Today we’d like to introduce you to Elizabeth Anderson.
Hi Elizabeth, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I grew up below the poverty line in rural Alabama, which was a very challenging life. I was fortunate to receive a music scholarship which enabled me to become a first-generation college student at the University of Alabama, double majoring in music theory and flute performance. During college one of the jobs I did to pay the bills was website design and development for small businesses, and as part of my music theory degree I did an extensive amount of work with electronic music, which includes coding. I didn’t expect to land in tech, but it seems like it was always in the cards.
After college, I went to work in banking just before the 2008 financial crisis. Although I was fortunate to keep my job, that industry wasn’t really where I wanted to be. I eventually moved into FinTech, working on software solutions for large international enterprises. This led me to custom software.
In 2021, Kelli Lucas and I co-founded LunarLab. We felt that you shouldn’t have to leave the South to build world-class software, and we wanted to help people to create products they were proud of. We’ve grown from a local startup into a firm with national and international reach. We became Alabama’s third Certified B Corp, expanded our work into the UK and Canada, and earned the Governor’s Trade Excellence Award along the way.
What I’m proudest of isn’t on the résumé, though. It’s watching our clients succeed. I love seeing our work help a founder get funded, or help a company ship something they weren’t sure they could build. That’s the part that still brings me joy.
Outside the company, most of my energy goes toward volunteer work. I serve as President of Birmingham Women in Technology and am on the board of the Rainbow Ventures Summit and Greater Birmingham Ministries. The goal is always the same: making sure the growth happening here creates real opportunity for the people who actually live and work in my community.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
As they say, a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor. Of course there were struggles along the way. I stayed in some jobs too long because I didn’t feel confident enough to make a big career leap. I faced difficult situations at work and in my personal life. And launching a business stretches you in ways you didn’t realize were possible!
One big struggle with launching a small business is learning to do it all in the early stages, building something that you’re proud of, and then when the business grows… learning to let go of some of the work. In the early stages, everything ran through me and my co-founder, which meant things were pretty tightly controlled. Now that the business is bigger and we have had some amazing growth, we simply can’t do it all. It’s like learning all over again how to delegate responsibilities, especially when you feel like the business is your “baby” (and you depend on it for your livelihood!). But we have an outstanding team that I trust deeply, so that makes it much easier.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about LunarLab?
LunarLab is a UX design and product strategy consultancy based in Birmingham, Alabama. We are also a Certified B Corp. We’re a small, senior team working with clients across the U.S., Canada, and the UK, from early-stage startups to established corporations. Our work spans UX and UI design, product strategy, user research, project management customer software development, and web design/development, which lets us stay with a product from the first research question through to a shipped experience.
What we specialize in is bringing clarity to complex product decisions. A lot of teams know something in their product isn’t working but can’t name what or why. We help them find the answer through research, then turn it into design and strategy that hold up. We’re known for pairing rigorous thinking with a practical, human touch, so the recommendations we make are ones a team can actually act on.
What sets us apart is that our values shape our work. As a B Corp, we’re intentional about who we partner with and what we help bring into the world, with a focus on responsible, human-centered design. For our clients, that shows up as a partner who cares as much about the people using a product as the business behind it. It’s a rare combination in this industry, and it’s the reason clients who share those priorities tend to stay with us.
The thing we’re most proud of brand-wise is our commitment to our community and our craft at the same time. We’re deeply involved in Birmingham’s tech ecosystem through organizations like Birmingham Women in Technology and the Rainbow Ventures Summit, advocacy for small businesses and responsible technology, and programs that open doors for the next generation of talent like Elevate & Empower. We built LunarLab to prove that a tech firm can do excellent work, treat its people and clients well, and give back to its community, all at once.
What we’d want your readers to know is that working with us feels like adding a thoughtful, invested partner to their team. We’re small enough to be personal and senior enough to be strategic, and we bring both to every engagement.
What does success mean to you?
We define success on three levels, and a project only feels complete when all three are in place.
The first is the client’s outcome. Did the product actually solve the problem it set out to solve? We measure ourselves by whether a team can point to something concrete after working with us, a clearer strategy, a research answer they’d been missing, an experience that users respond to. Deliverables aren’t the goal. Impact is.
The second is the relationship. We consider an engagement successful when a client trusts us enough to bring us the next hard problem. Repeat work and referrals tell us we did more than complete a scope. We became a partner they want in the room when the stakes are high.
The third is harder to put on an invoice, and it’s the one we care about most. Success means the work we do leaves things a little better than we found them, for the people using the product, for our own team, and for our community. As a B Corp, that standard is built into how we operate. A win that comes at the expense of the people it touches isn’t a win we’re interested in.
Put simply, we’ve succeeded when the client is better off, the people using what we built are better off, and we’d be proud to have our name on it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.lunarlab.io
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lunarlab.io/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lunarlab.io
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lunarlab
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LunarLabDesign
