Meet Cherie Tye | I am just Cherie

We had the good fortune of connecting with Cherie Tye and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Cherie, how does your business help the community?
Pray Date exists because most people never get the chance to sit with what they actually believe and turn it into something real. That gap costs them. It costs their work. It costs their relationships. It costs their sense of self.
The community impact is not a program or a donation line. It is the work itself. When someone comes through Pray Date and goes through the process of meaning extraction, they leave with more than an artifact. They leave knowing what they stand for. That clarity shows up in how they lead, how they build, how they show up in their city.
Columbus is a city with serious creative talent and serious gaps in creative infrastructure. Pray Date is building that infrastructure. The development model and the work itself are designed to make depth visible and make it accessible to people who were never told their story was worth building from.
The world does not need more product. It needs more people who know why they are building. That is the social impact.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
My work is rooted in one conviction: everyone has a story worth building from. Most people just never had anyone help them find it.
I came up in New York across every level of the creative and business world. Hard products, fashion, creative direction, events, nightlife, the service industry. If it required building something from nothing or making something mean something, I was in that room. That range is not accidental. It is the foundation. It taught me how to move across industries without losing the thread, how to read a room, a brand, a person, and find what is actually worth building from.
The move to Columbus was not a step back. It was a recalibration. A different pace, a different creative landscape, a different set of problems worth solving. Pray Date was born out of that season. Not as a pivot but as an arrival.
What sets me apart is the process. I do not start with aesthetics. I start with conviction. What do you actually believe? What have you actually lived? That becomes the raw material. Everything else follows.
Getting here was not easy. There were seasons where the infrastructure around me did not match the vision inside me. I had to learn to build in the gap. Faith was not a comfort during those seasons. It was an operating system.
What I want the world to know is that Pray Date is not a brand agency or a design studio. It is a creative contract with yourself. The work we do here is load bearing. And we are just getting started.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Honestly, Columbus does not need a packed itinerary to make an impression. Take them to the Goetchius House for dinner. That building and that food will do all the talking. Then walk through the Bo Bartlett Center to check out some local artist work. Two stops. Both worth it.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
First and foremost, my father God. Everything starts and ends there.
Beyond that, this one is hard to answer without writing a book. There are people from New York to Georgia who took a chance on me, let me into their rooms, their projects, their processes. Some taught me by example. Some taught me by contrast. All of it built something.
I am not going to name names because the people who belong in this answer already know who they are and what they contributed. What I will say is that every city I have worked in, every collaboration I have been trusted with, every moment someone said “come be a part of this” shaped how Pray Date thinks and operates today.
I carry all of it. And I am grateful.