My own brand started to feel like one of the mean girls at school.

The kind where you’re just desperately hovering at the edge of the lunch table, hoping she’ll let you sit down today.

Which is a wild thing to admit when you’ve spent a decade as a brand designer and strategist. But the ego is a powerful, powerful thing and apparently immune to professional expertise.

So here’s what actually happened…

I’d just liquidated my last company. Fresh off maternity leave. Absolutely gagging to feel like a put-together, well-presented woman again after months of existing primarily as a milk machine. So when I formed my new company, I made every single decision from that place.

The place of wanting to feel a certain way.

And that, it turns out, was mistake number one. It led me to proactively go against everything I know to be true about branding. Every. Single. Thing.

The result was objectively beautiful. Hamptons-meets-Scandi Core. Refined, polished, flawless. People were coming to me citing my own brand as inspiration for the work they wanted me to do for them.

And yet, I felt like a complete fraud every single day I showed up behind it.

It didn’t feel that way to begin with, mind you. At the start, it felt empowering. Motivating, even. I aspired to be the woman behind that brand and for a couple of months, I did notice a difference to how I carried myself… but that was the red flag I chose to ignore.

The red flag I actively warn my clients about.

Because I hadn’t built a brand that reflected who I was. I’d built a brand that reflected who my ego desperately wanted people to think I was. There’s a difference, and your nervous system knows it even when your conscious mind doesn’t.

The clients it attracted matched the energy perfectly – and I do not mean that as a compliment. There’s a reason my first and only ever official Stripe dispute came through during that era. (I won, by the way. Apparently that’s basically unheard of. I’m choosing to take that as the universe’s way of agreeing with me.)

The real damage though wasn’t the difficult clients. It was what happened every time I tried to launch something.

I’d put together offers, programs, ideas – and somewhere in the process I’d just… know. Know that it wasn’t going to work. Not because the idea was bad (they were all great), not because they weren’t presented well (everything that brand put out was immaculate), but because I didn’t have the guts to get behind it. I was too busy trying to prove myself to my own brand. I was launching anyway, out of sheer desperation, and everything was flopping. Every single thing.

That’s when I was forced to take off the rose-tinted glasses.

And so I rebranded, again. Frankly embarrassing as a brand designer but needs must.

I kept the elements I genuinely loved, and built something that actually had space for me inside it. Space for personality. Space for the real version of me to show up without feeling like she was violating the aesthetic.

The shift was overnight. I’m not being dramatic… overnight. Dream clients. Seamless projects. The ability to communicate with actual gumption and conviction instead of performing a version of myself I’d outgrown before the logo was even finalised.

To this day it’s the best move I ever made.

So if you look at your brand and feel something uncomfortable; a low-grade fraud feeling, a quiet reluctance to really go for it, a sense that you’re succeeding despite it rather than because of it… I’d gently ask you this:

Was your ego making the decisions when that brand was built?

Because it might not be your offers that need fixing. It might not be your marketing. It might not even be your pricing.

It might just be that your brand is wearing a version of you that no longer exists (or maybe never did).

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