Tina Roth Eisenberg

De-siloing creativity 

Tina Roth Eisenberg is a Swiss designer based in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for founding and running a global monthly lecture series called CreativeMornings, the SwissMiss design blog and the first creative co-working space in NYC called Friends Work Here. She’s also the founder of Tattly, a designy temporary tattoo shop. Because of the popularity of her blog, she’s often referred to as SwissMiss. 

Soon Tina will have lived half her life in Switzerland and half in New York City. She truly feels, at this point, that both places are equally home for her. She has a vivid memory of her first day in NYC in 1999. When she came out of the Wall Street subway station, she was surprised that everyone was walking as fast as she was. “I’ve always been too fast in Switzerland. I consistently had to hit the brakes: In the way I walked, in the way I talked, in the way my mind operated,” Tina says with the hearty laugh she is famous for. “It was liberating to see that my pace and my level of energy and enthusiasm were welcome and fueled here.”

Tina Roth Eisenberg, aka SwissMiss, is the head of a small design empire. Her accomplishments include a blog, a co-working space, a temporary tattoo company, and CreativeMornings, a monthly breakfast lecture series. 
To her, it felt that doors just opened when she arrived in NYC – things just happened and flowed. She had one interview for an internship lined up and got hired on the spot. A few weeks later, the design studio owner offered her a full-time job and a work visa. Tina believes this was mainly due to her not having an ounce of doubt that she could make it. “There is real power in not having resistance in your mind,” she says.  

Tina lives in the top apartment of a typical Brooklyn brownstone house with her two children (a boy aged 12 and a girl aged 16), a cat and a dog. “We should teach our children that they need to find the path that lights them up, to find the thing that gets them so excited. I’m a true believer that money will follow. You're like a magnet when you are high-vibing, happy, and fulfilled in the thing you do.”
In that way, Tina is the best role model for her children. Tina’s career has evolved and developed entirely organically. She’s not the kind of person that operates according to a business plan. Her path is wholly guided by what lights her up and feels right. Usually, it starts with an idea for something useful for herself or others. That’s why she is sometimes called the queen of accidental business.
That’s also how, in 2004, she accidentally became an international blogger celebrity. Her hugely popular blog – swiss-miss.com – at first only served her as a personal visual archive and to share things she found and loved with her friends. A year into blogging, she looked at her stats and, to her surprise, saw that more and more people tuned in to read her posts. At the blog's heyday, the blog had 2 million readers a month, and the name SwissMiss became a household name in the design world.

The name SwissMiss was a spontaneous choice because that’s what everybody called her at the time. Over the coming years, it would become her moniker on the internet and social media. For her, the name still rings true. “I’m proud and grateful for my roots and would not neglect or deny them. I’m here for it; I like SwissMiss!”

The blog opened many doors for Tina. It gave her credibility as a tastemaker and design expert. Six years later, after years of sharing and celebrating other peoples’ work, she found herself at the receiving end when she launched Tattly, a company selling ‘designy’ temporary tattoos. Posting about it on her blog was enough to push sales through the roof from the get-go.
By the way, Tattly is also an accidental business. Tina was tired of sticking tacky tattoos on her daughter's arm and took things into her own hands. She launched the first range of temporary tattoos designed by renowned artists, which not long after were sold in shops all over the world. 

Another personal itch of Tina’s that became a successful business was the founding of NYC’s first creative co-working space. She didn’t want to work alone or at home when she started her design studio in 2006 but to share space and knowledge with like-minded people. She dreamed up her ideal workspace and made it a reality, starting with six desks that grew to 65 over the years. “I realized the magic that unfolds when you’re gathering with people that are, sort of, feeding off each other, complementing each other.”

The community of her co-working space provided the breeding ground for another of Tina’s brainchildren. For a long time, she’s been hatching the idea of creating genuinely accessible events for creatively-minded people. Within her community of co-workers, she began prototyping what they could look like. The result is CreativeMornings, Tina’s widest-reaching project and the one closest to her heart. Its intention is simple: breakfast and a short talk one Friday morning a month, free of charge and open to anyone. 
Tina makes a point, which applies to everything she does, and says a lot about her unbiased and generous mindset that the creative community she has in mind doesn’t exclude anyone. “Living your life is a creative act. Everybody is creative. Everybody is welcome.’ 

