Senior creative leadership, a fraction of the time, none of the payroll. I step in as your creative director—translating business strategy into a brand people can experience, and building the standards and systems that keep working after I step out.
Building brands that connect.
A brand is a promise the whole business has to keep. I build brand platforms rooted in how customers actually decide — positioning, architecture, and narrative that give sales something to sell, teams something to rally around, and the market something to remember.
Guiding creative excellence.
Great work comes from great rooms. I build and coach creative teams — hiring for taste, designing the rituals that protect craft under deadline, and holding a bar that makes everyone's work sharper, including my own. The goal isn't output. It's a team that outgrows its leader.
Innovating for impact.
Attention isn't bought anymore — it's earned. I lead campaigns that behave like culture: ideas people actually talk about, backed by the channels, systems, and measurement that turn talk into business. Entertainment first, conversion close behind.
Turning big ideas into bigger results.
The rare seat where creative intuition and business strategy speak the same language. I translate brand into board terms and strategy into work people love — so creativity stops being a cost center and starts compounding as an advantage.
Three Would Be Creative Collaborative is my fractional practice: senior creative direction for organizations that need brand leadership, not headcount. Behind it — a decade stewarding Verve, A Credit Union from three‑way merger through $1B, AVP‑level brand leadership at Community First Credit Union, and an Insight 40 Under 40 nod, 2026.
Ten-plus years guiding one brand through growth, product launches, and digital transformation — one voice everywhere, never fragmenting.
I directed designers, photographers, videographers, copywriters, and agency partners — and advised executive leadership on brand direction.
Rebrands, campaign platforms that ran for years, character IP, and customer-experience replatforms — strategy through hands-on craft.
New brand, new site, film, broadcast, and a custom furniture visualizer that turned browsing into building — the full experience, end to end, by one creative partner.
Every business in town was hiring with the same banner. Verve dared commuters with seven words and no brand: QuitYourJobNow.com. The mystery did the marketing — and courage converted.
A three-way merger created Verve. Ten years of stewardship kept it unmistakably Verve: one voice across every member touchpoint, guarded through growth, product launches, and digital transformation.
Not a mascot — a strategic asset. Merv gave Verve a voice, a feeling, and emotional memorability in a category people experience as cold. Branding as experience design and long-term trust.
Most brand standards die quietly in a PDF nobody opens. Verve's brand greeted every new hire on day one — a film that makes them believers before their first coffee.
The Strategic Five needed credibility from a standing start. Strategy locked first, so design moved fast: identity, system, and site — professional enough to earn trust immediately.
A routine skip-a-payment lever, reframed as breathing room. Payment Pause made a lending product feel like a favor instead of a pitch — empathy as the creative strategy.
What if a loan felt as culturally inevitable as the season itself? The Pumpkin Spice Loan turned an annual obsession into a lending platform — the joke earned attention, the offer earned business.
Payment-Free Summer put listeners on a rollercoaster and made refinancing feel like peace of mind. It became Verve's longest-standing campaign platform, refreshed season after season.
A neglected platform, a change-averse culture, and a team of one. Legacy cultures don't buy pitch decks; they buy proof. A year of building turned skeptics into believers.
A pilot film pitched to Community First: the story of training, goals, setbacks, and a community that shows up — told so the marathon and the membership become the same journey.
Speed comes from clarity, not shortcuts. Creative decisions get pressure-tested against the business goal they serve — does it build credibility, does it generate demand, does it scale — so design moves fast because the thinking is already done.
A style guide can't defend a brand; standards, briefs, and review practices can. I build scalable creative systems that improve speed without sacrificing quality — so the work stays unmistakable long after launch, with or without me in the room.
The best work of my career has someone else's name on it. Building people who out-grow the role — and the leader — is the whole job.
I pride myself on choosing great partners, and for the past fifteen years Jordan Destree has been at the top of that list. I have led him directly, hired him as a colleague, and brought him in as a partner across rebrands, client work, and side projects for nonprofits, from the top level of organizations to my own business. Anyone can describe what a brand stands for. Jordan makes people feel it. One of the rebrands we did together, with a strong team around us, was for a brand whose name literally meant energy and enthusiasm. We could have said that all day long, but if someone walked into one of our physical locations and got a low-energy vibe, and the materials, the ads, and everything else felt flat, the words would have meant nothing. Jordan made people feel the energy without us ever having to explain it. No one I have worked with does a better job of taking a complex concept and making it clean, sharp, and compelling, whether it lives on a screen or in a physical space. That is a rare gift. Jordan is a thinker. He takes it all in, goes away with it, and comes back with something that blows you away. I can hand him a concept, nudge it in a direction, and the result almost always exceeds anything I had pictured. That is where the magic lives. I have worked with a lot of talented people. Jordan is the one I trust to make a brand mean what it says.
