One Utility Bill

OUB had a product people liked, three brands that didn't talk to each other, and an agency on retainer doing work the team couldn't critique, edit, or scale. I came in as the first creative hire with a brief that was effectively: make this an in-house function, and prove it pays for itself.

No team, no system, no shared visual language. Just a CEO who wanted leads to convert better and a marketing team tired of waiting for external rounds of revisions.

First job was to collapse three brand expressions into one visual language the whole company could use without asking permission. Type, colour, photography direction, voice — a kit the marketers, product team and ops could pick up and run with.

Second was building the room. I set up a working studio wall, started a weekly critique, and rewired the physical environment to match the ambition — a proper photo wall, multilingual office signage for a multilingual team, and a place where work was visible and challenged out in the open.

Brand work alone wouldn't earn the function its seat. I picked the lead funnel — the single surface where design quality and commercial outcome meet — and rebuilt it end to end. Messaging hierarchy, page architecture, form friction, trust signals, the full path.

Result: a confirmed 20% uplift in lead conversion. Not a vanity metric. The number the commercial team reported in their own dashboards, the number that paid for the function several times over.

The work I'm proudest of isn't the funnel and isn't the brand. It's that the critique culture I started kept running after I left. The team kept the cadence, the standards, and the language for talking about quality without me in the room.

That's the test for any in-house function I build — does the room still work when I'm not in it.