Brand strategy & creative direction

The tools change every five years. The eye doesn’t.

The eye doesn’t.

I build brand systems for hypergrowth startups, identity, story, and the discipline to hold it together from pre-seed to IPO. Built once. Built to scale.

Start with the audit

$4,500. Two weeks. Your market, on tape.

Who’s behind it

Thirty years. One eye.

I’m Tom O’Keefe. I was Creative Director at New Relic from fifty employees through a $1.4B IPO, and I’ve shaped the brands of Microsoft, Adobe, Evite, and 150+ companies before and since.

I came up doing graffiti, which means I learned to judge what stops you in your tracks on a wall, long before I learned to judge it on a screen.

The trends rotate. The eye is the part that doesn’t. The Brand Whisperer is that judgment, on call.

Someone has to taste the soup.

The work

New Relic

Creative Director from fifty people to a $1.4 billion IPO.

The brand held the whole way up.

Microsoft, Adobe, Evite, Idealab, and 150+ more companies.

A few are under NDA. Most aren’t, ask.

How we work together

Three ways in. No menu pricing.

The right number depends on your stage and what’s at stake, so we set it in the room, not on a page. Here’s where founders usually land.

The Founder Brand

Look like your Series A

Pre-seed & seed founders who refuse to look early-stage.

A full identity system, pitch deck, site direction, and voice, the whole brand, built once so you don’t rebuild it at every round. Fixed scope. Fixed timeline.

Engagements start in the low five figures.

The Growth Brand

A brand team, fractional

Companies in motion that need senior taste on tap.

Launches, positioning, employer brand, exec presence, everything that moves revenue, handled. Month to month. No retainer you can’t walk away from.

Monthly. Cancel anytime.

The Unicorn Brand

Your brand department

Past $20M ARR or on a clear venture trajectory.

I embed as the head of brand you haven’t hired yet, setting the system, directing the work, holding the line as you scale. Priced to the outcome, not the hour.

Invite only.

Not sure where you land?

Start with the Audit.

Three real evaluators matched to your market, a buyer, an investor, a partner, see your homepage, deck and LinkedIn for seven seconds each, on tape.

You get the tapes, a score out of 35, the three fixes that matter most and a 60-minute readout.

Price
$4,500
Timeline
Two weeks
Where
Remote
Score
Out of 35
Get the audit

What founders said

The brand changed. So did the meetings.

  • “Old deck got ghosted. New deck got term sheets in 48 hours. Same product.”
    Mathew Wilson
  • “Over many years I’ve worked with Tom on more than a dozen branding projects. He’s my go-to because the work is high quality, fast, and actually brings the company’s identity to life, the best and easiest design partner I’ve used.”
    Lars PerkinsCEO / Founder
  • “Tom is an exceptional designer and creative director across brand, web, comms, and UX. Compelling vision paired with a hands-on, pragmatic approach that delivers high-quality work fast, and he defends his ideas thoughtfully. I’ve hired him for everything from identity systems to product UX.”
    Adam BerreyCEO / Founder
  • “The Brand Whisperer extends far beyond design, he considers the brand, the user interaction, and every detail to craft a truly world-class experience.”
    Tamer MorsyCEO / Founder

01 / 04

Let’s build the one that doesn’t break.

Most brands get torn down and rebuilt every eighteen months because nobody designed them to hold.

Yours won’t.

Start with the audit

Or keep looking like every other startup. Your call.