Situation
A few years back, I walked into a gift company as their new marketing supervisor, only to realize—uh-oh—we didn’t have a brand story. We had products, we had sales (mostly from Amazon), but zero identity. Management wanted to be the Apple of home lighting (a tiny ask, right?), yet customers bought once and vanished into the void. We couldn’t build a business on one-time Amazon shoppers forever. We needed our own store, our own ecosystem, and, most importantly, our own brand that actually meant something.