Hi, I’m Ariel Meadow Stallings

I’ve been building things on the internet since 1996, back when digital publishing meant arguing about HTML and hoping your 56k modem held. Thirty years later I’m still here… which means my perspectives on media, technology, and small business are all hard-earned.

These days I split my time between running Offbeat Empire’s publications and working 1:1 with small business owners who need outside eyes on a specific problem.

I’m best known for founding Offbeat Wed, a publication that’s served 100M+ readers and won every SEO game worth playing, but I’m also the author of several books, most recently From Sh!tshow to Afterglow (Hachette Book Group in 2020), a memoir/self-help book about midlife transitions and post-traumatic growth.

In my consulting work, care about how doing business actually feels, not just how it performs. I will never tell anyone to hustle harder, optimize everything, boss up, or outsource their intuition to tech. I bring depth and pragmatism to every project. Sure I lurve a good checklist, but I also believe in conscious dance and somatic grounding practices.

To understand how I got here, let’s rewind to an island forest in the ’70s. I was raised by hippies as a sheltered little oddball in the woods on an island near Seattle. Deeply dorky, I came of age singing in musical theater and going to Pearl Jam concerts with BBS buddies (bulletin board systems were the ancient chatrooms for us early ’90s nerds!). Eventually, I graduated to studying social systems and media at the University of Washington.

My media career started in 1997 writing event reviews for a rave magazine in San Francisco. After graduating with my degree in sociology, I split my time between editing that rave magazine and working gigs for local PNW tech industry giants like Microsoft and Amazon.

In 2001, I attended the prestigious Columbia Publishing Course at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Although it didn’t help me with my dream of working for magazines in New York (those jobs were already dying out in the early ’00s), it did help me sell my first book, Offbeat Bride.

I launched the Offbeat Bride website (now Offbeat Wed) in 2007. The original plan was just to promote my book, but I instead I spent the next couple decades scaling the website into a globally-visible publishing company. Along the way, I continued to work jobs in tech, legacy media (Seattle Times), and digital publishing (Medium), leading cross-functional initiatives and doing product management.

I’ve authored three books, built and sold publications, and managed editorial and development teams for the better part of two decades. In 2025, I pivoted toward business consulting: less broadcasting to millions, more working directly with the founders and small business owners who need outside eyes on a specific problem.

The Offbeat Empire publications still run, serving a million readers a year and a vendor community of hundreds of wedding professionals. That side of the business funds itself through memberships and digital products while I focus on consulting.