worried about, how are we going to get people to this event in Brooklyn during Fashion Week? How are we going to get brands to sign up and help us be able to put this event on and afford it? How are we going to get press to write about it? Those were the concerns.
And knowing what the actual concerns were, instead of only hearing the “no,” we were able to go back and actually make the idea stronger and more robust and better. And so it ended up being one of the things that Refinery29 was most known for. It was something that brought so many brands and celebrities and partners to us. It got us an enormous amount of press and social buzz. And so it was a really big moment of recognizing that those skills and gifts of playfulness and creativity and experimentation are important not only in the creative process, but also in the process when things get hard or when there is pressure—that I could lean on those things, too, to collaborate. It wasn’t about just pushing my idea through. It was actually about, how do I work with everyone and all these inputs and make them all part of the creative juice that’s going to make this thing really yummy?
Debbie Millman:
After 15 years of continuous growth and success, you and your partners sold Refinery29 to Vice. The company you and your co-founders had built from $5,000 and four people was being valued at roughly $400 million. It’s hard to even say that number. From the outside, that reads like triumph. Inside the experience itself, what did that moment feel like for you?
Piera Gelardi:
It was this moment where it was like moving out of a beloved home. And even though, honestly, I’d been doing it for 15 years and I was ready for something else—I was ready for a different energy. I also very much needed some kind of break. It also was really bittersweet to leave it. And it was a hard moment, too, because I was so connected to so many people in that moment. And I left, and I also realized the ways that some of those connections were very transactional. And when I was no longer in that role and no longer useful in that way, a lot of people fell away. So that was a mix of being clarifying, but also challenging.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. For much of your adult life, you have been building things at enormous scale—a company, a media brand, experiences, teams. But your new book, The Playful Way: Creativity, Connection, and Joy Through Everyday Moments of Play, feels born from a very different question—not how to achieve more, but how to remain alive inside your own life. I’d like to read a short excerpt from The Power of Play about how you came to the decision to dedicate your next chapter in your life.
And you write:
“In the summer of 2022, I stood at a crossroads. For years, I had witnessed the transformative power of play in my work as a creative leader, a teacher, and a mother. I’d seen how playfulness could help people process emotions, spark brilliant ideas, and come alive like nothing else could. A quiet voice inside me kept suggesting that I should dedicate my next career chapter to bringing more play into people’s lives, but doubt crept in. Could I really build a career around something as misunderstood as play in adulthood? Would people truly see a need for this in our achievement-obsessed world? The question swirled, leaving me stuck between possibility and practicality.” Piera, you then decided to ask the universe for a sign. My question here is—my two questions are—why did you do that, and what happened next?
Piera Gelardi:
Yeah. I was stuck between possibility and practicality, and I felt this pull to dedicate this next chapter of my career to play. And paradoxically, I had this thought that I would not be taken seriously if I did. And my friend Sophia, who’s a very spiritual, very playful friend and journalist, suggested that I look for a sign. And being the open, “Why not?” person that I am, I thought, sure, I’ll ask the universe for a sign. So I said, “Okay, universe, if I’m meant to pursue play in this next part of my life, show me what you got.” I was in Cologne, Germany, at the time, and I went for a walk along the Rhine River looking for a sign. And first I passed a playground, but I thought, there’s a lot of playgrounds. And the one that I saw sort of looked like a medieval torture device, and I decided, not my sign—Not that kind of play. Yeah. I said, “No, not my sign.”
Then I passed a carnival. It was still being erected, and I don’t know, it just didn’t have the magic and the joyfulness that I was waiting for. And so I said, “I don’t think so. I guess I’m very picky about my signs.” And then I was at the end of the walk, and I was about to turn around, and I decided to walk down to the edge of the river and look across at the Cologne Cathedral. And I was standing there at the edge of the river, and all of a sudden I heard this clinking sound, and I looked down at my feet, and there was a message in a bottle. Okay, I’ll take it. So I picked it up, and it was a letter from a seven-year-old boy called Eliano. And he talked about his love of spielen, which is “play” in German, and—
Debbie Millman:
Who was the letter written to…?
