Brand Lab: A Studio-to-Strategy Workshop for Emerging Brand Identity

Description

A half-day, hands-on workshop where founding teams translate their company's values, culture, and ambitions into a visual and verbal brand foundation, ready to hand off to a design agency with clarity and confidence.

Most early-stage teams arrive at a branding agency with a logo idea or a mood board, but no shared language for who they actually are. Brand Lab closes that gap. Drawing on a background that spans fine art, design strategy, and museum-level creative program management, Michelle leads founding teams through a structured, studio-based process — part visual art exercise, part strategic workshop — that turns scattered instincts into a clear creative brief.

The Sessions

Session 1 | Memory & Meaning (60 min): Using techniques borrowed from visual storytelling and personal-narrative art practice, team members individually map the origin story, turning points, and core values behind the company. This isn't a mission-statement exercise; it's a guided reflection that surfaces the emotional and cultural material a brand is actually built from.

Session 2 | The Collage Table (75 min): Working in small groups with a curated set of art materials, images, textures, and color references, teams physically build visual collages representing their brand's personality, audience, and tone. This hands-on, tactile process gets non-designers thinking visually and breaks the instinct to default to generic "corporate" aesthetics.

Session 3 | Identity Crossroads (45 min): A structured group discussion and prioritization exercise where teams align on tone, voice, and visual direction, resolving internal disagreements about "who we are" before they become costly revisions in the agency process.

Session 4 | The Brand Brief (45 min): Michelle works with the team to translate the morning's output into a clear, organized creative brief: values, voice, visual references, audience, and competitive positioning — a document the team can hand directly to any design agency to accelerate and focus their work.

Benefits

Teams Walk Away With

• A completed, agency-ready creative brief
• A shared internal language for discussing brand decisions
• Stronger team alignment and reduced friction in the design process down the line
• A genuinely collaborative, hands-on experience that builds team cohesion through creative work, not icebreakers
• A physical collage artifact teams can keep as a touchstone throughout their brand development