Your brand is just a phase.
It’s not acting out—it’s adapting.
What a puka shell necklace, a fractured arm, and a minor identity crisis taught me about brand strategy—and why it needs to flex just as much as your brand itself.
Touch Grass is my Substack about early-stage ideas, brand clarity, and the creative murk in between—written with dirt under the nails. Subscribe for essays that blend strategy with story, business with backbone. If this is our first time meeting, I also write about nature and slow living over at Lowcountry, High Life.
The Girl, the Myth, the Tiki Headboard
Back in middle school, my personal brand was clear. I was a surfer girl.
Was I good at surfing? No. Had I ever actually surfed? Not really. But I had a puka shell necklace, board shorts from the men’s section at TJMaxx, and a Ron Jon Surf Shop catalog that doubled as my interior design mood board. No one deserved a tiki headboard more than me.
If you’d asked me back then what I stood for—what I wanted to express—I probably wouldn’t have said “authentic connection to land and sea.” I probably would’ve said, “I think it’d be cool to drive a Woodie” or “Amber said I look like a beach bum.” Amber, my best friend at the time, had a name that was literally a 311 song and therefore embodied peak beach culture. I was just trying to keep up.
Eventually I pivoted. From surfing to wakeboarding (surfing-adjacent, fewer sharks). Then to skateboarding. That one ended quickly with a fractured arm. I was a skater girl and, well, said see ya later girl.
The thing is, my brand kept changing. But my strategy stayed weirdly consistent. I was always chasing the same vision: nature lover, active, Florida-tomboy, a little sunburned, slightly feral. Easy. Breezy. Beautiful. Possibly a CoverGirl, more likely to be found in a sports bra and beat up converse.
Brand Identity Is Having a Middle School Phase
Lately, I’ve been thinking about this—not the Ron Jon catalog, though I do miss it—but the idea that brands today are expected to behave a lot more like middle school me: shifting, stretching, trying things on, playing in the world to see what fits.
We already know that visual identity systems have evolved. Brands aren’t expected to stay locked in a single system anymore. They can shape shift. Flex. Adapt. Get weird depending on the moment, the medium, or the audience.
But what about brand strategy?
If your voice and visuals are allowed to stretch, should strategy be the thing that stays solid? Or does that need to flex too?
I used to think strategy had to be the immovable core—the marble statue you base everything else on. But now I’m not so sure. The world moves too fast. Audiences are too fragmented. Messaging moments don’t wait for you to run a full positioning sprint.
And if you lock a brand into a single line—a tidy sentence written in a Q2 workshop—you’re giving them a snapshot, not a system. It might sound great in the moment, but by Q4 it could feel like blasting a Beach Boys playlist at a summer hang, only to realize everyone’s deep into The Format now. But enough about my trauma.
Keep the Core, Stretch the Rest
Here’s where I’ve landed: Strategy needs both a strong center and flexible edges.
The center is what grounds you: your purpose, your values, your long-term point of view. It gives the brand stability and direction, even as everything around it shifts.
Then there are the elements that should flex: positioning, messaging, narrative, differentiation. The parts that respond to context. They evolve depending on who you're talking to, what they care about, and what culture is doing that week.
It’s not about reinventing your brand every six months. It’s about building in enough elasticity to stay relevant—without losing the thread of who you are.
You can’t just flex for the sake of it. You still need a center of gravity. But you also need range. The goal isn’t to write one perfect sentence that lasts forever. It’s to equip the brand to say the right thing to the right person at the right time.
Shoutout to the Cast Tech Who Roasted Me
So no, I don’t regret my surfer era. Or my wakeboard phase. Or even the skateboarding incident that gave me a core memory of a cast technician looking at my X-ray and saying, “Huh. Never seen an arm shaped like that before.” (Like, ok?)
They were all real, even if they weren’t forever.
That’s the job now. Make the brand feel real—even if it doesn’t look the same every time. Stay true to the core. Stretch everything else.
And if you can do it with the energy of a 13-year-old girl planning a tiki-themed bedroom makeover from a Florida strip mall catalog, then you’ve officially earned your puka shells.
