Your brand has a story worth telling.Let's tell it well.
A brand strategist in Portland, Maine, building brand foundations and content systems for outdoor brands, independent retailers, and mission-driven organizations across the state.
✳︎THE WORK
A brand that stays itself after our work together is done.
Kristel & Co. is a brand and content strategy studio based in Portland, Maine, working with outdoor brands, independent retailers, and mission-driven organizations. The work starts with a written brand foundation: positioning, audience profiles, voice and tone, messaging pillars, and the proof points behind them, gathered in one document so everyone touching the brand draws from the same source.
That document solves the two problems owners describe on a first call: nobody can say what the product is in a single sentence that makes it click for a customer, and there is no system for making content that draws that customer in. Five people write in five directions because no one ever wrote down what the brand sounds like. The grant report reads one way and the Instagram caption reads another, and a reader who meets both comes away unsure who they are dealing with. Once the foundation exists, the content systems built on top of it hold the line after I hand the work over.
Clients are outdoor-focused, mission-driven small businesses, startups, retailers, small brands, and nonprofits, most of them in Maine and New England. Some have a marketing team, others a director of everything. How we work together adapts to that, though the order does not change. Foundation first, then the strategy that sits on it, then the systems that you or your team run every day, on whatever budget is left once the engagement ends.
Photograph by Stephen Wells
It reveals and builds on what sits beneath the surface.
Brand foundation first, then the content systems that build on it, so everything after sounds unmistakably like you.
- ✳︎Protects the brand against the slop.
- ✳︎Feeds the human team that carries it day to day.
- ✳︎Gives AI tools accurate material to describe it when someone searches.
The foundation runs about forty pages and reads like a working document, including the deep-dive reports behind it: positioning, up to five audience profiles, voice and tone with real examples, messaging pillars, proof points, and guardrails that name what the brand does not do. The social calendar and the site copy both get built from it.
✳︎THE WIDER VALUE
It informs the rest of your team's work
The foundation and content systems are what each of them draws from. Agencies and freelancers do better work faster when the brand has already been defined, because nobody is guessing at voice or reinventing positioning on your budget.
PR
Messaging pillars, proof points, and guardrails give the PR team a consistent story and the language to pitch it. The spokesperson sounds like the brand in every interview and every quote.
Advertising
Positioning and audience profiles tell the creative team who they are reaching and what the brand owns, so campaigns start from strategy instead of a blank page.
Web Design
Voice, structured page copy, and AI signals give designers real words to build around, and make the finished site legible to readers and machines alike.
Social Content & Community
Content pillars, voice guidelines, and templates give the social team a system to post and reply from, so the day-to-day stays on brand without a check-in.
✳︎THE PERSON BEHIND THE WORK
My story
Home is Portland, Maine. Two decades working within the outdoor, startup, small business, and nonprofit communities here has shaped how I think about brands.
Read the full storyLet's talk about your brand.
Tell me where things stand.