Build Your Own Boat

Most advertising agencies chase the youngest consumers in the room. Susan Colby built a thriving creative agency by doing the exact opposite. This episode of Build Your Own Boat explores how Susan — a veteran of iconic agencies including Chiat\Day and BBDO — left the traditional ad world, raised her children, and returned in her late 40s with a radical idea: that women over 50 are the most powerful, most overlooked, and most underserved consumer demographic in America.

Susan founded Grace Creative LA, a boutique agency specializing in marketing to women 50+, at a time when the industry was still chasing millennials. She shares how she turned deep personal experience, hard data, and a strong creative network into a growing business — winning major clients like Golden Door Spa and Seabourn Cruise Line — and why she believes marketing to the longevity economy isn't just the right thing to do. It's the smartest business move a brand can make.

Susan Colby is the founder of Grace Creative LA, a boutique advertising and marketing agency based in Los Angeles that specializes in reaching women over 50. Susan spent the early years of her career at some of the most respected agencies in the country, including Chiat\Day, BBDO, and RPA, working on major brands including Apple Computer. After stepping away to raise her children and doing marketing work for independent schools, she returned to the industry in her late 40s — and rather than quietly fit back in, she saw a gap that no one else was addressing.

She launched Grace Creative around a single, data-backed insight: that women over 50 are the most economically powerful consumer demographic in America, and they were almost entirely invisible in mainstream advertising. Since then, Grace Creative has worked with clients including Golden Door Spa — producing a campaign with legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz — and Seabourn, the ultra-luxury cruise line, winning a competitive pitch against ten other agencies. Susan is also an age activist, a champion of multi-generational workplaces, and the co-creator of Girls Gone 50, a social media community on Instagram and Facebook built to authentically connect with and celebrate women in the 50+ demographic.

Women over 50 make more than 85% of household purchasing decisions and collectively hold an estimated $19 trillion in assets. According to AARP economists, the economic output of Americans aged 50 and older would rank as the third-largest economy in the world, behind only the U.S. overall and China. Despite this, advertising budgets directed at this group remain disproportionately small — often under 10% of total spend — making it one of the most underleveraged opportunities in marketing today.

Middlecence is a concept — associated with researcher and author Barbara Waxman — that reframes the years around and after 50 as a period of identity renewal rather than decline. Women at this stage are often becoming empty nesters, navigating career transitions, and stepping into a new sense of freedom and purpose. Grace Creative uses this insight to develop campaigns that feel authentic to where women actually are in their lives, rather than defaulting to anti-aging narratives or generic "active senior" tropes.

Susan built Grace Creative gradually — tapping her existing network of creative, account, and business professionals from her advertising career, building a focused website, and honing a clear mission. Her first major client, Golden Door Spa, came through a warm connection. From there, she competed — and won — on the strength of her positioning and creative insight, including a competitive pitch against ten agencies for the Seabourn account, which she has held for nearly five years.

According to Susan, yes — slowly. Beauty and fashion brands, including Estée Lauder and L'Oréal, have been early adopters in speaking to the 50+ audience. More brands are now reviewing their consumer data and recognizing that their highest-spending, most loyal customers are in this demographic. However, Susan notes that true progress means moving beyond tokenism — one gray-haired model in a campaign — toward authentic representation that reflects the full range of experiences women have at this life stage.

Susan puts it directly: ageism in the workplace often forces the issue — if you want to keep working and contributing, building your own boat may be the most viable path forward. But the upside is that you also get to build the kind of business you actually want. For Grace Creative, that meant building a culture grounded in resilience, grace, and genuine respect — qualities that Susan felt were undervalued in the agencies she had worked for earlier in her career.

Build Your Own Boat is a podcast series hosted by Janine Vanderburg — award-winning three-time entrepreneur and anti-ageism advocate — featuring women who have launched new entrepreneurial ventures in midlife and beyond. The series is part of a larger storytelling project that includes a Substack publication and a forthcoming book, all built around one goal: changing the narrative about who entrepreneurs are and making women in midlife and beyond visible as builders of wealth, freedom, and possibility.