JAKE WEISS

Bios are weird. You're supposed to summarize yourself for a stranger in a few paragraphs and somehow make it not feel like a LinkedIn profile or a job application. I've never been great at either of those things, so let's try something else.

 

I'm a Brand Strategist, Creative Director and Art Director. Most of my career has been spent working on the underlying problem that companies usually know what they make, but they're not always sure what they stand for. Those are different things. My job is to find the true thing about a brand and build the systems to say it consistently, at scale, without it falling apart when the people who care about it change.

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At AriensCo I built The Forge — the company's first in-house creative studio. We hired the team, set the standards, and rebuilt brand architecture across multiple product lines. Raised aided brand awareness, collected more Telly and Addy Awards than the shelf could hold, and cut enough agency spend that the studio more than paid for itself.

Before any of that I was a non-commissioned officer in the Marine Corps, leading a fire team. The thing that stuck with me is pretty simple: a team that knows the mission executes. A team that doesn't, improvises badly. I've carried that into every room I've worked in since. Which is to say, I come into hard brand problems with a point of view. I'd rather be wrong and course-correct than spend the first three meetings circling the drain looking for consensus.

Outside of work I'm a tinkerer with a lot of interests and not enough hours. Vinyl, travel, carpentry. If there's a project to build or a place worth driving to, I'm probably already looking at a map. Mostly though, I'm trying to make good memories with my wife Michelle and our two boys, Greyson and Myles. That part's working out pretty well.

If something here resonates, I'd be glad to connect.