Piera Gelardi:
So it was a letter in a bottle. I ended up finding out, because there was an email at the bottom, that it was a project that he and his mom had done to connect with people through creativity. They did 50 different acts, and this was one of them. The letter was just to whoever found it, but he talked about play. And the act that launched the letter was also so symmetrical to what I wanted to do, right? I wanted to explore play and creativity as a way of connecting people to themselves, each other, the world, to creativity, and to joy. And so, yeah, this family launched this bottle as a form of connection, and it landed at my feet and launched me into this next part of my life.
Debbie Millman:
Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that this was actually the third time you found a message in a bottle over the course of your life. Is that true?
Piera Gelardi:
That is correct.
Debbie Millman:
I mean, don’t you find that a little weird? Wild? Crazy? Cosmic? Pick a word.
Piera Gelardi:
Yeah. I mean, people say, “You didn’t find a sign—it’s not a sign, it’s a billboard.”
Debbie Millman:
Yes. That’s a perfect word. That’s a perfect word.
Piera Gelardi:
For it, yeah. Well, it’s that beachcomber in me. I always have my eyes looking for wonder, looking for signs, looking for magic. And it’s a practice that I have had since childhood, and so, therefore, I see a lot of magical things.
Debbie Millman:
Did the other two messages in the bottles come at specific moments where you needed to be told something?
Piera Gelardi:
I would like to tell you yes, but that would be a lie. The other two messages in a bottle I just randomly found, and they didn’t mean that much to me. But the third message in a bottle felt cosmic.
Debbie Millman:
Hit out of the park.
Piera Gelardi:
Yeah. Really hit it out of the park.
Debbie Millman:
In The Playful Way, you state that playfulness is often dismissed as frivolous—a charming but dispensable quality best left in childhood alongside stuffies and imaginary friends. Why does that happen? Why is that the general stance on play?
Piera Gelardi:
As we grow up, we hear a lot of voices that tell us that play is frivolous. It starts in school, right, when we’re told, “Sit still. There’s a right and a wrong way to do things. Play is for recess.” We start to hear it as we enter the workforce, and it’s all about efficiency. We think that play is a diversion, that it’s unproductive, that it’s unserious. We hear it in the voices that tell us to strive for perfection. We hear it in the voices that tell us to be cool or to not be cringe and not stand out. So there are a lot of different forces that keep us from playing. And I think it’s the same—it’s a lot of forces that try to put us in a box and keep us doing things in a more conformist sort of way that centers around efficiency and productivity and fitting in. All of those things start to tamp down our playfulness and start to teach us that play is an incorrect way of being in adulthood or should be reserved for special moments of release, like a vacation—work hard, play hard—that type of message.
Debbie Millman:
You state this about playfulness in your book: Playfulness is finding humor and lightness even in tense moments, staying open to possibilities rather than fixating on one right way, experimenting rather than seeking perfection, bringing an ethos of curious exploration to difficulties, finding wisdom in the body when the mind’s tied up in knots, turning your attention to notice details and find wonder, reimagining dull tasks through reframes and games, improvising when things go sideways. One of the dichotomies that you talk about in the book is the difference between the playful way and the pressured way, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about the difference.
Piera Gelardi:
So often we get into the pressured way, and I can give you a little anecdote.
Debbie Millman:
Please.
Piera Gelardi:
When my daughter was a baby, we moved into a new apartment, and there was this car alarm that kept going off every day. I would just feel so stressed about it. It was so disruptive. It was so loud. And I would just get into this state of, like, “Why is this happening?” It was so frustrating.
At some point, I realized that this car alarm is just going to keep going off. And I can get into that pressured state, where I’m fighting against it, where I’m asking, “Why is this happening?” where I’m spiraling into stress and, like, white-knuckling my way through it—or I can take a different approach. So I started doing a car alarm dance every time the car alarm went off. I had this little dance that goes with the car alarm. Every time it would go off, it started to shift in my head from being this super annoying thing that stressed me out and was, like, ruining my life to, all of a sudden, “Oh, now I get to do the car alarm dance.” My daughter and I were walking down the street two weeks ago, and this loud car alarm was going off. There was a group of people trying to enjoy a beautiful day. They were sitting outside, and they looked so stressed out by the car alarm. Then there was this woman who was just yelling, “This is so dysregulating!” And then my daughter and I both—
Debbie Millman:
That was me.
