Why We Start with the Story First // Chelsea Von Mach Brand Story Dev: Part 2

I like to focus on the story behind the brand first.

When we take the time to get our story straight and clear, bringing the story to life through marketing and branding is SO MUCH EASIER and thoughtfully connected in all respects. 

I know it's tempting to jump into the fun stuff (I think they're fun).

Things like websites and photography absolutely help us sell and market our products and services. I too felt a desire to do this (and did some of it) when I first launched W&S.

Yet, after working with clients over the years, I've realized that taking the time to put words to the purpose and reason for why you are creating this business is incredibly helpful to do first. 

Why?

Well, for starters, the experts you hire to help you with all the marketing things are not in your head.

If you can put words to the essence of your business, your team, your experts and your customers will understand what you're all about without a lengthy conversation with you on the phone or in person.

That's huge. 

However, many of my clients are like me.

We wanted to just get out there and tweak while we went along. That's totally fine and honestly sometimes you need to test the waters to know what you love about what you do to know why you do it.

The awesome part about our digital world is that we can make changes pretty easily.

I invite you to try our quick and easy Brand Story Audit Exercise to see if your story and marketing are out of alignment.

Once you have the awareness about what isn't jiving, you can take the necessary to steps to adjust your story or your marketing or both. 

Part 2 of Brand Story Development with Chelsea Von Mach

As we dive into the continuation of our series to explore developing a brand story for fashion stylist Chelsea Von Mach, we share how a combination of both a written explanation and visual examples will help get you closer to what you want, much faster. Thus, saving time, money and avoiding unnecessary confusion and frustration. 

If you'd like to learn more about Chelsea and the overall project, read Part 1.

Once it was determined that Chelsea's goal was to share her story through a unique video series, we determined a media kit would be a great way to go. Our focus would be to share her story, the series concept and how potential collaborators could partner with her.

I brought in Art Director and Designer, Mandi Gum to help us visually bring Chelsea's ideas to life. Mandi designed our logo as well as all of our branded forms, templates and marketing collateral. However, I've been working with Mandi for years within in-house marketing roles, way before launching W&S. 

Currently based in Minneapolis, Mandi began her design career in Los Angeles where she orchestrated digital marketing campaigns for premium entertainment clients such as Disney, Showtime, HBO and more. Today, in addition to developing design related projects for us, she focuses on helping small businesses establish and grow their identity across a multitude of platforms.

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Along with the Brand Story Questionnaire from the beginning of the process that we shared in Part 1, I asked Chelsea to pull together images that would help us create a mood for her story, her past work and the video series.

Visual examples always help - it's not all that different from getting your hair done. :)

Tip: We like to create and work within Google Docs because everyone can easily share files and edit content.  

Here is a little snapshot of the awesome visuals Chelsea provided to help convey the essence of the video series.

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"Chelsea's brand story questionnaire and reference imagery allowed me to really get to the heart of who she is, her perspective and desires as a stylist and businesswoman, the ways in which she hopes to impact the fashion community, and the overall mood and aesthetic she is hoping to portray. These items were incredibly thorough and strategic, and because of them, we were able to quickly establish a design direction that is so uniquely Chelsea!"  - Mandi Gum

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After absorbing everything, Mandi designed a set of 5 different options that Chelsea could pick from to help inform the aesthetic direction.

You can click on the thumbnail images below to scroll through the options.

We tried a few combinations of the various designs, but ultimately landed on the very first option that Mandi designed. 

It's funny, I will usually ask Mandi for a couple of additional options when working on projects, but I would say about 98% of the time I end up choosing Mandi's first concept. It feels so great to be in such capable hands!

While Mandi worked on the visuals, I dove into Chelsea's bio and a written explanation of the video series concept which I'll be sharing in the next part of the series!

-Arica

Behind-the-Scenes of Brand Story Development // Chelsea Von Mach: Part 1

I'm having such a great time with a current client project that I realized there are so much gold in sharing our process with you. Luckily my client, the lovely Chelsea Von Mach, is down to share her experience as we dive into the early stages of developing her brand story and bringing it to life.

Chelsea Von Mach is a Los Angeles-based fashion stylist for television, film, editorial, advertising campaigns and red carpet events. Originally from Detroit, Michigan, she moved to Los Angeles to study Merchandise Product Development and fine-tune her innate creative talent at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.

After graduating, Chelsea assisted numerous fashion stylists and costume designers including celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe & Mad Men Costume designer Janie Bryant. Styling projects include The Cosmopolitan Hotel in Vegas advertisements, V-Magazine editorials, American Idol, The T.V. Show The Real and the CW Network campaigns. Chelsea’s personal eclectic street style has also been featured in some of the industries top style resources, such as The Sartorialist, Japanese Vogue, Refinery29 and The New York Times.

