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A rebrand in March, the biggest growth month in April

painting the southwest · march to april 2026 · brand, content system and campaign

The account was working as a bulletin board. I rebuilt it as a system, then gave it a campaign to carry.

Two Instagram grids side by side. The earlier grid mixes teal event flyers, phone snapshots and product photos with no consistent treatment. The later grid uses a single deep oxblood background, one serif display face and repeating post templates.
the same account, five weeks apart · left: event flyers and phone photos, no shared treatment · right: one ground, one typeface, six repeating templates

the problem

The account was working, but it was working as a bulletin board. Event flyers, market announcements, phone photos in whatever light the day gave me. Every post looked like it came from a different business, and the through line was where I would be that weekend rather than what the work was.

what I changed in march

A full rebrand in one pass: a single deep oxblood ground behind almost every post, one serif display face with a fixed treatment, and repeatable templates so a new post is a fill in rather than a design decision. I wrote an actual positioning line, Southwestern art for witches and wanderers, which names the audience instead of describing the medium. The website was rebuilt to match at the same time.

Templates only work if there is something to put in them, so I defined the pillars: card of the week from the oracle deck, sold announcements with title and dimensions, named work reveals, New Mexico landscape photography as connective tissue, studio and sketchbook process, and monthly affirmation posts built to be screenshotted. Each has a fixed format, which is what made a daily cadence sustainable for one person who also paints the inventory.

then a campaign to point it at

In April I ran a studio move sale, twenty percent off originals, open from the ninth to the seventeenth. A real deadline, a real reason, promoted through the new templates with a final day push. The first campaign to run entirely on the rebuilt system.

outcome

  • April was the biggest growth month the account has had.
  • Multiple originals sold through the campaign, including a two panel 24x36 work and a 16x20.
  • The template system is still running four months later, which is the part that matters. A rebrand that costs more time every week gets abandoned.

what I would not claim

The rebrand and the sale landed in the same window, so I cannot cleanly separate the two. The honest read is that the rebrand made the account worth following and the campaign gave people a reason to act that month. For a client I would have staggered them by a month to isolate the effect, and that is what I would recommend.

brand identitypositioningcontent systemcampaign planningorganic socialwebsite rebuild

open to marketing operations, analytics and martech roles

Let's talk.

Remote, or Albuquerque and hybrid. If you want the architecture behind any of the work here, ask me and I will walk you through it.