How did you discover you were interested in a creative career and gain the skills to enter the industry? I actually started building the skillset for brand strategy before I even knew the field existed. In high school, I attended a magnet school for fine arts alongside the standard curriculum, where I was able to immerse myself in literature, architecture, music and dramaturgy. Then, I earned my undergraduate business degree at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia (UVA).

At UVA, most of my classmates were heading straight into investment banking or traditional management consulting. I didn’t yet realize there was an entire industry devoted to brand strategy. As I debated what job to pursue, my father suggested I start in consulting. He thought the nature of continuous learning; the variety of project types, industries and challenges; and the advisory aspect would be a good fit for me. He was right, but after two years in marketing and sales consulting, I realized I wanted to apply that rigor to a more creative domain. That’s when I discovered brand strategy—the perfect intersection where my business background and artistic instincts made the most of each other.

I was fortunate that my first brand strategy role was at a firm led by a renowned industry expert, where our work spanned client projects as well as deep research supporting expert-witness testimony for high-profile brand equity legal cases. It was a baptism by fire that solidified both the analytical rigor and creative nuance required for the work I do today.

As strategy director at creative agency Kurppa Hosk, what does your day-to-day look like? I straddle both client work and agency operations as I’m also the lead for our strategy capability. This includes our team of insight, brand and communications strategists. Today, we’re around 30 people. Our day-to-day is a mix of brainstorming with our teams of strategists and designers, reviewing in-progress work and meeting with clients as well as recruitment and team development activities and agency initiatives. The mix is what keeps it interesting for me. When I considered going in-house a few years ago, I realized I would miss the ebb and flow of consulting work and the range of industry challenges too much.

Kurppa Hosk refers to its approach as “business artistry.” What does that mean for how you work with clients? While there are many things that brought me to Kurppa Hosk, one of the biggest was our core philosophy of business artistry. It might sound like another riff on “left brain meets right brain,” but across seven agencies, Kurppa Hosk is the only place where I’ve consistently worked in the trenches without silos. We bring strategy, design, client management and production together from day one.

That setup creates a brilliant intellectual tension. Business artistry, to me, is the ability to solve a business problem wearing multiple hats at once, balancing the rational and precise with the imaginative and daring. Instead of a room where strategists sit on one side and creatives on the other, Kurppa Hosk is a room full of people who respect each discipline and build on ideas together.

Because you’re a first-generation American, how has your experience contributed to your interest in uncovering minute details in history and weaving them together to tell a story? Growing up as a first-generation American in a place where you stick out teaches you early on to pay close attention to context. You naturally look past surface narratives to find the real backstory. I was born in New York City but grew up in a small Virginia town. I married into yet another culture beyond those, and currently, my husband and I are raising our children in Sweden, a country neither of us grew up in. Living a truly cross-cultural life has made the habit of paying close attention second nature for me. While I’ve always paid attention to details, living at the intersection of so many worlds as an adult has made digging into the minutiae an almost reflexive habit.

In brand strategy, this translates into an obsession with digging deeper than surface-level market claims. I look for the overlooked details: the origin stories, subtle cultural shifts and historical truths that explain why an organization exists and how it genuinely stands apart and creates value.

Uncovering those microscopic details is only half the job. The real impact comes from weaving them into a strategy that drives clarity for its people and growth for its business. Constantly acting as a cultural translator—both at home and with corporate leaders—has kept me sharp at taming the convoluted with sensible rationale. Whether assessing a company’s latent strengths or defining its future market positioning, my instinct is to gather scattered historical threads, brand truths and audience insights and then knit them together into a compelling strategy and narrative. Digging into history is about finding the most authentic pieces of a brand’s past and using them to shape a strategy that moves the business forward.

Tell us about Kurppa Hosk’s recent rebrand of the US-based trucking brand Navistar into International. How did you navigate International’s 200-year history and find inspiration for its next phase? When Navistar approached Kurppa Hosk, the business was at a critical inflection point, evolving from a traditional vehicle manufacturer into a customer-centric mobility solutions provider. While the corporate holding name Navistar lacked market engagement, its legacy brand, International, possessed deep equity, pride and history dating back more than a century ago.

Navigating that long arc meant combing through company archives, spending time with the official company historian to get a deeper understanding of the nearly two-century-old origin story, and speaking directly with people across every layer of the organization and its stakeholders, from front-line workers to diverse customer groups. Listening to these lived experiences made it clear that International was already the beating heart of the company. We guided the strategic decision to sunset the Navistar corporate name and elevate International to masterbrand status, leveraging its authentic heritage to consolidate a fragmented portfolio and position the business for the future.

Finding inspiration for International’s next chapter came from embracing the dynamic contrast between its past and its potential, balancing raw power with refined engineering, practical utility and grit with ambitious innovation, as well as massive scale with a personal touch. We translated those dualities into a comprehensive brand system, drawing on road-inspired visual language, bespoke typography and reworked archival marks across digital platforms, physical touchpoints and custom merchandise. The transformation culminated in the unifying launch concept, “We’re International,” which served as both an authentic declaration of identity and a rallying cry for employees and partners alike. By grounding the strategy in historical truth, the new brand re-energized a legacy American icon to lead in a modern, electrified industry.

What have been some of your other favorite projects you’ve created at Kurppa Hosk? One is our work with Zalando as it evolved from a pan-European e-commerce pioneer into an inspiring fashion-style destination. With our strategic challenge lying at the intersection of business and brand, we had to figure out how to support a mission that entertains and inspires customers while enabling them to express their individuality through personalized experiences across 25 different countries. It reset my perception of brand strategy by proving that a system doesn’t always need to be the loudest voice in the room. Instead, you can create a dynamic framework that seamlessly toggles between being the “star of the show” and serving as the “stage” for global partners, local creators and customers to express themselves while ensuring the brand remains unmistakably itself.

Beyond my own hands-on assignments, I’ve been deeply impressed watching what my strategy colleagues accomplished with Scania—a Swedish truck manufacturer I kept close tabs on as a sister company to International under the TRATON Group. Although I wasn’t directly on the project team, seeing how our strategy team crafted Scania's experience vision and flexible brand system expanded my view of what strategy can achieve at massive scale. Strategic clarity can rally a complex industrial leader from the inside out and align thousands of employees around a shared direction for sustainable transport. Seeing both ends of the spectrum—from Zalando’s consumer-led style platform to Scania’s heavy-transport evolution—underscores how strategy can act as both an adaptable creative catalyst and an engine for enterprise-wide transformation.

What is one challenge currently facing brand agencies that they must address in order to stay relevant? I think one of the biggest challenges facing brand agencies today is escaping the trap of hyper-commoditization. With AI tools and automated platforms making basic strategy frameworks, visual design and copy generation faster and cheaper than ever, agencies are under immense pressure to compete on speed and volume. There’s a risk of brand building being reduced to quick aesthetic polish or template-driven exercises. But if you only deliver surface-level refreshes, you’re racing to the bottom.

To stay relevant, agencies must move away from acting as transactional vendor factories and reassert themselves as indispensable strategic partners in business transformation. That requires balancing world-class design and technical efficiency with deep strategic clarity and craft—what we call “business artistry” at Kurppa Hosk.

Clients don’t just need another static brand book or more assets filling up digital channels. They need partners who can dig beneath surface-level noise, understand their core business model and uncover authenticity that builds long-term brand equity. The agencies that thrive will be those that use technology for speed but rely on human rigor, judgment, context and creativity to drive actual commercial growth.

Do you have any advice for creatives just starting out in the field today? Two things: Build a hybrid mindset and never limit yourself to your official title.

The industry used to favor strict specialists—strategists in one room, designers in another. Today, the most impactful people are those who can bridge different worlds. If you’re a designer or writer, take the time to learn the language of business, economics and metrics so you can articulate why your creative choices drive value. If you’re a strategist, immerse yourself in craft, art, literature and human behavior so your insights actually inspire compelling work.

Beyond that, look outside the digital echo chamber for inspiration. Don’t just rely on the same trends and mood boards everyone else is scrolling through online. Pay attention to context, history, subcultures and details in your everyday life. The ability to notice the minutiae—and translate those subtle observations into fresh, meaningful ideas—is what will always set your work apart. ca