My journey has always been driven by my desire to understand what makes people tick. 

At Hamilton College, I created my own major to study just that—combining sociology, economics, and communications to have a baseline understanding of human behavior. 

Then I went to Kantar where I sought to deepen that understanding. There, I researched and analyzed the various factors that change human behavior from a scientific and data-driven approach.

During this time, as kismet would have it, the Whitney was showcasing the first Warhol retrospective in the US since 1989; to which I begrudgingly accompanied my mother. Unexpectedly, I was completely and utterly enamored by Warhol’s ability to blur the line between art and advertisement—to take the mundane, recontextualize it, and elevate the everyday to the status of fine art.

And that’s exactly what branding does—it takes an ordinary commodity and elevates it into a premium product. When done right, it creates value, distinctiveness, and trust—it creates something irreplaceable.

But to some, it’s alchemy. To create value out of thin air—to transform table salt into Morton because it has a little girl on the package. No amount of economic theory or statistical modeling can explain that.

And that’s because branding is both an art and a science. In a world where people don’t act in rational ways, it’s not logic that moves people, but magic.

And this is where my strengths lie as a strategist—to unlock that magic utilizing both the arts and sciences. To not just study and analyze human behavior, but to shape and influence it because researchers describe how the world is, but creatives imagine how the world could be.