Innovator Stories
Susanna Sharpe felt a stirring of artistic energy during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a sign of the times, she unleashed it on her Stockbridge home.
“I attacked our house and just started painting,” says Susanna. “The whole house was an explosion of color, of me regenerating my creative juices.”
It felt right to infuse this energy into Mungy, the creative studio Susanna and husband Tom Sharpe have co-owned and operated since 2016 (she is a digital designer, and he brings years of experience in business relationship building). After experiencing explosive growth at the end of the 2010s, the couple was inspired by the Great COVID Slowdown of 2020 to reassess their trajectory.
Innovator Stories
Meet Tom & Susanna Sharpe
Susanna Sharpe felt a stirring of artistic energy during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a sign of the times, she unleashed it on her Stockbridge home.
“I attacked our house and just started painting,” says Susanna. “The whole house was an explosion of color, of me regenerating my creative juices.”
It felt right to infuse this energy into Mungy, the creative studio Susanna and husband Tom Sharpe have co-owned and operated since 2016 (she is a digital designer, and he brings years of experience in business relationship building). After experiencing explosive growth at the end of the 2010s, the couple was inspired by the Great COVID Slowdown of 2020 to reassess their trajectory.
“The only way we could keep growing this way would be to significantly increase the volume of our clients,” says Tom. “Part of our COVID experience was pausing and saying, ‘Is that the direction we want to go with Mungy?’”
The answer was no, and the solution was to “go back to the origins of Mungy: great design, great service, impactful relationships, quality over quantity,” says Tom.
Mungy now operates as a five-employee studio partnering with brands on strategy, design, and management. The shift, Tom says, “allows us to be a more complete partner for our clients,” meaning deeper conversations on identity and messaging, as well as more customized designs that cater to the audience’s user experience.
“It’s more purposeful, and more creative,” says Susanna.
Indeed, every choice the couple has made about their business, family, and the roots they’ve laid down in the Berkshires with their three children has been “purposeful.”
The Sharpes, who met as young professionals in San Diego (Susanna is from New Zealand, Tom is from Long Island), prioritized “work-life balance” before it was cliché. The word “Mungy” itself—which their daughter coined for “watermelon” when she was a toddler—reflects the importance they place on “making the business work for the life that we want,” says Susanna.
Building that life hasn’t come without pivots, and the Sharpes never hesitate to innovate the Mungy model to make it happen.
Given their limited portfolio in 2016, they knew they needed an edge when they dove head-first into Mungy. With countless freelancers slinging the traditional “We’ll make you a website for X amount of dollars,’” says Tom, he visited Berkshire businesses with a unique “partnership investment model” where Mungy designs, builds, hosts, and manages sites for a monthly fee.
“This was right on the cusp of the subscription craze,” says Susanna. “Within a month, we had two clients.”
As support grew, the Sharpes began seeing the Mungy vision materialize in the community they’d always hoped it would. A chunk of that support came in the way of an initial investment from Berkshire incubator Lever, who Tom sees as “a lighthouse client—a customer doing work that will expand Mungy’s reach,” as well as a perfect match for its investment model.
“The Berkshires is like a natural incubator,” says Susanna. “The whole community seemed to be behind us and really wanting us to succeed.”
Adds Tom, “We felt the greatest sense of community in the Berkshires, much more so than any other place we had lived.”
As Mungy continues developing, the warm home the Sharpes have found in the Berkshires remains their cornerstone. For Susanna, that means further blurring the lines between home and work for her clients, much like she “attacked” her house with art during lockdown.
“You walk up, you smell the flowers, you see the colors, and you walk in—there’s a flow of how that draws you in,” says Susanna. “My hope is to apply that to the experience of landing on a website, and how the user navigates. It’s very intuitive. All these worlds are blending into one.”
“The only way we could keep growing this way would be to significantly increase the volume of our clients,” says Tom. “Part of our COVID experience was pausing and saying, ‘Is that the direction we want to go with Mungy?’”
The answer was no, and the solution was to “go back to the origins of Mungy: great design, great service, impactful relationships, quality over quantity,” says Tom.
Mungy now operates as a five-employee studio partnering with brands on strategy, design, and management. The shift, Tom says, “allows us to be a more complete partner for our clients,” meaning deeper conversations on identity and messaging, as well as more customized designs that cater to the audience’s user experience.
“It’s more purposeful, and more creative,” says Susanna.
Indeed, every choice the couple has made about their business, family, and the roots they’ve laid down in the Berkshires with their three children has been “purposeful.”
The Sharpes, who met as young professionals in San Diego (Susanna is from New Zealand, Tom is from Long Island), prioritized “work-life balance” before it was cliché. The word “Mungy” itself—which their daughter coined for “watermelon” when she was a toddler—reflects the importance they place on “making the business work for the life that we want,” says Susanna.
Building that life hasn’t come without pivots, and the Sharpes never hesitate to innovate the Mungy model to make it happen.
Given their limited portfolio in 2016, they knew they needed an edge when they dove head-first into Mungy. With countless freelancers slinging the traditional “We’ll make you a website for X amount of dollars,’” says Tom, he visited Berkshire businesses with a unique “partnership investment model” where Mungy designs, builds, hosts, and manages sites for a monthly fee.
“This was right on the cusp of the subscription craze,” says Susanna. “Within a month, we had two clients.”
As support grew, the Sharpes began seeing the Mungy vision materialize in the community they’d always hoped it would. A chunk of that support came in the way of an initial investment from Berkshire incubator Lever, who Tom sees as “a lighthouse client—a customer doing work that will expand Mungy’s reach,” as well as a perfect match for its investment model.
“The Berkshires is like a natural incubator,” says Susanna. “The whole community seemed to be behind us and really wanting us to succeed.”
Adds Tom, “We felt the greatest sense of community in the Berkshires, much more so than any other place we had lived.”
As Mungy continues developing, the warm home the Sharpes have found in the Berkshires remains their cornerstone. For Susanna, that means further blurring the lines between home and work for her clients, much like she “attacked” her house with art during lockdown.
“You walk up, you smell the flowers, you see the colors, and you walk in—there’s a flow of how that draws you in,” says Susanna. “My hope is to apply that to the experience of landing on a website, and how the user navigates. It’s very intuitive. All these worlds are blending into one.”