Helping people build work around the life they actually want to live.
Julie Droege is an award-winning marketing strategist
and the founder of Wild Folke Method —
a practice built from lived experience across
schools, restaurants, nonprofits, and national brands.
At Whole Foods Market, she was named the company’s first-ever Marketing All-Star, helping elevate the role of storytelling and strategic growth across the organization. Her nationally recognized work bringing the FEED 100 Bag to life generated millions of meals for families in Rwanda. She has secured record-breaking grants for food rescue initiatives and leveraged media partnerships to bring national attention to independent retailers and mission-driven organizations.
Julie builds strategy from the inside out — turning lived experience into aligned growth without asking organizations to dilute what makes them distinct.
She believes business is never separate from values. She advocates for equality, LGBTQ+ rights, and amplifying women’s voices as a cornerstone for ethical leadership. She serves on multiple nonprofit boards and plans to pet as many dogs as possible in one lifetime.
Julie Droege, Founder of Wild Folke Method
Julie has placed and authored work in regional outlets including CT Insider, Litchfield Magazine, and Duchess Magazine, elevating mission-driven brands through strategic storytelling and media partnership.
Her own essays have been published in The Memoirist, where she writes about identity, resilience, and the act of becoming.
She is in the process of finishing her first novel, the Women of the Western Woods, Part memoir, part ancestral exploration, The Women of the Western Woods follows one woman’s journey to understand the love she learned, the patterns she repeated, and the moment she begins to choose something different.
Julie approaches every project with the same belief: story, when told well, changes what is possible.
Writer & Author
Julie was born and raised in St. Louis, a city layered with immigrant history and Southern influence.
By the 1990s, it pulsed with a kind of radical creative energy that shaped any teenager bold enough to question what was handed to them.
Raised in a faith tradition that spoke often of love — and taught her to notice when love and action don’t align — Julie developed an early instinct for integrity. That tension between words and reality would later become central to her work: story must match practice.
Drawn to a bigger life, she moved first to the outskirts of New York City, then to Boston, building experience inside fast-moving, complex environments. Eventually, fate (and perhaps wisdom) carried her to rural Connecticut, where subway platforms gave way to dairy cows and her teenager now keeps her current on which words are officially uncool.
Her roots are layered — Midwestern, East Coast, Southern-adjacent — but her throughline is consistent: build something true, and don’t be afraid to grow beyond what first shaped you.
Her Roots
