London holiday season: it’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey (unless you identify as gray), and if you ask the dyed-in-the-wool, that feeling’s gonna last the rest of your life.

But when your brand’s logo is a famous orange dot and you’re all about helping people live happier, healthier lives — and you’ve got yourself a massive scape to spread a little jingle jangle all over Piccadilly Circus and Zone 1 — it’s time to see if you can take the Mickey Bliss out of Londoners in the most unexpected ways ever for a meditation app. So we did do that.

Impact:

Brand recognition grew from 6% to 33% in market

Increased signups by over 4x

Increased active daily users in market 42% over the subsequent three months

One shimmering sunny day, I rolled up my sleeves at a place called Hotel Engine as creative director (head of all creative, reporting to the CMO) to lead them through a rebrand and build the brand team. HE had been crushing it in their travel management space for a handful of years, ripping up profit goals and growing exponentially year over year. They were getting ready to add flights and cars to their travel platform that helps businesses save time and money booking travel with an incredibly powerful product. They were also in the process of doing a Series C round. It was all very exciting. They wanted a world-class brand and in-house team to help them grow, that was reflective of their trajectory on their way to take over the dinosaurs in their industry. 

They wanted to launch the brand and product with a nearly-impossible timeline. New name, new capabilities, new look and feel and voice, new typefaces, new positioning, new everything. Make the product the brand, and the brand the product.

I was like, these folks are completely bananas: so let’s do it. 

Fast forward to three months later and that new brand is out in the world: Engine. Travel’s first prosumer brand. That’s right, folks: six people built a new brand, product, website, identity, soup-to-nuts in three months.

We jammed with the brilliant brand babes at Franklyn—who are amazing collaborators and partners and pushed us as we pushed them— early on and also a little at the finish line. We built out a truly exceptional world-class team of in-house brand creatives and lovely humans. 

Welcome to Modern Travel Management: Engine. All gas, no brakes.

Impact:

Exclusive coverage in Fortune; earned media coverage in WSJ, Yahoo Finance, Crunchbase, and over 35 other major outlets

Drove 2024 revenue to over $1b, beating stretch goal

Increased signups by 562% through the new website

When I was ten years old, I painted the trim on a neighbor’s house to earn the money to buy my first pair of Nike running shoes. I ran my first race in those shoes. Later, I ran my first marathon in Nike running shoes. Then I ran my first ultra marathon in Nikes. So over the last several years, as Nike Running lost its way and forgot the power they have in their voice, “I took it personally,” as the quote goes. 

The stars aligned and Nike Running reached out to me with a brief for the launch of the latest Pegasus, their iconic and most-worn model. Sales were lagging, and they needed a return to the voice that inspired people like ten-year-old-me to push beyond what they ever dreamed was possible. Nike Pegasus 41 is the best Peg yet, with new combinations of tech and more energy return, so the story had legs. 

To celebrate its release on Global Running Day 2024, we pulled out all the stops to not just return to the voice and championship mindset that made Nike the most beloved brand in the world, but to return to the love of running in all its gritty, sweaty, complicated passionate glory. 

It is Nike’s energy return era, and we took that seriously. To celebrate the Peg 41’s release on World Running Day, we activated group runs all over the world: Tokyo, Santa Monica, Chicago, and even back to the birthplace of the marathon (and the lore of where Nike got its name): the mountains of Greece. We invited 41 runners from 13 countries to share in one legendary relay from Mount Helicon to Mount Olympus. Over 272.4 km and 24 hours, these determined runners were fueled by the energy-giving power of the Pegasus 41s on their feet. 

Impact:

Over 51 million impressions across platforms

5.1% engagement rate on Insta

13.7% engagement rate on TikTok

1500 runners participated in the flagship Santa Monica community run

At Headspace, one of our most powerful benefits is helping you get the best sleep ever, which is really about loving yourself in better ways. This campaign brief was centered around Valentine’s Day, but we turned that on its head to ask, What would happen if we focused on our relationship with ourselves, as opposed to always making it about our relationships with others?  

So we partnered with one of the most soothing voices in the world—John Legend, the “King of Love”—to make content that helps get you there. Our campaign “Love Yourself like a Legend” generated awareness and excitement for the brand, while giving hope and help to folks focus on self-love and compassion. The team worked with the Legend himself to curate soothing playlists, sleepcasts, and even a Super Bowl spot to spread the news about loving yourself, connecting mind & body, and, well, sleeping with John Legend. 

