Q: What’s in a name?
A: Everything.

From P2P payment platforms and proprietary methodologies to signature cocktails and wholly new companies, I’ve gotten the opportunity to name all sorts of things, refining my approach in the process. Language and the lived experiences and connotations we bring to the table can be tough to navigate, but with the right name, you’re bound to go far.

Working with leaders in retail, beauty, cannabis, and hospitality to introduce their brands to the world, I’ve been able to apply blue sky thinking to unearth the most fertile territory. The resulting names strike the right balance between anything’s possible and everything’s been done before.

Monark

Brand Book, Lookbook, Website, Social, Advertising
Copywriting, Brand Strategy, Media Planning, Account Management, Social Activation

With the acquisition of three thriving distributors of premium home appliances, Sears needed to reconcile the family of brands to maximize a coast-to-coast market opportunity. I co-designed and co-facilitated a custom audience and industry research program that informed the foundational strategy and key brand recommendations for consolidation. The “go big, once” approach to expansion and growth involved launch, transition, and adoption plans to ensure alignment of teams across more than a dozen showrooms. I conducted stakeholder interviews and on-site visits to gather insights on the processes, materials, and tools that would best support teams, clients, and partners. I concepted and wrote a brand book for launch and a subsequent lookbook that showcased the Monark home as a way of life. 

Why Monark?  
Speaking to luxury without using the word itself, the name conveys the idea of high-end and highness (as in the monarchy). The prefix mon-, which means “one”, points to unification and the new brand’s singularity while the use of "k" instead of the traditional "ch" differentiates the company’s leadership in kitchens. 

Archer

Guest Experience, Website, Advertising, Ephemera
Copywriting, Account Management, Social Activation

Hospitality developer LodgeWorks had a clear mandate when launching their newest boutique hotel in NYC: build a destination brand—from the man up. But who was this nameless and faceless figure and how could an entire hotel much less a whole hotel chain revolve around him? For me, Archer is a curator, a consummate host, and a well-heeled, well-traveled patron who enjoys life’s finer things—from New York to Napa.

To help launch the boutique brand, Archer got an identity system that could scale and translate across new locations, reflecting an upscale look while allowing space for local touches. I created the brand narrative and brand voice guidelines, as well as messaging for everything else a hotel needs to operate. The invitation to join Archer’s inner circle was true to his warmth —the brand design’s confident elegance punctuated by a brand persona that exudes wit, charm, and casual cool. A comprehensive marketing strategy spanning digital, print, and social targeted industry insiders, neighborhood partners, and affluent travelers. The brand has since grown to include eight locations across the U.S.

Your marketing should be greater than the sum of its parts.

Taking into account everything from social media, email marketing, and branding to advertising, retail experience, and broadcast, I’ve helped companies navigate an ever-changing landscape of customer behaviors, technology platforms, and industry trends.

I have worked with global brands like Abbott, BBVA, Mastercard, and Slalom to enter new markets and launch new practice areas. I’ve developed marketing and messaging frameworks that highlight specific areas of focus and expertise while working within and complementing larger brand and business narratives.

Utilizing a scalable and flexible approach to content strategy, I have created sales enablement tools and marketing tookits that educate and empower teams through templated yet highly customizable materials.

True or false: Brands are living, breathing organisms.

People commit to brands they see as friends, brands who engage in real life and in real time. These friendships are built on a foundation of trust, respect, understanding, and the ability to have meanignful two-way conversations. Delivering products, services, solutions, and experiences that impact and enhance lives is no easy task, but none of it’s possible without fostering a healthy brand ecosystem.

Brand ecosystems optimize your marketing and operations functions through adaptive, omnimedia communications frameworks that reach the right customers at the right time with the right message. Your brand ecosystem should reinforce your value as a consistent, relatable presence in an uncertain world.  

Abbott

For more than 125 years, Abbott has brought new products and technologies to the world—from medicines, nutrition, and diagnostics to cardiovascular and diabetes care. Across the entire business, I helped develop frameworks for sharing the brand story in dynamic, user friendly ways, conducting stakeholder interviews and workshops to inform the process. 

Website, Intranet, Signage
Pillar Messaging

I helped refine messaging around core pillars of the business. Bringing a more human, empathetic, and ownable tone of voice to the brand, I co-created interactive digital, print, and environmental experiences to raise awareness of Abbott’s impact, core values, and capabilities. 


Global Marketing Framework
Breakthrough Innovation Messaging

With robust, customizable marketing and sales frameworks, new visual and verbal studies for the thematic expression of breakthrough innovation and cross-division co-creation were completed, influenced by and impacting the entire organization. New processes and new ways tools elevated the ways in which Abbott executive leadership views and speaks about the brand's many contributions to the world's populations.

