The shelf was real. Not a metaphor, not a simple way of saying she’d set a dream aside. Jacqui Fishman had an actual portfolio of designs sitting on an actual shelf in her office, and for more than twenty years she walked past it every single day.
Every so often, she’d take a dust cloth to it.
“It always picked at my brain,” she told me. “I’m not done with this.”
I met Jacqui through TheLegacy Project, an organization making intergenerational connections, where we both sit on the advisory board. When I discovered she’d built a venture called This Girl Can! Change the World—and saw the baby onesies with a sassy little stick figure whose hair is going every direction—I did what any new grandmother of a baby girl would do. I bought one for my granddaughter. Then I asked Jacqui if we could talk. Because this isn’t a hobby that wandered into a cause. This is a cause.
Jacqui has spent her career as a marketing strategist and storyteller, mostly for small startups and nonprofits in children’s media. She has a graduate degree from Harvard focused on how the things kids see and hear shape who they believe they’re allowed to become. She’s the person founders come to when they have an idea scrawled on the back of a cocktail napkin.
I’m at heart a storyteller. I love telling other people’s stories, helping them hone that story and bringing the audience they need to it.
But one story kept getting deferred: her own.
The idea started decades ago, when Jacqui was building a sports brand and kept walking trade show floors thinking, there’s nothing here for women and little girls. She built a line to fix that, sold it into retail for years, and then—life. Retail changed. The designs went on the shelf. And there they stayed.
What pulled them back down wasn’t a business plan. It was a moment. Jacqui went to a political event in Boston expecting to be asked for money. Instead, she found herself watching twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls roll up their sleeves, knock on doors, and speak passionately about changing their own communities.
That was the light bulb. It’s time.
Here’s the idea that makes Jacqui’s work more than merchandise. She talks about something she calls the confidence cliff.
Little girls, she points out, arrive loud and sure of themselves. Any mother of daughters knows the feeling—they want you to know they’re there. They’ll climb anything, try anything, say exactly what’s on their minds.
“When they hit ten, eleven, twelve, that confidence, that voice starts to erode. They start to doubt. They start to lose their sense of self.”
Jacqui’s fix isn’t a self-esteem poster. She’s careful to say she’s not selling “believe in yourself.” She’s after something sharper: claim your voice, claim the respect you deserve.
Her main character, Jane—a stick figure, because she’s meant to be every girl—is sassy and messy with her hair all over her head. Jane is the interrupter. In the stories Jacqui is writing, Jane is a library kid, tired of being shushed, who falls into books and meets the women who came before her: scientists, politicians, artists the world also said no to.
The through-line from her media career to This Girl isn’t a leap. It’s the same conviction she’s held since she started using television to get books into kids’ hands—that what children absorb early is what they carry. Only now the stakes feel higher, with screens in every tiny hand and what she bluntly calls “AI slop” being fed to brains too young to filter it.
For any woman sitting with an idea she’s been dusting off—here’s what Jacqui did, in plain terms:
Test it before you bet the house on it. Jacqui went back to what she calls her “Wilma Flintstone roots”—she printed a short run and mailed samples to her own circle. “You don’t have to have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars to launch something.”
Ask honestly whether the idea still works today. She tried modernizing Jane—gave her a Reese Witherspoon ponytail, a Taylor Swift look. It flopped. “She lost her sass. It’s just not who she is.” Sometimes the update is knowing what not to change.
Price with both respect and self-respect. She wants a revenue stream she can give back from, but she refuses to price women out. “Unless the cost of cotton goes insane, I will never charge forty dollars for a t-shirt.”
Expect to pivot when a plan gets blocked. More on that in a second.
Build partnerships, not just posts. Her real growth engine is mission-driven partnerships—Ignite, the women’s history museum, Girl Scout troops. “That’s where this brand will build.”
Here’s the pivot. When Jacqui relaunched around the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, she made a commemorative This Girl Can Vote design—Jane dressed as a suffragist, holding a sign. She put a little money behind a Facebook ad to test the waters.
Facebook shut her down. They flagged it as political. She was, as she pointed out, paying them.
I had to pause the recording to breathe. Think about it: a platform that powerful deciding that commemorating women’s right to vote is too political to allow.
The shutdown was so total that to run ads today she’d have to dismantle and rebuild every account—which she has no interest in doing. So she pivoted. She stayed on social media with steady content, sharpened the language on her website, built an online shop where she could keep testing what people responded to, and leaned into the partnerships that actually move her mission.
There’s a reason we tell these stories on Build Your Own Boat. When most people picture an entrepreneur, they picture a young man in a hoodie in a coffee shop. They rarely picture a woman with gray hair. And that invisibility isn’t harmless—it shows up as a lack of support networks for founders “of a certain age,” a gap Jacqui named out loud and turned back on me as a question.
It’s all connected. The narrow images girls are served become the imposter voice that whispers who are you kidding? on a job interview, in a corner office, and—decades later—at a kitchen table when a woman finally decides to build the thing she always wanted to build. Jacqui is trying to reach girls before that voice moves in. And she’s living proof that even if it did, you can still take the idea off the shelf.
So many women lived the life they were asked to live, supposed to live, were dictated to live. They never lived the life that they wanted to.
If you’re that woman—the one at the kitchen table with something waiting on a shelf—Jacqui has a message. “Call me. We’ll sit down, we’ll brainstorm. And don’t be afraid to step out of any comfort zone and prototype it.”
The idea doesn’t have an expiration date. And eventually, if you let it, it starts yelling.
Check out the podcast of this interview, and those of the other amazing women that I’ve interviewed to be inspired and to glean ideas and tips from the playbooks they share.
Jacqui Fishman is the founder of This Girl Can Change the World. Visit thisgirlcan.com to shop the line, learn about the book and animation series in development, or explore partnership opportunities. You can also follow This Girl Can Change the World on social media—yes, she’s on every platform now.
Loved this conversation? Subscribe to Build Your Own Boat, and send this episode to the woman in your life with a dream still sitting on a shelf. You know who she is.
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