Piera Gelardi:
Yeah. I mean, it is.
Debbie Millman:
It wasn’t, but it would be.
Piera Gelardi:
It is. But then my daughter and I started doing this car alarm dance, and everyone’s looking at us, and then they all start laughing. It was just this silly moment. But it’s a small example of this idea that in life there are a lot of things that we can’t control, that we don’t want to happen. Change is constant, and we don’t always love it. We can either be in this pressured state, where we’re fighting against what’s happening, we’re white-knuckling, we’re trying to control—or we can be in this playful state, where we’re saying yes and we have that improvisational mindset, where we’re accepting, even if we don’t like it, what’s happening, and we’re finding a more curious, open, creative way to work with whatever’s happening versus fighting against what’s happening. So this is my life philosophy. I bring it into all kinds of things, whether it’s a work challenge or a day-to-day frustration or even something heavy like grief. I try to weave this in as my life philosophy because, to me, being playful is being curiously, creatively, courageously engaged with life. It’s when we’re working with what life brings us and believing that we can make meaning and magic out of that versus feeling like life is happening to us and we’re fighting against it.
Debbie Millman:
In your book, you argue something fairly radical. You state that seriousness gets too much credit. When did you begin questioning the cultural equation between seriousness and value?
Piera Gelardi:
I think throughout my life I have challenged that idea of seriousness being the thing that is valuable because I got to see in childhood that my parents did both, right? My dad had a business, and he was playful. He was experimental and successful. My mom dealt with really serious things in her work and her personal life, and she chose to be joyful and full of wonder.
And so I got to see early on that play and seriousness are not opposites. It’s playfulness that allows us to navigate serious things in life with more resilience, with more creativity, with more resourcefulness. It was also when Refinery29 was growing and I had that moment of packing away my playfulness and trying to be taken seriously that I saw that it’s like a fool’s errand to try to be taken seriously because I want to be taken playfully. I want to value playfulness, and I want to embody playfulness, and I want to show people the value of playfulness.
Debbie Millman:
Talk about the Anti-Play Posse. What is that?
Piera Gelardi:
The Anti-Play Posse are the external voices throughout our life that have told us that play is frivolous, that it’s childish, that it’s unproductive, and that we’ve internalized and that we now hear when we’re doing playful things. So it could be the Cool Police that’s telling us, “Don’t be cringe.” It could be the Perfectionist that’s telling us, “Make it perfect. Don’t make a mistake.” It could be the Responsible Adult that tells us, “You have responsibilities. There’s no room for joy.”
And those voices, they start to really shrink us, and they start to limit how we feel like we can move through the world. And so in the book I name them, and then I give compassionate retorts because they are there to keep us safe. They’re there for a reason, but they’re not really correct in how they’re trying to keep us safe.
Debbie Millman:
Your book includes a framework that identifies eight powers of play: humor, imagination, exploration, creativity, movement, noticing, game-making, and curiosity. Tell me what you believe organizing the book in this way allows people to understand better about themselves.
Piera Gelardi:
So a lot of people tell me they’re not playful because there’s one dominant way of thinking about being playful. People either think it’s very childish, or they think it’s very humor, levity, silliness. And so people who are not those things don’t think they’re playful. And so when I was working on the book, I started to really dig into the research around play and looking at Stuart Brown’s work from the National Institute for Play and studies of playful people. So through my work, through my own experience leading play, and then through research, I realized that it would be really helpful for adults to understand that there’s not one way to be playful, that playfulness embodies all these different characteristics, and also that playfulness is a practice. It’s not something that you are or aren’t. It’s a muscle that you can develop if you want to. And I wanted to show people how they’re already playful and help them to identify what their powers of play are, and then also show them how, in day-to-day life, they can strengthen other powers and bring those into their lives to bring more creativity, connection, and joy.