Our partnership helped make mindfulness and meditation more approachable and practical—showing how mindfulness applies to our daily (and nightly) lives as part of a healthier routine. This work of love brought us a 38% bump in signups over the next three months, as well as industry recognition and a Webby award in Health and Wellness for the “Sleep with John Legend” Super Bowl ad.

So much of Nike’s mythology is built on the single champion grinding ‘til they shine—a sort of hero worship that might be aspirational but isn’t true to our lives. Leading a multinational team at R/GA as Creative Director and creative lead on the global project, we made the digital-first campaign You Can’t Stop Us. We were proud to create the first campaign for Nike that flipped that on its head and gave platforms to the everyday and undersung athletes that truly make sport the global language humans share. I’ve worked on a lot of Nike projects but this one, as Ezra Pound said, made it new.

In the build up to game time for the 2020 Summer Olympics, The Swoosh wanted to revolutionize how they told the stories of their athletes. For the first time in Nike history, we created long-form editorial stories—with video and social—for Nike.com. We championed the stories of women marathoners in Iran, queer skateboarders navigating gender within The Games, the youngest Olympic athlete ever and her little brother, abuelas who started their own basketball league in Mexico, women creating community and battling rape culture through martial arts in India, as well as bringing together the two greatest WNBA players of all time.

Then COVID-19 hit. The Olympics got pushed. When the world hit stop, our team pivoted to help lead the brand-level response for Nike. Our writers and strategists and designers and editors created the campaign Play Inside, Play for the World, a series of social videos with Nike athletes and master trainers to keep people connected, apart.

We built an editorial hub of Nike content for workouts at home, nutrition and recipes and mindfulness. We handled the Nike.com response and comms for the ‘Rona and owned the retail reopening messaging. Overall, my team was responsible for growing the scope of our contract with Nike at R/GA by being proactive, collaborative, compassionate and making the best work in the world during the biggest global pandemic in more than 100 years.

Find Your Force with Headspace and Star Wars™

May the 4th be with you—as it is with us. Headspace and Star Wars joined forces to launch an exclusive content series featuring the most iconic characters from the most popular franchise in the world to inspire Star Wars fans & Headspace members alike to come together and prioritize their mental health.

The overall campaign goal was to drive Star Wars fans to the app to engage with the new content, ultimately driving sign-ups. Disney and Star Wars were great collaborative partners, who gave us the exciting opportunity to take their iconic characters into the Headspace brand illustrative style. A rare thing for a brand as protective of their intellectual property and reputation as Star Wars. The result was like all the greatest collabs, more than the sum of its parts, and lead to two more Webby nods, 4x Viddy Platinum Awards, and 2x Shorty Gold Awards for the incredible work the team made. 

Videos

The Headspace app saw an average of 72% lift in content starts as a direct result of the Star Wars partnership.

Storyboard example

The concept combines the two worlds of Headspace and Star Wars by depicting Chewbacca in a stressful situation, and reaching for Headspace to find relaxation.

Story: We transition from the Find Your Force lockup to inside the Millennium Falcon to find Chewbacca sitting in the cockpit, flying through space. As the super “DARK SIDE” appears,buttons on the dashboard start turning red as the ship goes into hyperspeed, Chewie begins to roar in frustration. Chewie slams his fist on an orange button. “DEEP BREATH”… Chewie takes a deep breath in, Hyperspeed begins to slow, and the buttons begin to return to blues and whites. “LIGHT SIDE”… Chewie exhales as he appears calm and begins to smile. Everything is back to normal, as we transition to the Headspace logo end card.

Paid Media

With messaging that creatively communicated the key benefits of Headspace — stress reduction, better sleep, and improved focus — the Star Wars static ad creative drove a 45% lower cost-per-install compared with Evergreen ad creative.

Home Page Hero

During the campaign, web saw 36% increase in homepage traffic, and 2.8% lift in conversions.

Lifecycle

Emails, Rich Pushes, and In-app Modals increased content starts and retention of existing users.

App Store

In-app events drove in 93% of the total app installs for the month of May.

We all know there’s all sorts of holidays that marketeers want to use as a platform for talking about their product. But what if your product is trying to revolutionize mental health for humanity? At Headspace, my team got a brief to “celebrate World Mental Health Day” one year, but that didn’t quite sit right. 

