About
I help businesses figure out what they should say, how they should show up, and what customers should feel when they encounter them.
I work somewhere between brand strategy, creative direction, customer experience, experiential marketing, and the practical reality of actually getting things made.
The short version
My route into branding was not particularly linear. I started in art school, learned production by physically making products, ran businesses, worked directly with customers, managed operations, and eventually realized that the part I was most interested in was the connective tissue behind all of it: why a business feels the way it does.
I like figuring out what a company is actually trying to communicate, where customers are losing the thread, and how identity, messaging, environments, products, service, events, and physical touchpoints can all reinforce the same idea.
That is why I tend to move comfortably between strategy and execution. I care about the big idea, but I also care about whether that idea still works once somebody has to print it, install it, sell it, staff it, navigate it, or buy from it.
The path
2012–2013
Art school & video game design · Living Arts College
I originally enrolled for video game design, but the first year exposed me to Illustrator, visual communication, and branding. That was the first time I really understood that a brand could be expressed intentionally through typography, graphics, color, and visual systems. I went in interested in making things and came out fascinated by how businesses express who they are.
2014–2017
Business studies · Wake Tech + Salzburg College
I shifted toward global business and eventually studied international business and Austrian culture abroad in Salzburg. It gave the creative side of my brain another framework: businesses are systems, brands exist inside markets, and every creative decision ultimately has to support something larger.
2017–2019
Genetic Garments · Founder / Screen Printer
Genetic Garments was my first real business. I taught myself screen printing, worked with an art-school friend who handled graphics, and built a solid base of clients making custom apparel. It was also where I learned several business lessons the expensive way: I underpriced work, supply chains tightened, margins disappeared, and eventually I burned myself out. The business ended, but the experience did not. It became the foundation I would eventually rebuild into InkTerra.
2019–2020
Hospitality & guest experience · Residence Inn by Marriott
Hospitality sharpened a different part of the skill set. I worked with corporate travelers, extended-stay guests, meetings, transportation, reservations, recommendations, maintenance, housekeeping, and all the small service moments that determine whether an experience feels easy or frustrating. It taught me that customer experience is built through hundreds of seemingly minor decisions.
2023
InkTerra Prints · Owner & Creative Director
InkTerra began as a return to production, but this time I understood the business differently. Clients came in asking for shirts, signs, graphics, or print pieces, and I kept finding myself working further upstream: helping them clarify their message, improve their identity, understand their customers, and make better decisions about how their business showed up. That is what pulled me fully into branding.
2025
Pic Eros · Founder & Creative Director
Pic Eros turned branding into something I could watch customers interact with in real time. I built the identity, physical retail environment, products, signage, merchandising, pricing, ordering systems, technology, and customer experience — then changed them based on what people actually did. It became a live laboratory for understanding customer behavior.
Now
Brand strategy, creative strategy & experiential · the pieces finally connect
Art taught me expression. Business taught me context. Production taught me constraints. Hospitality taught me experience. Entrepreneurship taught me consequences. Now I bring those perspectives together to solve brand and customer problems from both the strategic and practical sides.
How I think
Sometimes the answer is a new identity. Sometimes the logo is perfectly fine and the real problem is positioning, messaging, customer friction, inconsistency, or something nobody has stopped to question.
I pay attention to what people ask, ignore, misunderstand, hesitate over, complain about, and buy. Observed behavior is far more useful than assumptions made in a conference room.
A great idea still has to survive budgets, production, staff, materials, physical spaces, vendors, technology, mobile screens, and deadlines. Those constraints are part of the problem, not an inconvenience afterward.
Identity matters, but so do service, environment, products, messaging, packaging, operations, events, and every other signal customers use to decide what kind of business they are dealing with.
My approach
I want to understand the moment somebody encounters the business: what they see, what they think it means, what they need next, and where the experience starts losing them. Once that is clear, the creative work has a much more useful job to do.
Understand the business, customer, environment, category, and actual context where the brand is experienced.
Decide what people should understand, remember, feel, or do — and strip away everything distracting from that objective.
Translate the strategy into identity, messaging, campaigns, environments, events, print, interfaces, physical products, or whatever the solution requires.
See what happens once real people interact with it. Find friction, identify opportunities, and make the system better.
Where that shows up
Event identity, sponsor integration, flyers, banners, apparel, koozies, promotional materials, and physical event touchpoints.
Retail environment, customer journey, merchandising, signage, ordering technology, product development, instant printing, and direct behavioral iteration.
Brand strategy, identity, customer messaging, signage, apparel, environmental graphics, print, direct marketing, vendor coordination, and physical production.
I’m strongest when the work lives somewhere between strategy and execution — especially when a business needs somebody who can understand the problem, shape the central idea, and still think through how it actually reaches a customer.
Positioning, customer perception, differentiation, messaging, architecture, and brand direction.
Turning business problems and customer insight into a central idea that can guide creative decisions.
Customer journeys, service interactions, retail flow, friction, merchandising, and behavioral observation.
Event identity, activations, branded environments, sponsor integration, physical interaction, and live customer experiences.
Identity systems that extend naturally into signage, vehicles, apparel, print, displays, and physical spaces.
Print, vendor coordination, fabrication thinking, project execution, delivery, installation, and practical production constraints.