About the Luminary Guides
Mica May and Taylor Nichols are co-founders of The Luminary Collective, bringing together decades of experience in creative entrepreneurship, culture-building, and human-centered leadership. Their passion is to support visionary women who are ready to realign their businesses with their lives.
Together, they offer what many creative entrepreneurs quietly crave but rarely find:
permission to pause, clarity to recalibrate, and the support to move forward with intention.
Mica May
Co-FounderMica May is a creative visionary and founder best known for building May Designs into a nationally recognized brand rooted in personalization, beauty, and intention. For over a decade, she has helped people steward their ideas, goals, and creativity through thoughtfully designed products—turning everyday tools into meaningful touchpoints for aligned living.
For years, Mica led the Trailblazer Retreat—a creative gathering for women entrepreneurs. When the pandemic hit, she experienced burnout after 15 years of hustle culture with May Designs. That breaking point became an invitation to recalibrate completely. Out of that pause, she started a makers space, DIY Studio—this time with a different rhythm, rooted in connection over metrics, learning that growing slow can be deeply good. That transformation taught her to honor both ambition and actual capacity, rest and self-care rhythms alongside growth. Now she helps other luminaries recalibrate before they reach that breaking point, designing businesses that sustain rather than deplete.
Mica understands firsthand what it takes to build something meaningful—and what it costs when creative brilliance is stretched too thin. She brings strategic insight, creative wisdom, and lived entrepreneurial experience to Luminaries who are ready to reconnect with why they started and how they want to move forward.
Taylor Nichols
Co-Founder
Taylor Nichols is a culture-shaper, storyteller, and relational leader known for helping people lead from alignment, both in business and in life. As Principal and Managing Member of Nichols Engineering, Taylor played a pivotal role in shaping company culture, employee experience, and leadership infrastructure from the ground up, supporting teams through growth, complexity, and change.
Through years of leadership, Taylor saw firsthand how misalignment shows up not just in strategy or performance, but in the body. Chronic stress, disconnection, people-pleasing, and burnout became quiet signals that something deeper was asking for attention. That realization led her beyond traditional leadership development and into the study and practice of nervous system awareness, values alignment, and embodied leadership.
Taylor’s work now centers on helping leaders slow down enough to listen to themselves, to their capacity, and to what is actually sustainable. She supports women in dismantling patterns of over-functioning, releasing internal pressure, and learning how to lead from a regulated, grounded place rather than urgency or self-sacrifice.
As the creator of Speak Life and through her work with The Luminary Collective, Taylor brings calm presence, deep listening, and honest guidance to entrepreneurs who are ready to align their inner world with the businesses they are building. She helps Luminaries reconnect with themselves so growth feels expansive, not exhausting, and leadership becomes something that supports life rather than consuming it.