BEATNIK DESIGN

Hey Reader On Wednesday night I sat on a panel at Lloyds Banking Group in London. The Female Product Lead and UX Crunch put it on, and the question on the flyer was a big one: is AI pushing more women and underrepresented groups out of tech faster? My friend, Meg, had messaged me just a few days before to ask me to speak on the panel. I was scared shitless. And I said yes. I shared the stage with 3 other speakers and a moderator. We each brought a different perspective with us. Mine was women...

Hey Reader I've just finished working with my fourth Brand & Bloom founder. We wrapped up this week, and she is super happy with it. Here's why. We built her a system. She already knew how she wanted to work. One main topic a month, split into four sub-topics, one a week. She had it in a Word doc. So that became the spine of the whole thing. In her words: "upload the Word doc I had of it and boom, done." Then her brand voice, written down. She read it back and said this: "I'm completely...

Hey Reader Happy September. The light has changed, the garden has peaked, and I've spent the last fortnight quietly tidying things I'd been putting off for months. Not the garden. The online stuff. I made three small changes. None of them took more than an afternoon. All of them were overdue, and all of them come back to the same single reason. I need to focus on what IS working for me. That's Instagram, Substack and of course this newsletter. It's where my people are. Everything else was...

Hey Reader I've just finished another Brand & Bloom beta trial. I'm writing this with a cup of tea going cold beside me and the particular kind of tired you only get from doing something properly and taking longer than you thought, but you had to get it right. That's four projects done now. A fifth client is starting soon. And honestly, it's been so much fun. Building an operating system for someone's business is a strange kind of joy. Not a logo and a colour palette, although we do those...

Hey Reader Let me start by saying how much I love Dolly. What a phenomenal woman. She's inspired me in so many ways, but this week, it's to keep showing up as myself and doing what I do. She never watered herself down to be easier to swallow. They told her the hair was too much, the outfits were too much, the whole thing was too much. She kept every bit of it. "Find out who you are and do it on purpose," she said, and then went and did exactly that for sixty years. Dolly was never trying to...

Hey Reader I wrote last week's letter from our family summer in Ipswich. Here's what I didn't tell you… tucked into the quiet corners of this holiday, I was working. And I loved it. My two Brand & Bloom beta builds are mid-flight, one in week two, one in week three. Between the poolside cocktails and boating to the sandbar I've been in user research mode: real conversations with the real people my clients serve, finding out what they actually need. I've enjoyed every minute of it. And here's...

Hey Reader I'm writing this from Ipswich, Massachusetts. We get here once a year to see family, and August is when the whole place shows off. The flowers are in full bloom. Sunflowers, black-eyed Susans, zinnias. Miss Tilly has spent at least eight hours a day in the pool with her cousins. We've been out on the boat and over to the sandbar to dig holes and make drippy castles. It's fun and busy and loud. Laughter, new babies, a lot of sun. I look forward to it every summer. (Mostly what I...

Hey Reader It is muy scorchio out there. My fan is on overdrive, my laptop has practically melted on to my desk, and the plan I had for a big strategic issue this week melted with it. So this one is a summer edit. Lighter, shorter, entirely practical. Because here's what I actually believe: you are the engine of your business. And looking after the woman who runs the show is not a luxury. It's your infrastructure. So this week, the five things that are worth every penny in my world right now....

Hey Reader I'll be totally honest with you. This week has not been a great content week. Life had other plans, the plates have been spinning outta control, and something had to give. And then I read something that made me feel a whole lot better about it. The polished era of online content is ending. Like, properly ending. Audiences are walking away from perfect, AI-flavoured, guru-shiny content. They can smell it now. And the platforms are rewriting their algorithms to reward the human stuff...

Hey Reader! It was the 17th of May, a Sunday, and I was on a call with a business buddy, when a hot flash arrived exactly the way they always do. No warning. My heart palpitating like crazy. I had to stop mid-sentence and just breathe through it. I was walking her through the second stage of a framework I'd built and hadn't even finished testing yet. The ROOT Framework. She was telling me, in that particular way people talk once they've stopped performing for the room, that she'd spent years...