The number of CreativeMornings attendees grew month by month, and soon agencies wanted to host and sponsor the events. The first chapters outside NYC were Zurich and LA, more cities followed, and CreativeMornings grew into the world's largest face-to-face creative community with monthly happenings in 225 cities in 67 countries. That’s 25’000 people coming together every month. CreativeMornings has just celebrated its 14th birthday. There’s a lot to celebrate and to be proud of, not least that it has survived the pandemic.

Tina doesn’t miss the hands-on designing from her early days in NYC. “It feels like I’m designing on another level now. I’m designing communities, experiences, how events feel, how companies feel, and how spaces for humans feel. I don’t care about font sizes anymore,” Tina explains.

How did this happen? Tina grew up in the village of Speicher in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden, surrounded by hills, mountains, fresh air and farms with brown cows. She would walk to school for 40 minutes one way, then home for lunch, and back to school again. “This blows my kids’ minds,” Tina laughs, “They can’t believe this.” One of her fondest childhood memories is the ski lift they had in front of their house. It was a small lift with nightlights, and she and her friends would go skiing every evening in the winter. “I had a very lucky, privileged, nature-rooted upbringing.” 

School came very easy to Tina. She remembers her school days in Switzerland very fondly and is grateful for her education. Her singular passion for organizing and lifting ideas off the ground was manifest by her high school years when she ran the student council, published a school newspaper, and organized events. “I love to grassroots organize people, get them excited about an idea, and convince them to help make it happen,” she explains. “I didn’t know what it was back then,” Tina muses, “but I realize that I’ve always had an entrepreneurial mindset.”
Tina knew early on that a creative profession would make her happy. But to realize it, she had to push back against the resistance from her parents, both entrepreneurs, who imagined a more conventional and, most of all, more financially stable career for their daughter. “I don’t blame them. When you grow up in Switzerland, stability and linearity of your resume is what everyone tells you is of utter importance,” she smirks.

Tina always wanted to go to America. “It was just like something was calling me. I can’t put my finger on why.” After finishing her degree in communication design at the Fachhochschule Munich, at age 25, the time for America was ripe. “I genuinely believed I would go to New York for three months and then start working in Zurich.” Now 23 years later, she’s still there.

Tina thought she’d eventually go back and get married and have kids in Europe. But when, one rainy day in the city, she met the father of her children (he offered her shelter under his umbrella), that was when Tina realized that she might stay forever.
Tina’s children feel very connected to their Swiss roots. They spend every summer holiday in Switzerland, mainly in the Appenzell region, and keep close ties with Swiss family members. Her 16-year-old daughter intends to go and live in Switzerland for a year at some point. Tina realizes that she sometimes alienates people when visiting her home country. “I’m more direct and set clear boundaries. That surprises people who think I’m still the old Swiss Tina.”, she explains. On the other hand, parts of her – like her tidiness and reliability – have remained profoundly Swiss. ”I try to merge the best of the two cultures.” Tina explains. 

It’s been a busy few years for Tina, and one wonders how she could juggle so many balls. She gives her teams, who have been running her organizations, much credit for their successes. “Because I’m so multi-focused, I had to relinquish control and trust people. When you trust good, smart people, they will expand and surprise themselves.”

The time has come for Tina to scale back a bit. She is grateful for the clarity that the pandemic brought. She also sold Tattly earlier this year and has more time to focus on the most important thing to her - CreativeMornings. She sees that as her legacy. “My goal is to get the business model to a place where it is stable and can work for the next 100 years, and it’s not going to depend on me.” Tina sees much potential in these gatherings of humans and their impact on people’s lives and the world, and she will focus her efforts on achieving this goal.

Tina is excited to see what the future brings. Maybe she’ll start writing a book, or perhaps there are more accidental businesses in her to materialize. While it’s not clear yet what, something will surely emerge. Stay tuned!

This article appeared in the 2022/23 publication ‘Bonebridge goes America’ for Bonebridge.

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