Mastercard

Mastercard makes marketing expertise a differentiating value add to their customers. Much of my work with Mastercard helped the brand strike the right balance of structured, consistent communication with the creative product domain flexibility that makes it possible for valuable marketing and sales tools to remain both easy to use and scalable.


Tap & Go Merchant Campaign
E-Learning Tools 
Research, Activation Strategy, Copywriting

Creating a suite of materials to help educate merchants on the benefits of contactless payments technology as well as point-of-sale retail displays that would drive consumer adoption required a clear understanding of the B2B2C purchase journey. Equally vast was the network of Mastercard team members needing to learn Adobe Experience Manager, for which I developed an e-Learning tool to empower enterprise-wide quick proficiency.


Sales Enablement, Foundational Marketing
Research and Strategy, Copywriting

I worked with the Global Product B2B Marketing team to develop B2B2C Design and Messaging Templates. The guidelines were formalized in an FMM Playbook that summarized the recommended approach and provided sample communication templates across the most-used channels.

Print is dead! Long live print!

They said print was done for, finished, kaput. Whether you see it as a commodity or a luxury, nothing beats the experience of a well-produced printed object in one’s hands. Some people love the way old books smell, the feel of something fresh-off-the-press, or the way ink lays on a page. With an array of dazzling special effects, new techniques, and innovative technologies, print continues to evolve, becoming more interactive than ever. Print as we knew it might go the way of the dodo, but the print of tomorrow has arrived, and the possibilities are endless. 

Sappi

Surface I & II: Paper Demonstrations
Digital Papers Swatchbooks
Hyperlink: A Guide to Interactive Print
Strategy, Creative Concepting, Art Direction, Copywriting, Account Management

Sappi Digital Papers wanted to push the limits of printing, so we explored the edges of premium McCoy. Surface I and II are two wire-bound promotional samples that contain exploded-view process stories that get to how and why while showing the boundlessness of digital papers. Equally challenging was the complex production of Sappi Digital Swatchbooks, my first heavy lift as Sappi account manager. Hyperlink bridges the physical and virtual, exploring augmented reality, the actual genius of QR codes, and a whole host of new packaging technologies and interactive capabilities.  

Discovering the Space Between
Educational Booklet from Hyperlink
Research, Content Strategy, Copywriting

Customer Journey Touchpoints by Industry
Interactive Print Demos from Hyperlink
Content Strategy, Copywriting

DLR Group

50th Anniversary Monograph: Fifty Years of Elevating the Human Experience Through Design
Stakeholder Interviews, Content Strategy, Copywriting

A 50th birthday only comes once, and the occasion should be celebrated accordingly. I helped global architecture and design firm DLR Group commemorate half a century of elevating the human experience through design. Neither monograph nor history text but rather an unconventional, non-linear approach to storytelling DLR Group’s legacy, I wrote a book highlighting their past, present, and future.

Knoll

75th Anniversary Integrated Print, Digital, and Social Campaign
Copywriting, Account Management, Media Planning and Trafficking 

I developed strategic messaging and integrated campaign platforms for Knoll over the past ten years, working on the agency side to position the company’s brands with distributors, design professionals, and consumers in relevant, engaging ways. Supporting Knoll Office, KnollStudio, KnollTextiles, Edelman Leather, and HOLLY HUNT, I created materials with a consistent focus on strong, ownable positioning—most notably the Knoll 75th anniversary campaign. The celebratory tagline “Modern Always” continues to be a lead element of the Knoll brand narrative, even since the M&A with Herman Miller in 2021.

BBVA

Treasury Management and Spend Net Video Series
Copywriting, Scripting, Storyboarding, Creative and Art Direction

I developed storyboards and scripts for two three-part video series for global banking brand BBVA. Collaborating with my agency design team and animation studio Bien, I helped capture the full spectrum of their Treasury Management and Commercial Payments Solutions through two hero videos and four supporting vignettes. The framework is scalable and shareable, conveying a consistent, relevant value story.

Sappi

Sappi On Marketing Video Series
Copywriting, Scripting, Storyboarding, Creative Direction

To support ongoing marketing initiatives, Sappi was looking for an approach that provided an easier means for sharing and digesting content with larger audiences. I helped create a visually cohesive video series that highlights the unique energy of several different Sappi programs: Fashion, Sustainability, McCoy and Spectro.

Some enchanted evenings. 

Nightwalking during the pandemic took me all sorts of places. Daytime had higher probability of encountering others who also were supposed to be in lockdown, and nighttime somehow felt safer, even in Chicago.

While the emptiness of the city seemed strange and eerily calm, I found this a meditative and useful space for rediscovering my love of photography. With no set destination and the streets vacant, everywhere became liminal space—a world in limbo for me to explore and find comfort in.