The brief
An established women's intimate health brand with national retail distribution approached me seeking a writer. They needed content for the site, were thinking about revitalizing their blog, and had a founder with a story they wanted to tell.
The diagnosis
Before I scoped any writing, I asked for two weeks to audit the site and talk to the team. I came back with a different read.
The existing content was inconsistent in voice. There was no messaging framework. There was no founder voice anywhere on the site. The team had told me they wanted to reach a specific kind of consumer, readers who know things about science, but the content infrastructure wasn’t shaped to resonate with that audience.
Hiring a writer wouldn't fix any of that. Whoever they hired would be producing into a vacuum: no voice to write in, no messaging to reinforce, no editorial point of view to extend. They'd get content. They wouldn't get a brand.
The reframe
I went back and made the case for editorial infrastructure built across four pieces: a content strategy roadmap, an updated brand style guide, the founder's signature first-person narrative, and a pitching strategy to get the founder and the brand into earned media. The writing they'd originally asked for would still happen. The system underneath it would shape it.
Artifact 010: An as told to narrative crafted in the CEO’s voice.
The work
The founder narrative (seen above, anonymized). The editorial decision I made was to write the founder as inspirational rather than aspirational. She is, factually, a scientist who built a category-leading brand. The easy version of this piece would have positioned her as someone to look up to. I chose to write her as someone you could actually talk to, someone closer to the consumer, not further from them. What stayed: the moment of clarity in her garage that decided her exit from corporate. The bootstrapped trade show booth where she landed her first major retailers set up next to big pharma's lit-up displays. The unlikely community connection that became her first manufacturing partner. All kept because they made her a person, not a figurehead.
The content roadmap. This covered three buckets: editorial articles on vaginal health fundamentals, common reproductive health questions, and evidence-backed answers; visual infographics; and video concepts— including a video series called "The Unspeakable," built around a specific constraint. The brand operated under heavy platform restrictions on what it could say about its category. Layered on top were cultural taboos about how vaginal health is discussed at all. "The Unspeakable" turned the constraint into a creative format, playing on what the brand couldn't say, using the restrictions as a tongue-in-cheek joke.
A brand style guide. Scaffolded with sections for tone, key messaging, language guidelines, dos and don'ts, a glossary of brand-preferred terms, and a messaging framework with sample copy.
A pitching strategy. An earned media plan oriented toward getting the founder onto podcasts and the brand into press coverage.
Outcome
The brand restructured mid-engagement, and the work didn't continue. What's shown here is a partial view of what was scoped: the founder narrative is the most complete artifact, the content roadmap shows the strategic logic, and the style guide and pitching strategy were in progress.