Wake Up Beautiful

---

My Role: Brand Identity, Logo Design, Marketing Collateral

Client Profile: Brandi, CEO of Wake Up Beautiful. 

Project Scope: Comprehensive branding and lifestyle photography across multiple venues, incorporating sponsored attire for Rent a Runway. 

Technical Specs: Shot exclusively on the Canon 5DS R, utilizing a mix of natural ambient light and portable studio strobe kits. 

Primary Use Case: CEO social media content, brand identity promotion, website visuals, and 'Outfit of the Day' (OOTD) styling for Rent a Runway.

The core of this project was to move beyond traditional headshots and create a dynamic, accessible, and sophisticated visual identity for the CEO of a successful beauty brand. The goal was twofold: to humanize the leadership position of 'Wake Up Beautiful' and simultaneously showcase the versatility of the apparel from Rent a Runway. This required a curated approach to environmental storytelling and precise lighting.

1. The Living Room (Indoor Comfort) A comfortable, residential setting was chosen to establish an initial sense of 'everyday luxury.' Here, the soft-box light was feathered with ambient window light to create a relaxed, warm tone, emphasizing 'beauty from within.' Brandi's interactions with her yellow Labrador Retriever added a powerful, personal touch, making her CEO persona highly relatable. Featured OOTD: Red cocktail dress.

2. The Renaissance Club Sport Lobby (Indoor Exclusivity) To transition from comfort to sophistication, the exclusive, member-only lobby of the Renaissance Club Sport was utilized. This location, with its strong architectural lines and dramatic, color-wash ambient lighting (vibrant blues), provided the perfect contrast. The challenge was balancing the 5DS R’s exposure to retain the ambient atmosphere while using a focused snoot on the portable light to make the subject pop against the complex background. This environment screamed 'modern leadership.' Featured OOTD: Sophisticated all-black two-piece suit with shoulder cutouts.

3. The Backyard & Garden Walk (Outdoor Lifestyle) The backyard provided two distinct looks:

• A relaxed patio scene against a lush green artificial hedge, perfect for 'at-home leisure' lifestyle shots.
• An intricate garden pathway under a pergola covered in climbing greenery. This setting, with its deep shadows and dappled light, was ideal for dramatic, depth-of-field portraits that highlighted textural details. Featured OOTD: Camo joggers and striped crop top (backyard), Navy blue ruffled two-piece (garden).

4. The Scenic Overlook & Park (Public Branding) Finally, photos at a scenic overlook against a backdrop of distant hills and beside her white Porsche provided classic branding moments. This transition from natural park lighting to controlled environment photography demonstrated the range. Featured OOTD: Pink sweater with patterned trousers.

The choice of the high-resolution 5DS R (50.6MP) was intentional, allowing the images to be cropped severely for different social media formats (square, vertical, banner) without loss of quality.

The key to successful multi-location shoots like this is the integration of portable lighting. A lightweight, battery-powered strobe (such as an AD200 or similar) was essential.

• Outdoors: In the park and against the green wall, the light was used as a fill-light to counteract harsh shadows and balance bright sunshine.
• Indoors: At the Renaissance Club and in the living room, it was used as the primary light source, with modifiers (softboxes or grid reflectors) to sculpt the subject and define texture.

This approach ensured visual consistency across highly diverse settings.

The resulting gallery provided the client with a curated year's worth of high-impact visuals. By blending personal lifestyle moments with corporate environments, the CEO persona was reinforced as both successful and approachable.

Furthermore, by integrating the 'Rent a Runway' apparel into these authentic settings, the clothing felt lived-in and desirable, driving significantly higher engagement on 'OOTD' social posts than standard studio product shots.

This case study demonstrates the power of a strategic, multi-location approach to branding photography, executed with top-tier gear and intelligent lighting, to deliver maximum marketing value across varied platforms.

Project Type: Brand Visualization & Portfolio Development 

Client: In-House Initiative for Wake Up Beautiful Spa (Founder: Brandi) 

Objective: To elevate existing "in-the-field" founder photography into retail-ready marketing assets, proving a design methodology that converts authentic moments into luxurious, cohesive brand storytelling suitable for a high-end corporate retail audience (e.g., Dillard's, prestige beauty divisions).

Many established small businesses possess immense authenticity but face a "visual credibility gap" when attempting to partner with or pitch to major corporate retail partners. Wake Up Beautiful Spa, a successful wellness brand, possessed original, authentic "founder-as-the-brand" photography of their CEO, Brandi. While genuine, the original, soft-focus candid photography lacked the visual precision, stylized cohesion, and elevated presentation required for print media, store-within-a-store displays, or premium co-branding efforts with a retailer like Dillard's.

The design methodology was to treat the original photograph as a structural blueprint rather than a final product. The objective was not to erase the founder, but to translate her authenticity into a powerful, stylized asset.

Step 1: Structural Analysis & Stylization (The Transformation) We analyzed the pose and likeness in the original image and translated them into a sophisticated, hand-drawn vector illustration. This process provided numerous branding advantages:

• Precision and Clarity: The details (Brandi's honeycomb mesh texture on her top, the pattern on her pants, and her jewelry) were sharpened, removing the limitations of photographic blur and maximizing visual definition.
• Aesthetic Cohesion: This allowed for precise palette control, replacing a chaotic green field with a curated, lush lavender field that integrated seamlessly with the brand's sophisticated gold tones.

Step 2: Brand Integration & Narrative (The Polish) With a clean vector portrait as the base, the full branding ecosystem was introduced with absolute precision.

• Gilded Presentation: A golden frame was introduced to immediately establish the asset as a premium, retail-ready advertisement.
• Logo Integrity: The refined Wake Up Beautiful Spa logo (script and bird) was integrated with gilded textures, ensuring brand consistency.
• Integrated Copy: Strategic headlines and calls to action ("Elegance in Every Moment" and "Explore the Art of Self-Care") were introduced in refined fonts, seamlessly merging the copy with the illustration to create a finished advertising product.

The transformation demonstrates a powerful ability to bridge the gap between "small business founder" and "corporate retail asset." The new creation successfully:

1. Maintains Authenticity: Brandi is still the recognizable face and core story of the business, but presented in a way that respects the professionalism of a major retail partner.
2. Elevates Perceived Value: The asset instantly communicates a higher price point and a more sophisticated customer experience.
3. Shows Corporate Viability: This proof-of-concept visual is immediately ready for high-resolution print in a Dillard's-style seasonal catalog, a beauty display, or digital advertising, saving the retail partner significant design development time.

This case study is a testament to the power of design to elevate, not replace, the founder story, creating visual assets that are both deeply personal and ready for the main stage of corporate retail.