Today we’d like to introduce you to Emily Moody.
Hi Emily, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My path has never been especially linear, but looking back, there’s a really clear thread through all of it: I love creating places, experiences, and ideas that bring people together.
I’ve spent more than 20 years working at the intersection of creativity, community, small business, arts and culture, and placemaking in Jacksonville. Over the years, that has taken a lot of different forms, from working in the arts and cultural sector to producing events, activating underused spaces, supporting local makers and entrepreneurs, developing neighborhood programming, and building businesses and creative projects of my own.
In 2015, my husband, Varick Rosete, and I founded Wolf & Cub. What started as a small independent retail concept became a creative laboratory of sorts for so many of the things we care about: thoughtful design, local culture, sustainability, storytelling, and creating spaces where people genuinely want to spend time. Over the years, Wolf & Cub has also grown from a shop that curates interesting things into a brand that creates them. We design and produce our own line of apparel, accessories, candles, personal care products, and Jacksonville-inspired goods alongside the independent brands, vintage pieces, plants, home goods, and work from local makers that we carry. Creating our own products has become one of my favorite parts of the business because it allows us to translate our point of view—and our love for Jacksonville—into something tangible that people can take home, wear, use, and make part of their everyday lives.
More than a decade later, Wolf & Cub continues to evolve alongside us and alongside Downtown Jacksonville. Today, from our home on Church Street, it’s as much about community, discovery, and connection as it is about what’s on the shelves.
That same desire to create connection in unexpected places also led to Little Alley Shows, another project that is really close to my heart. The idea is incredibly simple: take an overlooked alley in Downtown Jacksonville, add music, people, and a little bit of magic, and completely change the way people experience that space.
Little Alley Shows brings intimate live performances into Church Street Alley, creating a setting where the relationship between the artist, the audience, and the city feels completely different from a traditional venue. The small scale is intentional. There’s something special about hearing great music with a limited group of people tucked between buildings in the middle of Downtown. For a couple of hours, an ordinary alley becomes a place people remember.
For me, Little Alley Shows is also a perfect example of placemaking. You don’t always need a massive budget, a new building, or a huge event to change the way someone feels about a place. Sometimes you need a string of lights, a musician, some chairs, and a reason for people to show up. Once people experience a forgotten or overlooked space differently, they begin to imagine what else it could become. I love creating those moments.
Along the way, I’ve had the opportunity to work on projects throughout Jacksonville that have shaped the way I think about cities and community. My work at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens deepened my connection to arts and culture, and later, my work with PHXJAX allowed me to explore adaptive reuse, neighborhood revitalization, public art, small business incubation, and creative placemaking on a much larger scale. I became especially interested in what happens when we stop thinking about development solely in terms of buildings and start thinking about the life that happens between and inside them.
That idea ultimately led me to my current role as Director of Placemaking and Experience at Gateway Jax, where I get to focus on creating experiences, public spaces, programming, partnerships, and cultural moments that help shape the next chapter of Downtown Jacksonville. It feels like so many pieces of my career have converged here—retail, hospitality, events, arts and culture, community building, entrepreneurship, and development.
At the same time, I’m still very much an entrepreneur and a maker at heart. I continue to run Wolf & Cub and Little Alley Shows while staying involved in organizations and initiatives that support Jacksonville’s neighborhoods and creative community. Having those projects outside of my day-to-day work keeps me connected to the small-scale, grassroots side of placemaking that I love so much.
I think the biggest lesson from my career has been that you don’t necessarily have to choose one lane. For a long time, the fact that I was interested in so many different things felt difficult to explain. Now I realize those different experiences are exactly what allow me to do the work I do today. Retail informs how I think about streets. Events teach me how people move through spaces. Arts and culture create identity. Small businesses create personality. Development creates opportunity. And community is what gives all of it meaning.
