I Stopped Calling Myself a Designer — and My Business Changed Overnight
How Rebranding Yourself Changes Who Shows Up and What You Earn
For a long time, I introduced myself as a graphic designer.
It was safe. People understood it. It fit into a sentence at a networking event without requiring a follow-up explanation. But safe was costing me—in revenue, in the caliber of clients I attracted, and, honestly, in how I felt about my own work every single day.
The shift didn’t happen all at once. It happened the way most real changes do—gradually, then suddenly. I started noticing that the work I actually did for clients went far beyond design. I was shaping how they positioned themselves in their market. I was helping them define what they stood for before we ever touched a logo. I was sitting in on conversations that had nothing to do with fonts or colors and everything to do with growth strategy and revenue.
I wasn’t a graphic designer. I was a brand architect.
So I changed the words.
What One Word Change Actually Does
When you change how you describe yourself, you change who shows up in your world. The moment I stopped leading with “designer” and started owning “brand strategist”—and eventually Brand Architect and Fractional CMO—the entire texture of my client conversations shifted. I stopped getting asked to “just make it pop.” I started getting asked to help founders build brands that could actually scale.
That’s not a small thing. That’s everything.
It also changed what I charged—and what I believed I was worth charging.
Why Women in Service Businesses Hold Themselves Back
I’ve seen this pattern repeat itself with nearly every woman I know who runs a service-based business. We undersell ourselves with our own language. We use the smallest possible title because we’re afraid of being seen as overpromising. We make ourselves easier to understand at the cost of making ourselves easier to undervalue.
Here’s what I’ve learned: people don’t hire a title. They hire a result. They hire a transformation. And if your language doesn’t reflect the transformation you actually deliver, you’ll spend your career doing premium work for entry-level fees.
Your Brand Starts With You
I run a company called DesignPod Studio, and I also founded a 501(c)(3) ocean conservation festival called Sharkapalooza. Two very different ventures—but both taught me the same lesson. When you’re clear about who you are and what you stand for, the right people find you. When you’re not, you spend enormous energy attracting everyone and converting no one.
Brand strategy isn’t just for your business—it starts with how you see yourself. The language you use in your bio, at events, or in a cold email—that’s your brand. And the fastest way to upgrade your business is to upgrade those words.
Where to Start
If you’re ready to stop shrinking and start owning what you actually do, begin here: write down every outcome you’ve created for a client in the last 12 months. Not deliverables—outcomes. Not “I built a website.” Instead, try “I helped a founder triple their inquiry rate in 90 days.”
Now look at those outcomes. What does the person who delivers those results call herself?
That’s your new title. Start there.
The word change is simple. What comes after it—the confidence, the clients, the revenue—takes a little longer. But it starts the moment you decide to stop hiding behind a label that was never built to hold everything you truly are.
