Brand + Strategy
I start with the commercial questions most businesses skip. What actually drives revenue in your category? What can you own that competitors can't easily replicate? What matters to the people who buy from you, not just the people who market to them?
My strategic brand work produces positioning your sales team can use and your marketing can execute consistently. Brand architectures that clarify what you sell. Messaging that prioritises what your prospects need to hear first. Value propositions that survive actual customer conversations.
Bring me on-board for your strategic brand project and you’ll get:
Brand frameworks that your team can reference daily
Strategic thinking that guides creative decisions
Positioning documents that inform product development
Key messages that shape how your business speaks to the market
The kind of strategic infrastructure that gets more valuable as you grow
I've worked on corporate brands, plucky startups and SMEs seeking reinvention. The process can stretch to fit your needs, including stakeholder interviews, competitor analysis, customer research, and workshops that secure buy-in from the people who'll actually use this work.
Got a strategic brand project in the pipeline?
Creative Direction
I translate strategy into creative execution that works across channels without losing coherence. Most businesses end up with disconnected work—social that contradicts the website, emails that ignore brand guidelines, campaigns that forget the commercial strategy.
To me, creative direction means developing concepts that remain recognisable whether they appear in a 60-second video, a 40-page staff handbook, or a three-word headline. Visual and verbal systems that guide creative teams while leaving room for the medium-specific decisions that make individual pieces effective.
Working with me, you'll get:
Fresh ideas grounded in experience and cultural insight
Creative frameworks your team or agency can execute independently
Concept territories that define what's on-brand
Tone and style guidelines that copywriters and designers can reference
Channel-specific applications that show how ideas adapt across platforms
I've directed creative for advertising agencies, corporate brands, and digital-first businesses. I back my ideas up with strategic thinking, to make creative systematic rather than subjective—this speeds up approval cycles and reduces revision rounds.
You bring me in for some initial, strategically solid concepts, or engage me to deliver a focused campaign direction and carry it through to final execution.
Got a project that needs creative experience and big picture thinking?
Strategic Copywriting
I write copy that serves business objectives, working at two levels simultaneously. There's the word-by-word craft—rhythm, clarity, the way a sentence lands. Then there's the market level—what's happening in your category and the culture, where competitors are positioned, what forces are shaping buyer behaviour.
It’s easy to get stuck on one level with writing. Too much focus on making sentences work without understanding market dynamics, or a clearly grasping the strategy but failing to make individual words carry its weight. The valuable work happens when you move between both—understanding category forces while crafting the specific phrase that will shift someone's thinking.
My copywriting work covers websites, campaigns, long-form content, customer communications and anything else you can think of. Each piece gets structured around commercial outcomes. Generating leads. Supporting sales conversations. Reducing support load. Driving specific actions. But those outcomes depend on getting both levels right—the strategic positioning and the sentence-level execution.
I use AI in the writing process to speed things up, but it’s no thought leader or poet. Strategic thinking and market understanding remain human work. So does knowing which words actually work in your specific market.
The AI-enabled speed means more time on the decisions that affect performance. Positioning. Message hierarchy. The interplay between what your category demands and how you express that distinctively.
I've written for insurance, wine, technology, property, fitness, recruitment, FMCG, fashion, sustainability…pretty much everything you can imagine.
My writing projects range from beautiful brand stories to website rewrites to ongoing content development.
Need to find the right words?
For agencies
I work with agency teams on their client projects—primarily brand and design agencies, but also advertising agencies and digital shops. You bring me in when you need strategic thinking, creative direction, or copywriting that extends your capability without adding permanent overhead.
The work typically falls into three patterns:
Strategic projects where you need brand positioning, messaging frameworks, or tone of voice systems.
Creative direction when your client needs concepts that work across channels or campaigns that require verbal and visual integration.
Copywriting when you've nailed the design but need the words to carry the same strategic weight.
I’ve worked in agencies and understand agency dynamics. Tight timelines. Client relationships that need careful handling. The pressure of presenting work that serves both the creative vision and commercial reality. I've worked with agencies from small studios to the big network shops and always slot in comfortable as an extension of your team, not a replacement for it.
You stay in control of the client relationship. I deliver the strategic or creative work. Your team presents it or, if you want me at the table, I present alongside you. Most agencies use me for the high-value projects that justify bringing in specialist expertise, or the overflow when your core team is stretched across multiple deadlines.
Projects run from focused sprints (tone of voice, campaign concepts) to sustained partnerships where I become your go-to for strategy and copy across multiple clients. I’m happy to find an approach that works for both of us.
For brands
I’ve always been client-facing, even in my agency days, and love nothing more than a good brief delivered kanohi te kanohi.
I work directly with businesses and organisations that need strategic and creative capability without going through an agency. You get the expertise of someone who's worked across innumerable sectors without the agency markup or the communication layers that slow decisions.*
*Agency friends, you’re not supposed to read this bit. You know I still love you.
Direct engagement means I understand your business objectives first-hand. No intermediaries translating what you need. No second-guessing what the brief really means. You explain the commercial reality, I develop the strategic or creative solution, we refine it together until it works.
I've worked with corporates, family export businesses, professional services firms, growth-stage companies—the full spectrum. The scope ranges from complete brand repositioning to website rewrites to ongoing content development. What matters is that you need someone who can think strategically about your market position while executing the creative work that expresses it.
You're buying focused expertise for the time you need it. No retainers unless the work demands it. No padding projects to justify ongoing relationships. The work either serves a clear business objective or we don't do it.
No matter the project size and scope, with the timeline driven by your business needs rather than arbitrary creative processes.