At the center of everything is Jacksonville. I care deeply about this city and believe in its creative potential. Whether I’m designing a T-shirt for Wolf & Cub, putting a musician in an alley, imagining a public art installation, or thinking about the experience of an entire neighborhood, I’m ultimately asking the same question: How can we make this place feel more interesting, more welcoming, and more connected—and give people a reason to care about it?
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Definitely not! I’m not sure any interesting path really is. 😉
One of the biggest challenges throughout my career has been choosing to work in spaces where there often isn’t a roadmap. Whether it’s opening an independent retail business, producing an intimate concert series in an alley, activating an overlooked property, or helping imagine what a neighborhood could become, so much of my work has involved seeing potential before the finished version exists. That can be incredibly exciting, but it also requires a lot of persistence.
Owning a small business has probably taught me the most about resilience. Wolf & Cub has been around for more than a decade, and during that time retail has changed dramatically. We’ve navigated changing neighborhoods, changing consumer habits, rising costs, the pandemic, moves and reinventions, and all of the everyday realities of running an independent business. There have absolutely been moments when it would have been easier to stop.
Instead, we’ve learned to evolve. Wolf & Cub has never stayed exactly the same. We’ve expanded our own product line, experimented with events and workshops, changed the way we merchandise and tell our story, and continued finding new ways to connect with our customers. I’ve learned that longevity doesn’t necessarily come from finding one formula that works and repeating it forever. Sometimes it comes from knowing what is core to who you are while being willing to change almost everything else around it.
There are similar challenges in placemaking and community development. Good ideas don’t happen in a vacuum. You’re working with property owners, residents, businesses, artists, city agencies, developers, budgets, timelines, regulations, and sometimes very different definitions of what success looks like. The creative idea might be the exciting part, but bringing it to life requires patience, trust, compromise, and an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes problem solving.
I’ve also had to learn to be comfortable with ideas that don’t work. Not every event is packed. Not every product sells. Not every partnership comes together. Not every concept gets funded. Some ideas that I’ve been incredibly excited about have never made it past a sketch or a conversation. Earlier in my career, I probably saw those moments as failures. Now I see them as part of the process. Sometimes an idea that doesn’t work teaches you exactly what you need for the next one.
On a personal level, one of my ongoing challenges has been learning how to balance being a creative person with actually executing the ideas. I have no shortage of ideas! But creativity without follow-through doesn’t create much impact. Over time, I’ve become much more disciplined about asking: What is actually possible? Who needs to be at the table? What does it cost? Who owns it? How do we sustain it after the exciting launch moment?
And then there’s Jacksonville itself. I love this city deeply, but anyone who has worked to create something new here knows that change can take time. There can be a temptation to focus on what Jacksonville doesn’t have or what hasn’t worked in the past. I’ve always been much more interested in what it could be and what we can build with the people, creativity, history, and character that are already here.
If anything, the less-than-smooth parts of the journey have made me more committed to the work. They’ve taught me to be resourceful, to keep evolving, to surround myself with people who know things I don’t, and to not be afraid of starting small.
Some of the projects I’m most proud of began with very little more than an idea and a belief that a place could feel different. I’ve learned that you don’t have to have everything figured out before you begin. Sometimes you just have to be willing to start, pay attention, adjust, and keep going.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
When I was asked to choose the category that best describes my career, the options included business, professional, artist/creative, or other. I chose “other,” because the truth is I’m a little bit of all of them.
I’m an entrepreneur, a creative, a placemaker, a producer, a strategist, a retailer, and a community builder. Depending on the day, I might be thinking about the programming of a public space, designing a new T-shirt for Wolf & Cub, working with an artist on a public art project, developing an event concept, thinking through the guest experience of a new neighborhood, or figuring out how to turn an overlooked space into somewhere people actually want to be.