Debbie Millman:
In April 2025, you launched a new company devoted to play called NoomaLooma. Is there a significance to that particular name?
Piera Gelardi:
There is. So when I was naming, I wanted to come up with a name that was a made-up word for funzies and trademarkies. And there’s a Greek Stoic concept called Pneuma, which is our indwelling creative spirit. It’s like our life force. And so I love the idea of our life force being this creative spirit. So I took the essence of that word, Pneuma, changed the spelling. And then I love rhyming, as you know from my book. So I was rhyming it, and I came up with NoomaLooma. And then I loved that Luma was like luminous. Also, I looked it up, and it means “to make, create, or compose” in Estonian. So that was just a synchronicity that I thought, okay, the universe gives me a check mark. So yeah, NoomaLooma—it also feels like it embodies playfulness. It’s fun to say.
Debbie Millman:
On the NoomaLooma website, you ask this question: “What if your most alive moments happen between the mundane parts of your day?” Why is that question important?
Piera Gelardi:
It’s important because so often we see creativity as this big act. We look at the finished book, the amazing, renowned podcast, and those are our markers for creativity. But what I’ve found in my life to be true, especially as I navigate the harder things in life, is that it’s actually the day-to-day acts of creativity, those micro moments, the things that happen in between the big events, that actually make up the substantive matter of our lives and are actually the things that make us feel the most resilient and connected. And so when I was coming out of the period of teaching all these play workshops during the pandemic, I started interviewing the people who had joined the workshops and asking them about creativity and play in their lives. What people were telling me was that they didn’t have time for creativity, and they didn’t have the skills. And so that insight really inspired me to think about how I can create a company that gives people more permission to explore creativity and play in those small moments and make it really bite-size, really doable, so that it actually builds and grows those creative muscles over time versus it feeling like this intimidating thing that you have to have a ton of time and skills to accomplish.
Debbie Millman:
You just opened early App Store access to build what you’ve referred to as the next frontier of wellness. Can you talk a little bit more about what you’re doing?
Piera Gelardi:
We just launched the first version of our app, and it’s essentially a daily creative practice that you do with other people. It’s all very low stakes. You do it in one to three minutes. We really designed it intentionally. We didn’t want it to have any of the traditional performative social media metrics. So it’s not about likes. It’s not about comments. It’s about expression and really putting something out there. So people are making on the platform. They’re really having fun with it. We’re hearing people say, “This is like the antidote to brain rot. This is my daily joy.”
And so what we are building is both the in-person experiences—we started with events—and then the app is the daily habit. It’ll grow to have more features, but what we’re trying to accomplish is helping people shift their state through creative play and unlock more joy, connection, and aliveness in their day-to-day.
Debbie Millman:
Piera, I have one last question for you. Can you tell us what being a wonder wanderer is and what it entails?
Piera Gelardi:
Yes. Translating from my early days as a little girl in Maine looking for treasure while beachcombing, I have a practice of wonder wandering, and it was born out of a period of depression where it was really hard for me to leave the house. It was hard for me to get out of bed. I decided to tune my frequency to the frequency of wonder and awe. I would leave my house and go on a walk and say, “Okay, I’m looking for micro delights. I’m looking for anything that catches my eye, anything that’s interesting, and I’m going to look up, down, zoom in close, and see what I discover.” And so wonder wandering, for me, is just having those childlike, open eyes where I believe that anything is possible. I believe that there is beauty and magic in the world around me, and I am on a mission to put myself in the path of surprise and find it.
Debbie Millman:
And who knows? Maybe as we do that, we’ll find our own little messages in bottles clinking on our shoes. I hope so. Piera Gelardi, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Piera Gelardi:
Thank you so much. Thanks for playing.
Debbie Millman:
Piera’s new book is titled The Playful Way: Creativity, Connection, and Joy Through Everyday Moments of Play: The Adult’s Guide to Unlocking Innovation, Stronger Relationships, and Better Health. To learn more about Piera, you can go to her websites, pieragelardi.com and noomalooma.com. This is the 21st year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Curtis Fox:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions.
The interviews are usually recorded at the Master’s in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world.
The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.
