Guided by Context.

Design on strategic foundations

I started out in art school in Philadelphia in the late ’80s and have been working in design and branding ever since. Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to experience the business from quite a few different perspectives, and each one has influenced how I think about brands and the work that goes into building them.

In the mid-’90s, I was involved in the early days of the internet, building websites before most businesses knew what to do with them. My studio at the time, Attention Design, was part of that first wave. From there, I moved into high-tech in Austin, working at an agency focused on tech startups and ecommerce. That’s where I began to understand positioning as something more than a marketing exercise. We were helping young companies figure out what made them different and why anyone should care, often before they had much of a history or reputation to build on. It was an exciting time to be learning about brand strategy.

My first in-house position was Global Creative Director for O’Neill Wetsuits & Outerwear, and that was a turning point. After working with technology startups, I was suddenly part of a brand with real history, culture, and an emotional connection to the people who lived it. O’Neill was a lifestyle brand long before lifestyle branding became a marketing term. I had the opportunity to work alongside brand strategy agencies like Prophet Group and apply thinking influenced by David Aaker, but now the strategy had something very real to connect with. I could see how the history, products, people, and culture all contributed to what the brand meant. That experience brought together what I’d been learning about positioning with what I’d always understood intuitively as a designer: a brand is much more than what a company says about itself.

By the time I founded BXC in 2005, I’d seen how easily the thinking behind a brand could get disconnected from the things a company actually designed, made, and marketed. I wanted a practical way to bring those decisions together, something I could use with founders and creative teams to understand the business, its customers, and the market more precisely and efficiently before deciding what to do next.

That became my philosophy and the foundation for Branding By Context. A discovery and guidance process developed through years of doing the work, asking questions, making things, and seeing how customers respond and products perform in the market. It helps establish a direction people can work from, while leaving room for the judgment and creativity it takes to make something great.