My current role as Director of Placemaking and Experience at Gateway Jax brings many of those worlds together. My work focuses on the human side of development. I think about what makes a neighborhood feel alive, how people experience a place, what gives it personality, and what makes someone want to come back. That can mean public art, events and programming, retail, food and beverage, partnerships, landscaping, lighting, music, wellness, hospitality, or simply creating a really great place to sit and spend an afternoon.
I think my specialty is seeing the potential in things, especially places that other people might overlook. An empty storefront, an alley, a vacant lot, an old building, or an underused public space immediately makes me start imagining what could happen there. I love connecting the dots between people, place, culture, and experience and then figuring out how to actually make the idea happen.
That same philosophy runs through my independent creative work. With Wolf & Cub, my husband Varick and I have spent more than a decade building something that blends retail, design, local culture, and community. In addition to curating products from independent brands and makers, we create our own line of apparel, accessories, candles, personal care products, and Jacksonville-inspired goods. With Little Alley Shows, I take something as simple as an alley and use intimate live music to create an experience that changes the way people see and remember that space.
What I’m most proud of is probably not one individual project. It’s the body of work and the relationships that have grown around it. I’m proud that I’ve been able to build a career in Jacksonville around creativity and ideas, while supporting other artists, musicians, makers, small businesses, and entrepreneurs along the way. I’m proud when something I’ve worked on gives someone else an opportunity, introduces people to a part of the city they hadn’t experienced before, or makes someone feel more connected to where they live.
I also think one of the things that sets me apart is that I understand these projects from several different sides of the table. I know what it feels like to be the small business owner trying to make the numbers work. I know what it feels like to be the creative person pitching an unconventional idea. I understand programming, operations, budgets, branding, marketing, hospitality, and community engagement. And now, working within large-scale development, I understand much more about the complexity of actually building and sustaining places over time.
That combination has made me very practical about creativity. I love big ideas, but I’m equally interested in how we get them out of a presentation and into the real world. Who is going to run it? What does it cost? How does it sustain itself? Does the community actually want it? Does it feel authentic to the place? And most importantly, will people use it and care about it?
Ultimately, I think what I’m known for is bringing ideas to life and bringing people together around them. I’m endlessly curious, I love collaboration, and I’m rarely interested in doing something simply because that’s the way it has always been done.
So “other” feels pretty accurate. I’ve stopped trying to fit all of the pieces of my career into one box. The intersection of business, creativity, community, culture, and place is exactly where I want to be.
What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
The most important lesson I’ve learned is that you don’t have to have everything figured out before you start. I think a lot of us wait for the perfect moment, the perfect plan, enough money, the right space, or someone to give us permission to move forward. Some of the most meaningful things I’ve been part of started without any of those things. They started with an idea, a few people who believed in it, and a willingness to try.
I’ve also learned not to underestimate the power of starting small. A tiny shop can become a community. A concert in an alley can change the way people experience a city block. A temporary activation can help people imagine the future of a neighborhood. Small things, when they are thoughtful and authentic, can create momentum far beyond their original scale.
Another important lesson has been learning to trust the fact that my path doesn’t look traditional. For a long time, I felt like I needed to define exactly what I was. Was I an entrepreneur? A creative? A producer? A placemaker? A community builder? Eventually I realized that the intersection of all those things is actually my strength. Every experience has given me another lens through which to look at a problem or an opportunity.
I’ve also learned that ideas are only a small part of the equation. Relationships, consistency, and follow-through matter just as much. The best work I’ve been part of has happened because people trusted one another enough to build something together. Creativity might spark the idea, but collaboration is usually what makes it real.
And maybe most importantly, I’ve learned to stay curious. Cities change. Businesses change. People change. I change. I never want to become so attached to one version of an idea, a business, or even myself that I stop being open to what it could become next. So much of my journey has been about being willing to begin, learning as I go, surrounding myself with good people, and allowing things to evolve. I think that willingness to keep experimenting and keep moving forward has opened doors I never could have planned for when I started.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://wolfandcubjax.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wolfandcubjax
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfandcub/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilyhmoody
