Hey, everyone, Emily Abadi here. You are listening to a five-minute Friday from Hurtle.

This is kind of wild. It's kind of wild because I'm about to say a sentence that I cannot even,

I mean, I believe it because I lived it, but I can't believe I'm about to say it. My Birkenstock campaign comes out today.

I shot a global campaign for Birkenstock earlier this year in January.

And there were so many steps and phases and parts of this that I won't even get into now.

But I am in utter disbelief that this moment

is finally here. I'm in disbelief for so many reasons, primarily because there were so many

points in my journey of entrepreneurship, and there have been so many points that I have felt as though I was doing

something wrong that I haven't been doing enough that I am completely missing the mark,

that I need help and all these things can be true at different moments. But on a day like today

where I can say a sentence like that, I am utterly almost beside myself. And that is not entirely what I want

to talk about on the podcast today. What I want to talk about today on the show is really the sense of

duality that I've really been lingering in lately and something that I experienced in the creation of this campaign.

So for context, it's a video that will now live on the Birkenstock website. It went live on

social media or is going live depending on when you're listening to this on June 14th at 9 a.m. And I was so scared to shoot this campaign.

And it had nothing to do about the product itself. I have been wearing Birkenstocks for as long as I can

remember. I believe I got my first pair, maybe around 14, 15 years old. And I think that I had a pair of

Birkenstocks from age 18 to age 30, like the exact same pair that I had so much love and affection

for. Needless to say, my purpose for wearing Birkenstock certainly evolved over time. For a long

time, it was just a shoe that everyone was wearing that I loved the way that it looked,

it was comfortable, and so I too owned a pair. But as I became more active in my pursuit of a

different lifestyle, Birkenstock became the companion

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