Rolling the Dice

Playing Without a Rulebook

Carr did not always have a clear vision of where she would end up. As a child, she imagined becoming an astronomer, a writer or a teacher, and she even co-created a school for neighborhood children at age 10.

When she arrived at William & Mary, that sense of exploration remained. Rather than pursuing a specific career path, she studied what aligned with her interests and strengths. She majored in English, drawn to what she described as a natural fit and her love of reading and writing, as well as an appreciation for the artistry of language.

“I love wordplay and how a precisely chosen word or phrase really captures the essence of what we’re trying to communicate,” Carr says.

After enrolling in an art history survey course with Barbara Watkinson, now a professor emerita of art history, she decided to explore the subject more deeply by adding it as a minor. She was drawn to the intersection of visual art and history, appreciating both context and beauty, and briefly considered a career in teaching the subject. She spent a summer semester studying literature with John Conlee, now an English professor emeritus, packed with other students into a small van, visiting historical sites in England, Scotland and Wales.

Conlee recalls their trips — visiting castles, cathedrals and ancient archaeological sites such as Stonehenge, Avebury and Tintagel, King Arthur’s legendary birthplace — and says he is not surprised that Carr found success in her professional life.

“She reflects the truism that William & Mary English majors don’t prepare for any one thing, they prepare for everything,” he says.

Through her humanities coursework, Carr says, she learned to decode symbols and themes and to analyze ideas from multiple perspectives. She now sees how those skills connect directly to her current professional work. As founder of Vitamin C Creative, she works to define and reshape companies’ brands and bring them to life through powerful storytelling, messaging and visuals.

Although her liberal arts education sharpened her ability to absorb and synthesize large amounts of information, it took some time for her to see how those skills would translate into a career. As graduation approached, she watched peers commit to law school or medical school while she continued weighing her options.

She applied to be a college admissions counselor and considered being a paralegal, but eventually landed a job as a multimedia editor at Microsoft.

Carr says she didn’t have “the typical Microsoft skill set,” since her background was in the humanities. She worked on Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia, a digital reference tool, and Encarta Virtual Globe, which later served as a baseline for many digital maps.

After a few years, she got a call from Whit Alexander, who had left the Encarta team to found Cranium with another “ex-Microsoftie,” Richard Tait. They were looking for someone to lead their editorial team, and Carr’s manager, Nancy Dixon, had recommended Carr for the role, which led to her career-altering decision.

Microsoft was a well-established tech giant that offered stability, benefits and a clear career trajectory, which were all things Carr had worked hard to secure. Still, Cranium felt “intriguing,” she says, and she was excited at the prospect of being part of building a company and having a front-row seat to see where this quirky startup would go. Even in its early days, the company was gaining national attention after actor Julia Roberts mentioned on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” that it was her favorite game, creating buzz around the brand.

With the tagline “The game for your whole brain,” Cranium challenged players to compete in teams across a broad range of activities including trivia, charades, word games, drawing and sculpting. The company took innovative approaches to game design, using Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences as a framework; hiring artist Gary Baseman to create a distinctive box that challenged convention; and marketing, securing trailblazing distribution partnerships with Starbucks and Barnes & Noble.

Although joining a small startup was not an easy decision, the timing would prove fortunate: As Encarta faced the rise of Wikipedia, Carr had already stepped into a new opportunity with what would become a highly successful, award-winning game company, including awards from the Toy Industry Association as “Game of the Year” in 2001 and again in 2003.

Molly Kertzer, a former Microsoft teammate who met Carr when they were in their 20s, remembers Carr’s uncertainty about leaving the security of a global company. Kertzer, who became the 10th employee at Cranium, recalled that soon after Carr joined as the 11th or 12th hire, the hesitation disappeared.

“She never looked back,” Kertzer says.

“The process is very energizing for the teams. They’re like, ‘Yes, this is what we’ve been trying to say!’” Carr says.

Vitamin C Creative also helped Icertis, a technology company specializing in contract management, elevate its brand and set itself apart in an increasingly crowded competitive landscape. This paved the way to a planned IPO by embracing a bold new position centering on contract intelligence. By shifting from “contract-centric” to “consumer-centric” language, Icertis could more clearly communicate the value of its offering to a wider audience.

Another brand Carr has helped reshape is William & Mary’s Entrepreneurship Hub.

After she gave a talk as part of the Hub’s Topic Talks series, Graham Henshaw, W&M’s assistant provost for entrepreneurship, said he was struck by her expertise and approached her afterward about helping articulate the organization’s brand. 

Henshaw is pleased with the progress and the Hub’s team still meets with Carr to finalize and implement the brand. Through working with her, he has gotten to see the process in real time and says that a key element in her work is a “tolerance for ambiguity.”

“Building a brand for a company is like chiseling a sculpture. You have some idea of what you want it to look like and the form emerges along the way,” Henshaw says.

Working with Carr allows him to realize his vision through a deliberate creative process — one that gradually refines the broad ideas they began with into a clearer, more defined brand.

Over the past few months, that process of gradually chiseling away, refining ideas and bringing clarity from ambiguity is what he described as an example of “entrepreneurial thinking in action.”