Over last holiday season, I ran into someone I hadn’t seen in a while. After the hug and the familiar catching up, they asked the question I’ve been hearing more often lately: How is Frankie & Jo’s doing and what are you up to these days? It wasn’t intrusive, just curious in the way people are when they’ve known you inside a chapter for a long time and aren’t quite sure how to place you as that chapter seems like it is closing.
For years, Frankie & Jo’s has followed me into grocery stores, school gatherings, dinner parties, and casual conversations with strangers. It has been shorthand for who I am, a way people orient themselves to me without needing the whole story — oh that’s Kari, one of the Frankie & Jo’s owners. When you build something publicly and over a long period of time, it stops being just your work and begins to shape how you are seen, how you introduce yourself, and sometimes how you understand yourself as well.
So here it is. A change I have been waiting for and ready to shed for a while now: as of May 1, 2026, I am no longer operating Frankie & Jo’s (cowbells, triangles, confetti!) — although I still remain an owner, for now.
Leaving hasn’t been dramatic or abrupt. It’s been a long, often painful, and ultimately thoughtful unwinding — full of conversations, transitions, logistics, and an emotional landscape that doesn’t resolve linearly. There has been relief alongside sadness, gratitude alongside grief, and a sense of rightness that doesn’t cancel out the loss of a project I have poured my whole heart into. The work is now learning how to inhabit myself without something that once took up a lot of space in this life of mine.
This isn’t my first time navigating an ending. Before Frankie & Jo’s, there was Juicebox, and before that, my ballet career. I grieved each of those chapters in my own way — not just the work itself, but the versions of me that lived inside them. Those endings taught me something I trust now: grief doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice, you are a quitter, or weren’t committed. It means something mattered enough to shape you. And if I’m honest, I’ve been grieving this decision for years and years already.
What’s been clarifying in the stillness that follows leaving is how slowly, and consistently, my identity has been shifting — as it always does when I career change. With dancing, I was teaching myself how to cook, and suddenly retired as I was accelerating in my career. With Juicebox Cafe, I had Frankie & Jo’s, and I knew the 2020 closure was the right strategic business move during the tumultuous time of Covid. And long before deciding to step away from Frankie & Jo’s, my work had already begun moving inward and relationally — away from products and toward people, away from constant output and toward sustained conversation. I found myself more interested in the internal lives of leaders than in the next launch, more drawn to the questions people carry privately than to the metrics they share publicly. For years now, I’ve been sitting with founders, operators, and creatives as they navigate exhaustion, misalignment, growth, and the reckonings that come with success.
Over time, those conversations became the place where my energy gathered rather than drained. I noticed how naturally I listened, how easily I tracked patterns across someone’s history, how attuned I was to the moment when someone was ready to tell themselves the truth instead of repeating a story that kept them functional but stuck. As I always quote, “The Universe whispers before it screams”.
So when I say that what comes next is building my coaching and consulting practice, it doesn’t feel like a pivot or a reinvention, and nobody here is surprised. Right? It’s a continuation of what I have been doing. Coaching is where my years of building, leading, failing, learning, exiting, and letting go converge — where I get to work with the internal architecture that shapes how people lead, decide, and live, rather than only the external structures they build.
If you find yourself in your own in-between, I know how tender and disorienting that space can be. I also know it isn’t empty. It’s active, reorganizing things beneath the surface. It needs patience rather than urgency (something I deeeeeeeply struggle with).
This is where I am now: grieving what was, grounded in what I’ve learned, and stepping forward into work that feels aligned and true to me (and hopefully my final career… maybe?). And, not because I have everything figured out, but because I trust what’s been forming over time.
I am still a ballet dancer. I am still the founder of Frankie & Jo’s and Juicebox Cafe.
And, I am now a leadership coach and consultant.
To new beginnings and letting go,
KBW
🙌🏻💙
Beautifully articulated per usual!