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Leadership · Team Building · Creative Direction

Brand Management at Ketra

Ketra was doing something genuinely new in lighting, and a category-defining product needs brand collateral that visually explains the benefits of that product. My job was to build both the identity and UX language, along with putting together a team of in-house contributors and outsourced creatives to execute the brand vision.

My role
Creative Director. I owned the outward-facing customer experience end-to-end, and built the team and workflows that produced it.
The team & partners
Built and led a team of external partners (spanning identity, photography, video, web UX/UI, trade show, and sales enablement) and internal designers and marketers.
The challenge
Give a category-defining lighting startup a brand and UX language coherent across every touchpoint. Then, maintain and grow this ecosystem.
The outcome
A brand and UX system that held across every customer touchpoint and carried through the Lutron acquisition — with a small team producing at the quality of a much larger one.
Headline impact
Stood up the creative function for a startup during an acquisition, while rebalancing the brand as needed due to resulting changes in positioning.

Communicating the product promise

Ketra brand collateral — example one Ketra brand collateral — example two Ketra brand collateral — example three Ketra brand collateral — example four

Gathering the right team to build the brand

A coherent customer experience across identity, photography, video, web, trade show, and sales enablement is more than one person — or one discipline — can hold. I built a 9-person team and a network of external partners, and structured it so a startup-sized group could cover an enterprise-sized surface area without the work fragmenting.

Decision · a shared language over a style guide

Rather than police a static style guide, I established a brand and UX language the whole team internalized. That's what allowed us to deliver a wide range of artifacts while still working to resolve the finer details of the brand system.

A wide range of brand artifacts produced from the shared brand and UX language
Decision · workflows that buy velocity

I set up creative review and approval workflows tuned for a small team's reality: enough structure to protect quality, an alien concept to that team at that point in time. The result was a way to debate the finer grain details of the work we were producing and test them in different contexts (ex: trade shows, online, social).

The Ketra website — the brand and UX language carried through to the full web experience

The acquisition

Ketra was acquired by Lutron during this work. Acquisitions can cause priorities to shift, but our brand and UX language continued to grow and evolve through these changes.

The single fact that I'm the most proud of is that the system and the team were both adaptable enough to keep humming along after the acquisition; and even after I left the organization.

Selected Earlier Work

BBC America

Re-imagining a British classic — creative & art direction, brand identity.

Arts Publica Austin

Visual identity for the City of Austin's public-art initiative.

REI: No Destination

Creative direction and coaching spec work on an REI sub-brand.

End of an Ear

Rebrand for a legendary Austin record shop.

Design Management

Building and running an in-house design team across multiple online consumer brands.

Non-Profit & Volunteer Work

Creative direction and team leadership for local non-profits.
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