Reliable Creative Leadership
My skill set links a brand’s business goals with the evolving cultural and lifestyle trends affecting its consumers. I focus on where brand, product, and consumer intersect – highlighting the values, purpose, and drivers shared between them. The plan and creative assets I design center on this unique space – delivering a strategy that builds recognition, excitement, and longevity.
Below outlines the qualities that set me apart and the services where I shine. Any project will be dialed to your particular needs.
What Sets Me Apart
Diverse Expertise
Throughout my career, I have worked with Fortune 500 companies to start-ups in various industries, product categories, and geographies. Usually, at the same time. My point-of-view is rooted in understanding the intricacies of a range of approaches, philosophies, structures, and budgets. Knowledge centered on expansive experience leads to confidence in results.
Strategic Thinking
Color and trend touches more than design. It influences the functionality and success of multiple systems across a business – planning, operations, marketing, sales, customer experience. Any project I work on considers the complete impact of a creative strategy. Big picture thinking accounts for the health of the entire brand.
Strong Relationships
Open collaboration that invites curiosity, communication, and innovation is my preferred way to work. Building trust, honoring commitments, and surpassing standard expectations are key principles in my approach. I have worked with most of my clients for multiple years, and the majority of my new partnerships are from word of mouth or past clients with roles in new companies.
Where I Shine
Color Design
Color design creates the visual language that communicates your brand’s character and culture. Color is the first opportunity you have to speak to consumers. Done right, it generates an emotional, visceral response that leads to engagement. Color dictates consumers’ perception of your brand, their purchasing decisions, their loyalty, and their level of connection to your product or service.
Color design includes palette creation, defining color jobs (consumer focus, longevity, usage), building the vernacular that elevates positioning, and working within business constraints.
Trend Strategy
Trend strategy is a window into the future heart and mind of you customers. It captures the influences, challenges, and cultural shifts relevant to your brand and product space, connecting the dots from what is forecasted globally to what matters most for your consumers and your business. This client-specific guidance is distilled into actionable direction, initiatives, and stories.
Trend strategy can range from an in-depth, comprehensive view to a high-level snapshot to seasonal color-specific insights. It is designed to deliver what is most valuable for you.
Merchandising
Merchandising brings it all together. It provides the framework for how color will be applied across categories and assortments. Successful merch plans balance newness, sustainability, and consumer expectations with business goals, retail concerns, and economic indicators.
Merchandising may include a detailed roadmap outlining color usage by categories and consumers, visual line plans, individual color CADs, and active participation throughout the seasonal design + development process.
Surface Design
Surface design enhances the appeal of your products, showcases color stories, and amplifies trends. I have created graphics for apparel, footwear, accessories, and consumer goods – illustrating a brand’s personality on everything from outerwear to cycling kits to sleeping bags to socks. My style leans geometric and modern, occasionally with a bit of whimsy, and is influenced by both organic, natural elements and bold, colorful graphics.
I am skilled in yarn dyes, repeating or placement prints, jacquards, and knits.