Catherine Anderson

Catherine swore up and down to her mom that she’d never go to school in Arizona. Funny, then, that a girl born in Salem, Oregon, would end up enrolling at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University anyway, proof that even a lifelong planner can be talked into a plot twist. What followed was a delightfully chaotic four years of switching majors, adding a second, then tacking on a minor and a certificate for good measure, because apparently one degree was never going to be enough. Somewhere in there, she also found her people in Kappa Delta and studied abroad in Madrid because Catherine’s never been one to do anything halfway.

Catherine’s entrepreneurial streak actually started decades earlier, running lemonade and produce stands her mom built out of the family garden with her brother. It was an early, unpaid crash course in sales, branding, and customer charm.

Around that same time, she started surveying her classmates on Google Forms, just because she found people interesting and wanted to understand them better. (Nobody told her that it was called market research yet.) That instinct carried her through a term as the first DECA president in her high school’s history. She also ran her swim team’s Instagram, where (no big deal) they still use content strategies she started. She joined ReThinc as an intern and simply never left, working her way to a full-time seat on the digital team.

As the eldest of three, Catherine has mastered the ancient art of influence (ask her siblings, actually, don’t). She’s always been the observant one, the friend with the wardrobe everyone wants to borrow, and the one who can’t listen to a song without picturing the video edit that should go with it, a habit she picked up somewhere between years of cello and piano lessons. Her love of art might be genetic; her mom used an art history degree for a career in architecture, but it was her semester in Madrid that turned it into a full-blown habit. Since then, Catherine hasn’t set foot in a new country without finding its museums first, racking up stamps across nearly 20 countries and counting, from Iceland to Morocco to Croatia.