Krissi Edgington ’05 has always been a challenger. So it wasn’t a surprise to many when she left her career as a sports marketing executive to become an entrepreneur.
“I’m a curious kind of troublemaker, and I always say I’m an advocate of ‘why,’” Edgington says. “I think ‘why’ gets a bad rap. A lot of times it’s considered to be this challenging, confrontational, resistance word, but to me, it is such a superpower.”
During her time at Butler, Edgington’s challenger mindset pushed her to combine different experiences and skill sets to align with her dream career in sports media, from Communications and Psychology courses to an internship with the Indiana Pacers.
And just years after graduation, Edgington was living her dream, occupying seats at influential tables as Vice President of a sports and entertainment marketing agency—until becoming a mom forced her to confront some new whys.
“I struggled terribly for the first time in my life with a ‘What am I doing here?’ situation,” Edgington says. “Here I was dropping off my infant and preemie babies to be raised by strangers every day, while I was going to do work that sometimes felt great and sometimes felt very misaligned.”
Returning to work armed with a handmade sign reading “Make It Worth It,” Edgington did all she could to make her time away from her babies matter. That is, until she realized how much more meaningful her work could be if she were in the driver’s seat, ensuring every project she touched aligned with her values, expertise, and purpose.
A year later, Edgington took the leap and left her job to begin working with her first consulting client, Butler University, before eventually founding MIWI Marketing.
MIWI—which is pronounced “my why” and stands for “Make It Worth It”—challenges the way brands market, encouraging clients to find their why.
“One of the things I say very directly to clients is, ‘What will have changed because you were there?’’’ Edgington says. “It’s not just about what you do, but it’s about what you create because of that.”
In just 10 years since its founding, MIWI has grown to four dedicated team members and earned media mentions for clients on ESPN, in The New York Times, and more, all the while transforming clients’ multifaceted brand identities and challenging limiting beliefs every step of the way.
Around the same time Edgington was establishing MIWI Marketing, another opportunity arose out of tragedy.
Andrew Smith ’13, a member of Butler’s back-to-back NCAA Finals Men’s Basketball teams, had just lost his two-year battle with cancer. His widow, Samantha, began championing bone marrow registry drives—a bone marrow transplant had added three months to her late husband’s life—but there was much more that could be done.
“When I came in, I was really looking to maximize my experience in athlete branding and cause marketing to say, ‘All right, there’s something here that needs to be done,’” Edgington says. “Andrew had a platform. We have a platform. What good can we create from this tragedy?”
Edgington partnered with the University to campaign Butler Blue III as the national ambassador for the Be The Match bone marrow registry before pitching an impactful story to ESPN.
The story in question was how Chase Stigall ’13, a teammate of Andrew’s, saved the life of a 2-year-old battling leukemia after adding his name to the bone marrow registry at Smith’s celebration of life. Amplifying Stigall’s and Smith’s stories was just the beginning.
In 2016, Edgington and Samantha Smith-Michael cofounded Project 44, a nonprofit housed at Butler aimed at saving lives by growing the national bone marrow registry. And while it’s difficult to put a number to how many lives Project 44 has saved, the nonprofit has added thousands of willing donors to the registry in its 10 years.
From transforming brands at MIWI Marketing to saving lives with Project 44, it’s no question that Edgington has always been good at finding the why.
Her real superpower? Finding—and working tirelessly to achieve—the how.