Chelsea and I were introduced by our mutual dear friend Bill Cliatt, another veteran survivor of the fashion industry, and we began working together last year when she signed up for my 1:1 coaching program. Her goal was to begin the process of extending her career beyond that of traditional fashion styling. At the beginning of this year, I reached out to Chelsea to see what kind of progress she had made in developing her personal brand and an exciting video series concept we discussed during our sessions. Being that her styling career keeps her incredibly busy, she felt less than accomplished in the areas we worked on and wanted to chat about how I could provide her a little more hands-on help to get things moving. She also knew that I'd keep her committed to her goals by providing a level of accountability and a solid sounding board for her creative ideas. 

So we got to work. 

First things first, we set up a 2-hour in-person work session to work through a slightly intense brand story questionnaire that I've been developing over the last couple of months. The questions are a deep dive into all aspects of how to discover and tell your story. Although not all of it will be used in the copy, understanding all of it helps my brain work and come up with different ways to position and help clients market themselves later on. In this case, we decided to focus our energy on the development of media kit that would include a concept for the video series.

Below is a glimpse into the questionnaire. It's never meant to be edited perfectly, it's more so written as a stream of consciousness because that's just the way it works best.

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Here are some of Chelsea's kind words after our initial session:

 "It was so great seeing you Thursday!! That work session WAS AMAZINGGGG! I'm going to work on filling out everything this week/weekend. Ahh I'm so excited! The work session was so helpful bc it really got me thinking and brainstorming ideas I hadn't really thought of yet." 

Next week I'll be sharing how Art Director Mandi Gum began crafting the aesthetic direction for Chelsea's media kit. I LOVE this next part, it's like opening a present. 

xx

-Arica

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Have you been thinking about your own brand story?

Join our list via the button below and receive our begin with our free brand story audit exercise.

Story dev begins with awareness. You can download and fill in the PDF template with your responses to start seeing what might need a little love and attention.

Dreaming up Magic

I once had a boss who said, "If you're in marketing, you should always be thinking about marketing; even in the shower, you should be thinking about marketing."

I'm not sure if at the age of 22 that I fully understood what he was telling me, although I know I wanted to.

It was my first job working for a fashion brand within a legit marketing department. I had varied positions in the past including wholesale sales, event coordination, managing retail stores and e-commerce websites.  A year prior, I had launched my own company where I connected business owners with creative experts. It was called Marka Concepts and it was when I first knew I had a knack for seeing a need and solving a problem. It was my first taste of entrepreneurship and I knew some day I'd want more. However, I decided to put it aside to focus all of my attention on my new role.

This boss of mine was the CEO of a successful wholesale and retail junior denim brand. He had a fiercly strong personality and I always admired his drive. He had created the company from nothing and while many brands in that highly competitive space fizzle out after a few years, he and his business partners have continued to grow the the company since launching in 2000. While working there, I grew from Website Specialist to Marketing Coordinator and finally to Advertising Manager. It was the true jumping off point in my career and I'll never forget the opportunities and exposure I was provided. 

Fast forward to today, after launching Written & Styled in August of 2016, I can finally say that I am living those words spoken by my past boss. These days, creative marketing ideas and inspiration come in strange forms and seem to appear most often when I take time to breathe and let go.

By setting yourself up for opportunities to be inspired or gain clarity by getting away from the day-to-day grind and connecting with others, you might find the answer you're looking for was always there, you just have to be open to seeing it. It may come to you on a serene beach or maybe even in the shower. 

I hope you take time to recharge in order to let go and dream up some magic for the New Year. 

With love,
Arica

Why Waiting to be Inspired is Not the Answer

Don't you find that even if you take just a few days away from your creative work that it's easy to forget where you left off? Even if you can only spend 15 minutes on your content development, that daily effort will make it much easier to sink back into what you were working on and keep that creative flow. By consistently practicing our craft, we create opportunities to be inspired rather than wait for it to happen.

Like "The Tortoise and the Hare" folktale, sometimes slow and steady wins the race. 

When it comes to content creation, many people I speak to get tripped up by feeling the need to have everything just right before getting started. I understand this and commend their commitment to excellence. Yet, sometimes, just diving in head first and keeping up a continual routine is going to serve us better.  

My best advice is to carve out some time at the end of each month to brainstorm/research some content topics for the following month.

For example, if you know you want to blog once per week, you might want to draft a handful of potential post titles and source related images and/or necessary facts/quotes. This effort helps to just get some ideas forming. Your actual content may shift, but at least you have some great starting points for when you get down to work.

I will say, sometimes planning too far in advance doesn't always work for me. I'm usually inspired by what is going on at the moment which allows me to be really connected to what I'm writing. This post was inspired by my own planning efforts for upcoming social posts.

I was super lucky and had a free Sunday morning (kiddos are at Grandma and Grandpa's) to gather a bunch of content for my Instagram posts. Feeling so organized right now! I'm guilty of usually only preparing a few days ahead or even the day of, which results in me posting a lot less often then I'd like. 

After you get in the habit of carving out that time to brainstorm and research ideas, commit to working on developing that content every day. 

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”

— Anthony Trollope

Cheers to consistency!

-Arica

image via Thought Catalog