Bianca Gay spent three and a half years as a UX researcher at Foot Locker — her first full-time role in tech. She navigated constant leadership changes, department shuffles every six to eight months, and the particular exhaustion of producing research she knew wasn't going to be used. She left with a plan, a savings buffer, and a train ticket down the California coast.
Today she co-owns Three Coupe Society, a beverage curation business she runs with her husband, while also working as a studio lead at a Pilates studio. On a recent episode of In Her Words, she talked about what it actually took to make that shift — and what she's learned about work, creativity, and herself in the process.
Four things from this conversation I keep thinking about.
1. Just because you can endure the change doesn't mean you have to.
Bianca was clear that change wasn't her enemy. She actually likes change — her business embraces it. What wore her down at Foot Locker wasn't change itself, it was change without conversation. Waking up and finding that everything was different, with no explanation of why or what it would mean for her team and her role.
Her question for herself eventually became: is this kind of change actually making me stronger, or is it just something I've learned to endure? There's a difference. Enduring something isn't the same as being built for it or choosing it.
"Just because I can, should I?"
It's a question worth sitting with in any environment that's asking something significant of you. Capability and fit aren't the same thing.
2. Over-explaining your decisions to family is a sign you're still seeking their approval.
When Bianca told her mom she was leaving Foot Locker, she over-explained. She laid out all the reasons, covered every angle, made the case. Her mom felt reassured. Bianca did not.
She noticed something in that conversation: the more she explained, the more she was asking for permission she didn't actually need. So she changed her approach. With everyone after that, she kept it simple: she wasn't happy, she had a plan, she was building something. That's it.
The people who needed a full explanation weren't going to be satisfied by one anyway. And the people who knew her — the close friends she'd had for years — heard her say she was leaving a Fortune 500 job and said: yeah, that tracks.
The lesson she took from it: if you're over-explaining, notice what you're really doing. Sometimes it's processing out loud. Sometimes it's asking for a blessing that isn't coming.
3. Running a business with a partner requires explicit conversations about who does what.
Three Coupe Society started with an assumption mismatch. Bianca had left her job and was running everything — the business cohort, the groundwork, the logistics — while her husband worked full-time and focused on the creative side: flavor profiles, concept development, crafting the actual drinks. The contribution gap was real, and it created friction.
What helped was getting explicit. Who's talking at the event? Who's behind the bar? Who dislikes which parts of the business enough that we shouldn't ask them to do it? They're both introverts, but they each have areas where passion overrides the introversion — for her, it's storytelling about the business; for him, it's nerding out on culinary approaches with people who care.
They're also intentionally a word-of-mouth business. No social media advertising. Clients come through relationships and referrals, which means the people they end up working with tend to already share their values. That, she said, makes the selling feel less like selling and more like collaborating — which is the whole point of what they do anyway.
4. The word "career path" might be doing more harm than good.
Bianca has a background in creative writing. She spent three and a half years in UX research. She works at a Pilates studio. She runs a beverage curation company with her husband. If you tried to draw a career path out of that, she said, it wouldn't look like a path — it would look like a constellation.
And she's made peace with that. The word career used to feel limiting because it implied linearity — that there's a direction you're supposed to be moving in, steps that are supposed to come next, a trajectory that makes sense to other people. What she discovered is that ditching the frame entirely opened things up.
"I just think about what kind of work should I be doing right now. What has brought me joy and what hasn't. And then try to go from there."
She was also honest about the ground-level reality: she has bills, a family, responsibilities. The point isn't to make it all fluffy and pretend money doesn't matter. The point is that the financial reality and the values-aligned reality don't have to be in opposition. You can take care of what you need to take care of and still ask what kind of work you actually want to be doing.
You can find Three Coupe Society on Instagram at @threecoupesociety or at threecoupesociety.com. You can connect with Bianca on LinkedIn by searching Bianca Gay in Chicago.