Marie has seen explosive success over the past few years, but she's been hard at work helping others declutter since she was a teenager. At 18, she worked at a Shinto shrine keeping order for a shrine elder, and at 19, Marie started a home organizing consulting "business" when her friends offered to pay her for her tidying help in college. This is when she first used the "spark joy" method that would become synonymous with her name.
After college, Marie kept up her tidying business on the side, seeing clients before and after working at her staffing company job. Eventually, she turned to tidying full-time.