Designer,
Creative Director,
Marketing Strategist
My experience runs the gamut from building traditional retail and B2B marketing strategies to managing creative teams, owning a brick-and-mortar retail business, and assisting executive teams with scaling their brands. I have helped develop multinational ecommerce brands, ground-floor start-ups, and nonprofits that are leaders in their fields. Intrinsically, I am a designer. This experience has helped me to develop the skills not only to design effective creative, but to elevate systems, enhance platforms, and develop all-encompassing marketing strategies and tactics that work.
I have decades of experience in design and marketing; my career began in the days of heating up waxers in the morning, cutting litho, and manually calculating photo-crops, back when computers were only used for typesetting. I understand the true mechanics of design. But as a marketing and design technologist, I also strive to always stay a step ahead. I thrive in understanding the latest platforms, recognizing prevailing cultural messaging trends, and keeping up to date with color and marketing forecasts.
My personal life is largely about wilderness: I spend most of my free time in the mountains and wild places of the world. In contrast to this, my design aesthetic is firmly rooted in Bauhaus, postmodernism, and futurism. While these influences may seem to lie at opposite ends of the spectrum, they fuse into a cohesive perspective of minimalism, self-sufficiency, and efficiency.
Relevant Work History
DESIGN
and MARKETING
Incline Design Group
Founder, Creative Director | 2014–Current
I built this marketing and design studio to serve a diverse range of clients in several key verticals, with a heavy focus on the outdoor and cycling industries, tech and science, and nonprofits. We serve both direct clients and creative agencies, primarily in the Western US and Europe. With my deep background in design and extensive experience in business development and management, IDG also functions as a business consulting agency.
Backcountry.com, Competitive Cyclist
Creative Director | 2010–2014
Working with Backcountry and Competitive Cyclist, I was able to combine my design and marketing expertise with my years of experience in the outdoor industry. I managed a department of 20-plus people, including designers, art directors, traffic managers, and photographers, while working with the sales department, merchandisers, executives, and content department to align our KPI’s and objectives with a bottom-line focus on sales and customer engagement. I built and managed the department budget while collaborating with the finance department, and interfaced with external partners on larger marketing initiatives including the acquisition of smaller companies.
Art Director | 2010–2011
I started at Backcountry as an Art Director overseeing the bike vertical, including more than a half-dozen synchronous bike brands. I was responsible for the majority of the visual design, as well as managing the output and consistency of the junior-level designers who were occasionally called in for seasonal help. The visual design included all digital design, from email to web, including web and app banners and affiliate marketing, and required effective communication with the email marketing team to strategize marketing voice and market segmentation. This position also included overseeing and directing photo shoots, both in-studio and in-field, as well as print design for advertising, packaging for house brands, and corporate communications across all brands.
BUSINESS STRATEGY
and CONSULTING
SP2 Life
Director of Marketing, Consulting Creative Director | 2017–2020
I began working with SP2 on the design front—rebranding, building an identity system, and designing packaging and physical branded merchandise. I quickly moved into the role of Director of Marketing to oversee the big-picture marketing development. In the first 6 months I worked with them, we increased revenue by a factor of 8. We then refined their marketing strategy to maintain their trajectory, developed strategic relationships with world-renowned athletes, and developed a refined business plan with the potential for exponential growth in the coming year.
Reissued.com
Consulting Creative Director, Designer | 2014–2015
Reissued was a high-end online marketplace for curated rare, vintage, and one-of-a-kind goods. I built a robust identity system for this start-up, developing an app-based platform that brought a new market approach to selling vintage merchandise. I handled app-based UI and UX, working with a development team based out of San Diego, CA. Once the platform was launched, my role moved to marketing and visual design, including web banners, digital advertising, email marketing, and continuing to make iterative revisions of the app UI in cooperation with a distributed team across North America.
