Case Studies

Six engagements across climatetech, crowdfunding, media, hospitality, agriculture, and creative operations for a high-growth designtech company. Each one proof that strategy and execution don't have to live in separate people.


Creative — The Luxe Nomad

Twelve villas.
One relentless December.

At the Luxe Nomad, Asia-Pacific's leading luxury villa booking platform, I ran press and campaign strategy across 1,500+ curated properties in 33 destinations, from Bali to the Maldives to Niseko.

1,785
Comments on a single campaign post
HK$43K
Raised in 5 days for the Seabin initiative
12 days
Consecutive giveaway campaign, full partner coordination
33
Destinations across the villa portfolio
Context

The Luxe Nomad operated in a category where editorial credibility was the business model. The publications that covered you determined the clientele that trusted you. Getting into Tatler, Condé Nast, and Harper's Bazaar wasn't a nice-to-have; it was the acquisition channel.

Campaign
12 Villas of Christmas

Conceptualized and executed a 12-day Instagram giveaway - one luxury villa stay per day across properties in Bali, Koh Samui, Niseko, and the Maldives. Each post required curated property copy, partner coordination with individual villa accounts, and community management across thousands of comments. Built and deployed a custom branded GIF sticker pack to extend the campaign's organic reach.

Press
Beyond the View

Wrote and distributed a press release positioning The Luxe Nomad's design villa portfolio as the definitive holiday destination for architecture-conscious travelers, featuring a villa by the architect behind "Bali Modern," a solar-powered off-grid property in Pantai Nyanyi, and a beachfront estate with a 22-meter column-free span.

Sustainability
Seabin partnership

Authored the press release for a sustainability partnership with The Aberdeen Marina Club that raised HK$43,000 in five days to install Hong Kong's first floating ocean waste collector, positioned as an extension of the company's in-villa sustainability program across managed properties in Bali.

Proof
Tatler Asia
Featured alongside Plum Guide and Le Collectionist as one of four definitive luxury villa platforms to bookmark.
What this shows

A relentless campaign calendar and top-tier press credibility aren't in tension, they run on the same muscle. The Luxe Nomad is where I learned to hold both at once: daily execution and long-arc brand positioning, in a market where the wrong villa story could cost a placement.

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Creative — Oko Farms

Where brand meets
the ground.

Brand strategy, illustration, content, and event production for NYC's only outdoor aquaponics farm, founded by Prada/Dorchester Industries Creative Fellow Yemi Amu and featured on PBS, Vogue, and Good Morning America.

Context

Oko Farms sits at the intersection of food access, community education, environmental science, and cultural life. Founder Yemi Amu needed a brand and marketing partner who could hold the full complexity of what the farm is without flattening it into a single lane.

My work spanned illustration, content strategy, event production, newsletter editorial, press coordination, and website redesign - not separate projects, but one continuous creative and strategic relationship.

Illustration
Botanical drawings for markets, newsletters, and campaigns

Created original hand-drawn botanical illustrations used across Oko Farms' marketing materials - from holiday market event graphics (credited directly on @okofarms) to the "Notes from the Field" newsletter headers accompanying each edition.

Press
National media coverage

Coordinated press around Yemi Amu's growing national profile, including the PBS "Women of the Earth" documentary feature (S1E4, "How This Aquaponics Farmer Is Reinventing Urban Agriculture") and a Vogue feature through the Aerthship collaboration that brought Oko Farms into the editorial conversation on urban food systems.

PBS · Women of the Earth S1E4 Vogue Good Morning America
Website
okofarms.org redesign

Contributed to the redesign of okofarms.org, the organization's primary digital presence, housing program information, workshop registration, farm tours, and community resources - balancing the full breadth of what Oko Farms does without losing the farm's distinct voice and visual identity.

What this shows

Oko Farms is the case study that most clearly shows both sides of how I work. The illustrations are a craft practice; the content strategy, newsletter editorial, and press coordination are strategic. They're not in tension. At Oko Farms, the brand only works because both are present simultaneously.

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Tactical — Adweek

55–60% open rates.
An 18% industry floor.

At Adweek, I ran newsletter, event sponsorship, and ABM campaigns inside the ecosystem that sets the media and marketing industry's direction.