Mental health isn’t a problem to be solved, it’s a way of caring for ourselves. Some days are good. But some don’t feel celebratory at all. The truth is, feelings come and go, and Headspace is here to honor and help with all the days—no matter how we feel. 

So our in-house creative team pushed back on the brief. We didn’t want to celebrate mental health like it’s a holiday—we wanted to create a platform for conversation and sharing. So we pitched using World Mental Health Day to create a platform to help everyone connect with each other and share their experience caring for their minds through social media. What came out of that was My Headspace, a movement to create space for folks to support each other and offer hope to anyone, however they’re feeling. 

We created a series of videos using real Headspace members Sucari, Patti, Ashli, and Chris, supported by what became a viral campaign to remind folks we’re all on a mental health journey—it’s just a matter of how we take care of ours.

Branding, creative direction, story development, concepting, creative decks, cultural engineering, and thought leadership for Ace Hotel in New York, Portland, London, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Pittsburgh, and creative for confidential new developments in the US and internationally. Collaborating with artists and musicians, poets and activists—as well as design shops like Roman and Williams, Commune, and our own Atelier Ace, we work to create a brand that functions like a relationship or cultural engine and sets the tone for a highly curated and conscientious lifestyle.

As Creative Editor in Chief, I establish and lead the voice and aesthetic of Ace Hotel. While helming the copy department and overseeing Ace and affiliated outlets across properties and partnerships, I work with my colleagues on the direction of design, architecture, graphics in Ace’s projects on a global scale, including new brand development and branding and identity of the iterations of Atelier Ace.

One weird creative challenge: How do you launch an American-Briton meditation app in the land where meditation was invented? At the end of 2021, our brilliant Headspace team worked with Times Bridge — India’s oldest and largest media company — to answer this question.

People in India are working harder than ever, with more stress and pressure in their lives, their jobs, their relationships. Suicide and depression are skyrocketing, especially with younger people.

Carefully navigating the traps and legacy of colonialism, the team side-stepped meditation qua meditation and took the ethos of Headspace to India: make a space, make a moment, to be kind to your mind.

We bannered our simple messages of hope on planes, trains, and autobus stops — plus TV, digital, and oh yes, the front page of the largest English-language newspaper in the world, and maybe others — to massive success in our first launch in Asia.

Impact:

500+ million impressions

277,000 signups

Cost per signup 78% below average

After some time in the wilderness with Nike Valiant Labs creative startup brands, I got the call to work behind the berm in Beaverton on elevating Nike Employment brand (including Converse). A voice that is more inline with the rest of the brand, a mind-expanding amount of internal comms, strategy, initiatives, new content streams, an experiential corporate conference jobs booth, and of course the MVP of it all — a big brand-new complicated website for jobs.nike.com.

As Creative Director and lead writer, we had a small internal creative team and lots of agency vendors to wrangle and coax excellent work from. We also had more stakeholders than stakes to pitch this tent. If you know anything about Nike, there’s about a thousand people who can say no to an idea and almost no one who can say yes.

Where others had tried before I got there with no approval, the site and its accompanying rain fly and tent stakes and guyed out lines finally got pitched, made and launched under my watch. Now we can all get jobs at Nike using a pretty, clean site. Now they call me Captain Tying Knots.

Creative direction for the release campaign of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Warner Bros. film Inherent Vice. The first production of Thomas Pynchon's work blessed personally by the man himself. The launch included a red carpet screening event at The Theatre at Ace Hotel DTLA, corresponding art shows in New York, London, and LA based on the psychedelic ground the film covers including Joshua Light Show, John Van Hamersveld, The Haas Brothers, Steven Harrington, Alia Penner, Travis Millard, Lili Lakich, Dustin Stanton, Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe. Rounding it out, we launched a special release on limited edition 10" vinyl of the Inherent Vice Soundtrack with Jonny Greenwood and had a listening party for cast & crew. Print/digital/social/curation/event/spiritual.

I know what’s right and you can count on me to be out there in the fight for it. I’m a Chicano kid from Arizona. My whole family works in the trades and I grew up working hard and being hard en la frontera. First of my family to go to college and all that. When the chance to work low-bono with United We Dream on an app to help protect immigrants, I put my chops to work for the good.

