My friend “shopped” my brand.
The dumbest brand strategy exercise ever.
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When I was obsessed with building my dark-as-fuck personal brand, I was dead focused on figuring out how I came across to people.
It was definitely tied to a deeper insecurity. Was I coming off as cool as I hoped I was?
In other words, was I fooling people?
I’m definitely a horror fan, as my website puts forth. But I didn’t realize at the time that I’m more spooky than dark.
I had no idea (partly because I hadn’t quit caffeine yet) that true crime made me unhappy when I consumed it in vast quantities, or that I used horror largely as catharsis around dark topics.
I didn’t understand my relationship to my own image.
But I could tell there was a gap, and it was making me unhappy. So I gave my awesome writer friend Sonia $90 and asked her to purchase me some shirts based on my online brand.
I was incredibly surprised, but I probably gained more insight than I ever would have with a survey.
More than that, it started setting me on the path toward truthful branding.
Shirt #1: The humorous philosopher.
My eternal fear online is that I will look like a complete wanker.
I know I drink the business-speak Flavoraid sometimes, and I’ll wax poetic about things that don’t really matter a lot. I’m not perfect. But I will never ever put “philosopher” in my Twitter bio unless I’m being paid to teach the subject to people. Loving the Philosophy Bites podcast doesn’t count.
But this shirt includes a life philosophy I can get behind: Spend your days doing strange things with weird people.
It’s not pretentious. It’s not suggesting that the wearer is weird themselves, which I appreciate after thrown “strange and unusual” lines over and over again. (Please stop hitting on vaguely goth women with this.)