Context

The role spanned the full product suite: a weekly newsletter reaching 43,000+ sales prospects and subscribers, event sponsorship campaigns for Social Media Week, Cannes, SXSW, Mediaweek, and Elevate summits, co-branded content through Adweek Branded, and ABM targeting senior decision-makers across brand, agency, and technology verticals.

Email · Newsletter
The Adweek Update

Managed and optimized a weekly sales-assist newsletter distributed to two distinct lists: 43,252 engaged subscribers and 11,042 sales prospects: tracked across open rate, CTR, click-to-open, and unsubscribe rate, and benchmarked against industry averages to inform A/B testing and segmentation. Audience skewed brand-side (54%) and senior (29% Director, 22% Executive, 16% C-Suite).

MetricIndustry avgSales prospectsUpdate list
Open rate18%55%60%
Click-through rate2.6%3%3%
Unsubscribe rate0.1%0.05%0.03%
Events · Sponsorship
A full-year calendar, 30+ tentpoles

Managed demand generation and sponsorship campaigns across Adweek's full 2022 editorial calendar, a year-long program built around the theme "Convergent Futures", running simultaneously across event properties, each with its own sponsor decks, lead gen assets, and promotional cadence.

Product
Adweek Branded

Sold and supported Adweek Branded, the company's co-branded content product with packages running up to $100K, sitting at the intersection of editorial credibility and sponsor deliverables.

What this shows

Three times the industry open rate isn't a lucky send. It's a list treated like an asset, not a channel. That discipline, applied across newsletter, events, and branded content simultaneously, is what demand generation looks like when it's run by someone who understands both the audience and the sale.

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Tactical — Superside

Employee 24.
Fifty-plus onboardings later.

I joined Superside as its 24th employee and built the onboarding function from the ground up: the systems, the team structure, and the pitch for why it needed to exist at all. The company has since scaled to 900+ people as a YC-backed design-as-a-service platform.

#24
Employee hired into a now 900+ person company
50+
Client companies onboarded
Proposed
Dedicated onboarding pod, built before it was asked for
1
Internal tool shipped: Superspace
Context

Superside sells design as a subscription: a rotating bench of presentation, graphic, illustration, UI, and brand designers serving clients from robotics startups to national retail chains. At the scale I joined, there was no dedicated onboarding function; new accounts were handed off cold, and the first weeks of a relationship (the ones that decide whether a client renews or churns) were left to chance.

I proposed and built the fix: a structured onboarding motion with a named team, a repeatable kickoff process, and the internal tooling to support it as the client base scaled past what any one person could manage by memory.

Team design
A named pod, not a ticket queue

Structured each account around a fixed team (creative project manager, senior account manager, design director, account executive, and an onboarding lead) so clients had faces and names instead of a rotating support inbox. Trained design directors and project managers on each client's brand guidelines directly, rather than leaving brand fidelity to whoever picked up the next request.

Process
A repeatable kickoff, run 50+ times

Ran kickoff calls across a wide client range covering user needs, brand maturity, internal stakeholders, and existing design assets before any work started. Same structure, different vertical each time, so the relationship started with clarity instead of guesswork.

Internal tooling
Slack-based escalation system

Built a slash-command system so bottlenecks surfaced instead of stalling quietly — an internal flag if a designer went late on a submission or a project manager went unresponsive. Turned "this project needs saving" into a two-second command instead of a guessing game.

What this shows

Nobody asked for a dedicated onboarding function, I saw the gap between "signed" and "retained" and built the team, process, and tooling to close it. Fifty-plus companies later, across robotics, retail, hospitality, and healthcare, the same structure held. That's the difference between executing a process and building the one that didn't exist yet.

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Innovation / Corporate — Urban Future Lab

Six programs.
One communications department.

At the Urban Future Lab (UFL) at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, I run marketing, PR, and communications across six simultaneous climatetech programs: a scope most organizations split across four to six people.

40.8%
Average newsletter open rate vs. 21% industry avg
49.5%
Best single newsletter send
$4.2B+
Capital unlocked across 200+ supported startups
92%
Portfolio company survival rate
Context

UFL had deep credibility inside the climatetech world: 200+ startups supported, $4.2B+ in venture capital and grants unlocked, partners including BP, Shell, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, NYCEDC, NYSERDA, and the Department of Energy. What it lacked was a coherent public narrative and the communications infrastructure to sustain one.