OUTDOOR
and BIKE INDUSTRY
uBRDO Cycle & Mountain Supply
Owner | 2007–2010
I started this retail business after managing a bicycle shop in the same city and seeing the potential for a tighter-focused shop that met the needs of a smaller, more fanatical demographic of professional outdoor athletes and more aggressive endurance athletes. uBRDO was a high-end boutique with an average bike sale of more than triple the price of the typical bike purchase in the state at that time. We also focused on what was a sorely underserved demographic at the time: women in the outdoors. We strove to create a welcoming environment where women felt they could safely come to get their questions answered, get fitted for clothing and bikes, and meet up with other badass women in the area. We ran several teams out of the shop, including men’s and women’s endurance road and mountain bike teams, and a cyclocross team that was well established in the region.
Montlake Bicycle Shop
Store Manager, Bike Fitter, Mechanic | 2000–2006
Working across roles from Mechanic to Sales to Store Manager gave me the opportunity to understand the key aspects of running a multi-location retail business, including the value of community engagement in driving bottom-line revenue. During my time as Manager, I increased our customer base and led the business from an operational loss to a sustainable profit.
REI
Shop Tech, Sales | 1996–2000
My introduction to the outdoor industry was working for one of the largest outdoor retailers in North America in the mid-90s. I worked hard to learn as much as I could and to impact the performance of the store, including earning a National Merchandising Award in my first year.
Personal Projects
VOLUNTEER WORK
Adventure Scientists
Uinta Mountains Carnivore Study
This was a camera-trap project deep in the backcountry of the Uinta Mountain Range of northeastern Utah, to try and determine if wolverines were moving south and west into the mountains of Utah from the more prominent Rocky Mountain Range. We were also looking for movement of lynx as a secondary goal. Over 4 months, I managed 2 sites located 20-plus miles into the backcountry with 2 baited camera traps. I returned once per month to maintain the sites and cameras and collect data.
Wasatch Mountain Arts
Board Member, Volunteer
I’ve worked with Wasatch Mountain Arts on marketing and design since 2016, rebranding them, producing their print and digital visual design, and personally managing and designing the annual collectible magazine for the Wasatch Mountain Film Festival. I currently serve on the Board of Directors, working to bring the next year of this quickly growing mountain culture festival to the Wasatch Front.
OUTDOOR PURSUITS
2019 John Muir Trail
The John Muir Trail and the Sierra Nevada hold a special significance for my life. Those mountains have beat me up and beat me down (and they’ve nearly killed me a couple times); they are the mountains that first nurtured my love for the wilds of North America. In the summer of 2019, I teamed up with an athlete friend and completed the JMT(-plus)—starting south of Mt. Whitney at Horseshoe Lakes and continuing northbound to cover 240 miles in 13 days. Photos and a write up on our trip appear in the 2020 Big Agnes Catalog.
2018 Alaska Bikepacking
Working in cooperation with One of Seven Project, Big Agnes, and Outdoor Research, I spent 15 days bikepacking in Alaska with a friend and sponsored endurance athlete, exploring some route possibilities for a new trail that was being scoped for future development. We covered roughly 470 miles—about 1/3 of that on dirt—in 11 days of pedaling. We managed social account takeovers for Outdoor Research and Big Agnes following the trip, and photos appear in their catalogs and online.
2000 Pan-American Highway
Bike Tour
Starting at the northernmost point reachable by road in North America, a friend and I pedaled south for 6 months to Southern California, carrying all our gear on the bikes and sleeping in tents. We travelled 5,500 miles, crossed Alaska from its northernmost to southernmost and westernmost to easternmost roads, crossed the Continental Divide twice, and traversed the Yukon Territory, British Columbia, and the length of the Western U.S., covering Washington, Oregon, and California.
1980’s–Current
Outdoor Pursuits
For me, being outside is far more than a hobby—it is a way of life. I have hiked, run, climbed, pedaled, and paddled tens of thousands of miles around the Western U.S. and Canada, backpacked in Australia, taken an accidental 18-mile trail run in Croatia (in the hardest rain I’ve ever experienced), and introduced more friends to the comforts (and discomforts) of sleeping on the ground and pedaling around the outdoors than I can count. And still counting…