Episode 007: For When You’ve Outgrown Your Brand

Have you ever reached a point where your brand no longer feels aligned with the growth of your business?

In this episode, Kat opens up about the moment Afternoon Culture's brand no longer reflected the direction it was heading.

She shares how rebranding isn't just about an aesthetic change but about recalibrating your brand to align with the vision and direction your business has taken. Kat discusses the key signs that it's time for a shift and how aligning your brand with your evolving business can open doors to new opportunities.

If you've been feeling a disconnect between your brand and the direction of your business, this episode will provide valuable insights into how to approach rebranding thoughtfully and strategically. 

Full Transcript

This month marks seven years since I launched Afternoon Culture and twelve years of entrepreneurship. I am so grateful I get to do it. It's been a wild ride with a lot of learning, unlearning, and figuring things out as I go.

In the last episode, I shared the moment I had to restructure after scaling fast and hitting a wall at the end of 2022. We had tripled our revenue and doubled the size of our team but the way we were growing was no longer sustainable.

At the beginning of 2023, I had to take a step back to reflect, recalibrate, and reimagine how I wanted Afternoon Culture to grow in the years to come.

And once I gave myself space to slow down and listen, I realized something big: we had outgrown our own brand.

If you’ve gone through some shifts in recent years, you might be feeling that same disconnect between where you are now and how your brand is showing up. 

In this episode, I want to explore what it feels like to outgrow your brand and how to know when it’s time to build one that reflects who you’ve become.

Let’s get into it.

I created the first Afternoon Culture brand from a hotel room in Miami over the course of a few days.

I was on a solo birthday trip, spending my afternoons wandering through Wynwood soaking in the street art, walking through galleries, sipping strong coffee, and daydreaming about the future.

I had just booked my first few branding projects and was finally doing the kind of work I’d dreamed about.

But I was still in contractor mode and I hadn’t yet named or built a brand for what I was building. 

One evening, during my trip, I called a friend and shared my idea: I wanted to shift from being a freelancer to starting my own brand consultancy. She encouraged me to give it a whirl.

That same night, I got to work.

When I first started Afternoon Culture, it was a six-month experiment. I wanted to see if I could run a consultancy for half a year before really defining what the brand actually was. Honestly, I’m not even sure I knew what it was back then.

I launched with a minimal brand, focusing on just the essentials: a logo, a color palette, typography, and a very simple website with a few portfolio pieces. I didn’t put too much energy into developing a full brand strategy because I was still figuring out who we were and where we were headed.

Between 2018 and 2020, I worked diligently to grow our clients and create steady revenue. Most of the work I was doing relied on personal relationships and word of mouth. I was often meeting potential clients in person, so our digital presence was important, but it wasn’t the main driver of our business.

Then everything changed in 2020 when we switched to an entirely remote approach. Overnight, we had gone from working on quick projects with small budgets to partnering with growing brands, national nonprofits, and Fortune 500 companies on more comprehensive launches, rebrands, and campaigns.

But while we were growing and evolving, I became so wrapped up in the day-to-day that our brand started to feel static. I made some updates here and there, but the brand wasn’t reflecting the full scope of the work we were doing or the fact that our clients' needs had shifted significantly.

Not being intentional about aligning our growth with our brand started to affect us. I found myself working with clients who had six-figure budgets, only to be referred to others who were just getting started with very small budgets.

The challenge of serving such diverse needs…going from quick, budget-conscious projects to larger, more intricate brand transformation….was becoming overwhelming. The whiplash was real for me as a leader.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great problem to have. But I struggled to embrace the fact that we had grown. I wanted to help everyone and approached each project with all my heart, but I wasn’t fully acknowledging how draining it was for me and my team. The mindsets and needs of these different clients were so varied, and that alone forced us to spread ourselves too thin.

By the end of 2022, it was clear that we needed a major transformation if we wanted to continue growing.

Year five of Afternoon Culture was one for big shifts and resets. I spent all of 2023 reshaping the business. I took on less work and created space to move the company in the different direction.

We had grown so much, but I hadn’t stopped to really think about what we were doing and who we were doing it for.

I brought on a CFO to help me build a more sustainable business and partnered with a new legal firm to help us refine and protect the business in the next phase.

I reflected on all the projects we had worked on and identified where we were strongest. I did a lot of market research, talked to founders and brand leaders to better understand their needs, and created offerings that aligned with where things were headed.

Because I was also a little burned out, I started reshaping my life, too. I began sleeping normal hours again. I picked up photography again, started writing more, and leaned into creative adventures in LA.

I had been running on fumes for so long that when I finally created the space to reflect and replenish, I felt real joy & clarity for the first time in a while.

By the winter of 2024, Afternoon Culture felt like a brand new business. But then, I started to feel the disconnect.

Every time someone reached out to learn more about our services and I sent them to our website, I couldn’t help but cringe. Most of our digital presence was stagnant, and it felt outdated. It just didn’t align with the work we were doing or who we had become.

I realized our brand was no longer in sync with my vision. Internally, we had evolved so much, but our messaging, visuals, and overall presence didn’t feel cohesive. Every proposal I sent, every email I answered...it didn’t reflect the pride I felt in the work we were doing.

There were so many moving parts that needed attention. It became clear we needed to apply the same process we use for our clients to ourselves. We had to audit every piece of our brand.

And that’s when I realized: the change I needed wasn’t just about aesthetics or a fresh new look. Our strategic direction had shifted, and I needed a brand that could reflect that transformation. 

I personally believe that launching a brand is so much easier than rebranding.

When you’re launching, you’re starting from scratch.

There’s no baggage, no history to reconsider, no expectations to meet. There’s a sense of freedom in creating something new, where every decision is forward-looking and open-ended. You're building from the ground up, with a clean slate to make your mark.

Rebranding is different. You’re navigating what already exists. You are not starting fresh. You are reshaping, refining, and letting go of what no longer serves you. You are also listening to your customers, to your team, and all the metrics/data and letting them guide you forward.

Evolving your brand calls for you to stand in the space between what your brand is and what you want it to be. In some ways, it’s like updating the blueprint of a house you’ve been living in for years. You know what works, you know what doesn’t, and now it’s time to rebuild with intention.

The most challenging part of every rebrand is that it’s tempting to focus on surface-level updates. But most brand transformations fail because they don’t go deep enough. Rebranding isn’t about changing colors or refreshing a logo. It’s about aligning your brand with who you’ve become and where you're going.

Rebranding is a strategic process that asks you to reckon with the past while shaping the future. It’s a balancing act of growth, reflection, and transformation.

And when you get it right, your brand becomes more than just a presence. It becomes a mirror of your purpose and a powerful tool to carry your vision forward.