I rebuilt that from scratch. Serving as the sole brand and communications lead across six programs simultaneously, from press strategy to newsletter editorial to website ownership to event campaigns to media pitching. I also built and own ufl.nyc, along with the tracking system that keeps six programs' worth of content, press, and campaign activity synchronized.

Press · Media relations
From the NYU newsroom to Nasdaq TradeTalks

Drafted, coordinated, and placed press releases across UFL's six programs, working directly with NYU Tandon's communications team to move stories from internal briefing through institutional approval into published coverage. A live Nasdaq TradeTalks segment featuring UFL's Carbon to Value Initiative positioned the organization's climatetech work at the intersection of innovation and capital markets; a PIX11 segment brought the same story to a local broadcast audience.

Scaling Climate Tech Solutions for Real-World Applications
NASDAQ TradeTalks
Video
UFL Announces Finalists for 2025 Urban Future Prize Competition
NYU Tandon Newsroom · 382 record applications
Press release
Local broadcast segment on UFL climatetech programming
PIX11
TV
Email · Newsletter
A performance system across six lists

Built and ran the newsletter program across UFL's six programs, averaging a 40.8% open rate against a 21% industry benchmark, with a best single send of 49.5%. Grew LinkedIn following from 7,894 to 10,200 across the same period — proof the audience was actually engaging, not just subscribing.

Digital
ufl.nyc — owned end to end

Own the organization's primary digital presence outright - architecture, content, and maintenance -alongside the internal tracker that keeps six programs' content calendars, press pipelines, and campaign metrics in one place.

What this shows

The NASDAQ TradeTalks placement required understanding financial media. The PIX11 segment required making a technical story feel local and human. Navigating NYU Tandon's institutional approval required patience and institutional fluency. All three happened in the same year, across six programs, managed by one person. That's the work.

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Innovation / Corporate — StartEngine

Thirty-five raises.
One quarter.

At StartEngine, I ran full-funnel campaign strategy for a portfolio of 35+ Regulation CF startups at once - wind turbine manufacturers next to wineries next to a cashew-milk cheese brand. Same funnel mechanics, entirely different audiences, run in parallel.

$5.5M
Raised across portfolio in 3 months
35+
Startups managed simultaneously
2 days
Fastest raise to hit its $25K goal
1
Strategist owning positioning through compliance
Context

Regulation CF fundraising is a compressed, deadline-driven format: a startup gets one live campaign window to convert its community, StartEngine's investor base, and net-new prospects into funded investors with SEC compliance rules governing exactly what can be said, when, and where.

I held full ownership of that funnel for each company in my pod, from the first kickoff call through campaign close. That meant the marketing strategy couldn't live separately from the legal and financial mechanics as positioning, paid media, and filings all had to move together, on the same clock, for a portfolio spanning industrial hardware to CPG.

Strategy
Kickoff to campaign page

Led first-touch strategy calls with each founder, setting perks, shaping the pitch video, and setting valuation, then worked with the creative lead to translate the company's story into a campaign page structured to convert.

Paid media
Facebook, IG, and Promote strategy

Built and sold paid media strategy through StartEngine's in-house Promote agency - sequencing discovery, acquisition, and retargeting audiences across the campaign lifecycle, and advising founders on budget pacing against typical 2.5x–4x return benchmarks.

Communications
Investor nurture and campaign updates

Managed the campaign update cadence that converts followers into investors over weeks of touchpoints, timing announcements around funding milestones (StartEngine's own promotional queue triggers at $45K) to keep each raise visible to the platform's investor community.

Compliance
SEC filings and extensions

Filed campaign amendments, extensions, and closing paperwork directly with the SEC for each company, the unglamorous backbone that let the marketing side move fast without putting a raise at legal risk.

Proof
Investor nurture framework
Built out the paid-ads-to-investor funnel logic - prospecting, retargeting, follower conversion via a 3x/week update cadence - used to set founder expectations on how long-tail conversion actually works.
Campaign lifecycle model
Mapped the revenue curve of a typical raise - community surge, plateau, channel-by-channel reactivation, closing urgency - as a teaching tool for founders navigating their first (and only) campaign window.
What this shows

Thirty-five companies, one quarter, zero repeats. A wind turbine manufacturer and a cashew cheese brand need entirely different stories, but the same disciplined funnel underneath. That's the muscle this role built: holding strategy, media, and compliance in one hand without letting any of them slip while the clock runs.

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