ADVISORY
Shaping brand through strategy, story and design.
I work with organizations and teams to clarify the challenges they face, shape how their brand is communicated and understood, and design the identity and experiences that bring it to life.
The work can begin with a brand question, a business change, an experience to shape, or an idea to express. I work across the thinking and the making—clarifying the challenge, shaping the story, designing how the brand shows up, and building what teams need to carry it forward.
Clarify the challenge
Understand the business context, audiences, and assumptions. Identify where brand and design can make a meaningful difference.
Design the experience
Translate that thinking into identity, communication, and experiences across digital, physical, and other brand touchpoints.
Shape the brand
Define positioning, narrative, and creative principles that give the work a clear purpose and a basis for decisions.
Build for use
Create systems, tools, and ways of working that help teams apply the brand, make decisions, and evolve it over time.
Featured Projects
IBM Big Bets
Translating emerging technology into a clear, executive-level narrative.
This work sat at the intersection of strategy and expression—ensuring that complex ideas were not only communicated clearly, but could be understood, discussed, and acted on by leadership.
CONTEXT
IBM convened a group of ~100 global CEOs for an invite-only forum focused on the “Big Bets” shaping the future of their businesses.
CHALLENGE
The content centered on highly complex, emerging technologies—AI, quantum computing, and classical systems—developed across IBM Research.
While the underlying work was advanced, it wasn’t immediately clear how these technologies connected to real business decisions, or how leaders should think about their impact.
ROLE
As creative lead, I worked closely with IBM Research and cross-functional teams to distill these technologies into a coherent, accessible narrative.
This involved:
Identifying the core themes that connected disparate innovations
Structuring a simplified framework around the “future of computing”
Translating technical concepts into clear, executive-facing stories
Aligning how these ideas were expressed across environments, content, and interactions
APPROACH
Rather than presenting technologies in isolation, the work brought subject-matter expertise and brand together into a unified point of view.
The future of computing was framed through three core pillars, grounded at the intersection of science, business, and culture.
The goal was to move from information → understanding → relevance.
OUTCOME
The result was a more cohesive and comprehensible narrative that allowed executive audiences to engage with complex ideas more intuitively—connecting emerging technologies to strategic decisions, organizational impact, and future direction.
VaxCare
Turning brand into a system for clarity, alignment, and scale
At VaxCare, the challenge was not just defining the brand—but ensuring it could operate across a complex, growing organization.
By establishing brand as a system—connecting positioning, communication, and experience—the work helped create a foundation that could scale with the business, while remaining clear, consistent, and usable across teams.
CONTEXT
VaxCare was scaling rapidly as a healthcare technology company—expanding across products, partners, and markets within a complex and highly regulated ecosystem.
As the organization grew, brand and messaging evolved across teams, with different functions shaping how the company’s value and story were communicated.
This created an opportunity to bring greater clarity and alignment—supporting more consistent communication, stronger trust, and scalable growth.
CHALLENGE
This evolution created an opportunity to establish a clearer, more unified foundation for:
How the company is positioned.
How it communicates its value.
How the brand shows up across the full partner lifecycle
ROLE
As VP of Brand, I established and led VaxCare’s in-house brand practice, hiring two designers and working across leadership, product, and go-to-market teams to connect brand with the needs of a growing business.
I shaped the positioning and narrative while directing the visual identity and brand experience across digital, packaging, presentations, and events. I also built the systems and tools that helped teams carry that work forward.
APPROACH
I worked with leadership and teams across product, marketing, sales, and partner experience to identify where the existing brand was no longer serving the business.
As VaxCare expanded toward enterprise partners and adjacent care markets, we developed a clearer company narrative and a more flexible expression of care, credibility, and innovation.
I directed how that foundation appeared across the website, visual system, packaging, executive presentations, and conference experiences, while building the internal team and tools to carry it forward.
OUTCOME
The work created a more stable and scalable foundation for growth:
Teams operated from a shared narrative
Communication became more consistent across touchpoints
Positioning was clearer in market-facing conversations
Onboarding and partner enablement became more structured, improving adoption and operational efficiency
The organization was better equipped to expand into new offerings and markets
CRKT
Repositioning a product brand into a consumer-centric experience ecosystem
CRKT’s challenge was not just brand expression—but managing complexity across a diverse product portfolio and a multi-dimensional user base.
By aligning brand, product structure, and digital experience, the work helped make that complexity more legible—allowing the brand to scale while remaining intuitive, differentiated, and connected to its community.
CONTEXT
CRKT set out to evolve from a product-led knife manufacturer into a premium, consumer-centric lifestyle brand.
While known for quality and innovation, the brand was expanding into a broader role—supporting a multi-dimensional community of users, makers, and enthusiasts across a growing portfolio of products and channels.
CHALLENGE
As the brand evolved, several opportunities emerged:
Brand expression had developed across channels without a fully unified system
A growing product portfolio made navigation and differentiation more complex
The shift toward a consumer-centric positioning needed to be reflected more consistently
The digital experience needed to live up to the brand’s ambition
This created an opportunity to bring greater clarity and alignment across brand, product structure, and experience.
ROLE
Worked in close partnership with strategy to translate the brand platform, consumer insights, and product architecture into scalable systems across brand, product, and digital.
The focus was on ensuring alignment between strategy and execution—so the brand could be experienced consistently, not just defined.
APPROACH
Translating strategy into systems
Brand and consumer insights were translated into clear drivers to guide decisions across identity, product structure, and experience.
Structuring the product ecosystem
A complex portfolio was simplified into a more intuitive architecture—clarifying categories and tiers while enabling future expansion.
Building a cohesive brand foundation
A flexible brand system supported a shift from product-first to consumer-centric, enabling consistent expression and stronger connection to the community.
Extending into digital experience
The website was redefined as a platform for discovery and engagement—experience principles grounded in brand and user insight, audits surfaced opportunities across navigation, content, and storytelling, user journeys, information architecture, and content strategy were developed in parallel to align structure and narrative.
OUTCOME
The work strengthened CRKT across multiple dimensions:
Clearer positioning as a premium, lifestyle-oriented brand
A more intuitive and scalable product architecture
Improved usability and navigation across the portfolio
A more engaging, exploration-driven digital experience
Greater consistency across brand, product, and experience
If this resonates, feel free to reach out.
