Brand Strategy Fellow

The Short Version

You'll build brands from nothing for founders building companies from nothing. Not brand refreshes. Not brand extensions. Brands that didn't exist yesterday and need to be indelible by next quarter.

What Liminal Is

A Founders' Studio. We co-build with repeat founders—many of them unicorn founders—providing build expertise, capital, and unfair access from MVP to Series B. We call ourselves a Founders' Studio because "venture studio" undersells what we actually do and oversells what most of them actually deliver.

What This Role Actually Is

Brand-building is applied semiotics. You're the person who catches the Baudrillard reference in a sneaker collab, clocks why a certain typeface is having a moment before the trend pieces land, and understands—at a cellular level—why some brands become cultural objects and others become wallpaper.

You'll architect the entire brand identity for our Founders in Residence: audience personas, brand models, positioning, personality, naming, messaging, and visual direction. You'll partner with designers to bring it all to life—guiding logo, color, typography, and expression—but you are not expected to be the one pushing pixels. This is a strategy and storytelling role first. What is required is exquisite taste. The kind that's only built by obsessive, omnivorous consumption across domains: literature, design, film, architecture, music, menus, memes, whatever. The throughline is a preternatural feel for why things resonate.

You'll work across multiple ventures simultaneously, which means context-switching between industries, audiences, and problem spaces at a pace that would give a brand agency an aneurysm.

Nuts and Bolts of What You'll Actually Do

• Brand models & positioning. Build the strategic foundation for each venture's brand from scratch—target audience definition, competitive context mapping, positioning frameworks, and brand personality models. You're constructing the architecture that every subsequent creative decision hangs on.
• Narrative & messaging. Craft brand narratives, tone of voice guidelines, taglines, value propositions, and core copy. This is real writing—precise, evocative, and disciplined. You need to be able to write a positioning statement that makes a founder's eyes light up and a homepage headline that makes a stranger stop scrolling.
• Naming. Develop and evaluate naming candidates—linguistically, culturally, legally. You understand phonetics, morphology, connotation, domain availability, and why some names stick and others slide off. This is harder than people think and you know that.
• Creative direction. Guide designers on visual identity—logo direction, color systems, typography selection, imagery style, and overall brand expression. You need to speak the language of design fluently enough to art-direct with precision, even if you're not the one in Figma.
• Audience & cultural insight. Develop audience personas grounded in real cultural behavior, not demographic stereotypes. You draw on anthropology, semiotics, behavioral psychology, and your own deep cultural literacy to understand what will resonate and why.
• Brand stewardship across ventures. Maintain coherent brand systems as ventures evolve, ensuring that the fiftieth touchpoint is as considered as the first. You'll also contribute to shaping Liminal's own brand alongside the venture brands.

You Should Have

• Deep cultural knowledge. We don't care if you have an MBA or a BFA. We care if you can explain why Glossier's brand architecture worked, why Liquid Death shouldn't work but does, and what Dieter Rams and Virgil Abloh have in common despite having nothing in common. History, literature, art, pop culture, subculture—you've been soaking in it and you can connect the dots across all of it.
• Exquisite taste. Not "good taste." Exquisite. The kind where you physically recoil at bad kerning. Where you have opinions about restaurant menus. Where you can articulate why something feels right three beats before anyone else in the room catches up.
• Real writing ability. Brand strategy lives and dies in language. You need to write—clearly, compellingly, and concisely. Positioning documents, brand narratives, messaging frameworks, taglines. If you can't make a founder's vision sing in twelve words, the hundred-page brand book won't save you.
• Strategic clarity. You can take a founder's 45-minute monologue about their vision and distill it into a brand positioning statement that makes them say "that's exactly what I meant." Translating the abstract into the concrete is your native language.
• Comfort with ambiguity. These are zero-to-one environments. There's no existing brand guide to reference. There's no precedent deck. There's a founder with a world-changing obsession and a blank page. That should thrill you, not paralyze you.
• Contrarian streak. We prize people who think independently, argue from first principles, and aren't afraid to hold unpopular positions. You believe the best ideas survive open debate, not groupthink and therefore treasure free speech and debate, but you know how to disagree and commit..

Unicorn Points If

You also happen to have serious visual design chops—a RISD degree, a stint designing typefaces at a foundry, art direction at a magazine. Real, credentialed craft on top of everything above. But let's be clear: this is bonus, not the job. The job is cultural depth, exquisite taste, strategic clarity, and the ability to tell stories that build brands. Visual design execution is what we have designers for. That said, if you can move fluidly between strategy and execution without a handoff, you become unreasonably dangerous.

You Might Be

A former art history professor who missed tenure because you were too busy dissecting Warby Parker's brand architecture on a secret DNVB blog. Or a cultural journalist who wrote about fashion and design for a decade and realized you’d rather build the brands you kept profiling. Or a semiotics researcher at a luxury house who got tired of optimizing heritage brands and wants to create from zero.

This Is a Fellowship, Not an Internship

12-month commitment. Meaningful stipend. You'll be embedded in core projects alongside experienced builders—not fetching coffee, not observing from the mezzanine. If you've been wanting a way into the world of startups, venture building, brand strategy, or creative direction at the zero-to-one stage, this is the door.