Notifica is an app that helps immigrants defend themselves from ICE and deportation. If a human is about to encounter ICE, they can deploy encrypted prewritten messages to loved ones and local immigrant advocacy groups to call for help, then wipes itself clean. I worked to develop the voice, UX, and wrote the app.

Wired, Rolling Stone, Fast Company, and Mashable wrote about our work.

Nike Valiant Labs wanted a fresh perspective for the beta launch of EasyKicks, a sneakers-on-demand club for grade school kids and their parents. As creative director and copy lead, I worked to build a fresh tone of voice and executed copy across the project, from headlines to website copy to email campaigns, with a little UX for good measure. Then, when it was time to launch the brand widely under the Nike brand, I helped usher in the pivot to Nike Adventure Club, the first successful Nike startup. Brand/voice/website/email campaign/e-commerce. 

You shouldn’t trust someone who’s never worn Vans. So when it was time to outfit the crew at Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles, Ace worked with Vans to create Ace Hotel x Vans Era 59. Guiding the creative vision of the campaign, an ambitious satellite of the intricate Ace x Vans footwear nexus, Noise Grind came to life online as part of our unveiling. Rolled out in advance of National Go Skate Day, Noise Grind is an interactive audio game designed and produced by Atelier that tests players' ability to identify skateboard tricks by ear. Working closely with Vans to guide trackpad traffic to the site — with prizes including dishing out a new pair of Vans each month for a year, two nights at Ace Hotel Downtown LA to top scorers, and putting shoes on a ton of feet. The campaign also included a special party and screening of Stacy Peralta’s Dogtown and Z-Boys with Tony Alva and personal skateboarding hero Steve Caballero showing up to shred 11 in The Theatre at Ace Hotel. App/social/digital/events.

In 2010, I was sitting with my friends Zachary Schomburg and Drew Swenhaugen at Stumptown Belmont in SE Portland lamenting the lack of a nationally-recognized poetry event in our city. Before moving here in 2008, we'd been involved separately in literary projects in Omaha and Tucson and Tempe, Arizona — communities with small but dedicated scenes that punched above their weight. We saw a huge poetry scene in Portland, and an opportunity to create something that crystalized the vibrancy of the community. Bad Blood was born.

With our backgrounds in bands, activism, and advertising, we created a reading series that became a bonified scene in Portland, creating a reputation for bringing dynamic, nationally-recognized poets to town for readings that felt more like a DIY house show in the '80s than a stuffy poetry reading.

We made good-looking, limited edition pamphlets and flyers for each reading and gave them away. We were the first independent reading series in the country to secure an alcohol sponsor, so we gave away booze, too. Our events were always free and community based, leading to a national reputation and recognition as the best reading series in the country from 2011 until we celebrated our final readings at the 2016 AWP conference in LA, where we curated an entire weekend of events at our takeover of Ace Hotel DTLA.

The blog is the spirit animal for Ace Hotel. For better or worse, I've got the sole set of keys to the fiefdom, the engine room of the cultural engineering machine. We post whatever we want, like artists visits and interviews, but not like "babes" and "hot dogs." Maybe a gif of a cat dressed up as a hot dog and sent to 100,000 humans. 

Alexander Chee, novelist par-excellence and brain parent of Amtrak Residency for Writers, on his sojourn in Portland after his initial residency, and I met at Stumptown to talk lit-world shop after meeting through mutual friends. The conversation's child was Dear Reader, a micro-residency for writers at Ace Hotel New York. Each writer stays at the hotel, gets a tab and supplies, and writes a letter to the imagined Dear Reader. We print up the letters in an edition of 300 on good paper, and one night during the month of the writer's stay we deliver each guest of the hotel the letter. We also interview each reader on our blog. It's a passion project proved true, expanding the cultural conversations Ace has in the world. 

The American Southwest has been home to people with grit for thousands of years. Every spring when it starts to heat up in the in the Coachella Valley the desert’s energy calls out. So we go out to commune with the shamans wielding guitars and drums and keyboards and even laptops around the Big Show at Coachella. We make a party layer cake every year at the Swim Club and it’s called Desert Gold.

For the two weeks each year the Coachella valley is at its most psychedelic, we make events and parties and popups and in the most euphemistic sense we make experiences surrounded by music and artists for brands and their fans—Marc by Marc Jacobs, Mutato, tumblr, Amoeba Records, Moon Juice, Remezcla, Mail Chimp, Festival Nrmal. It's a good place to fall in love for as long as you want.