SNAPPY KRAKEN
Scaling creative without
compromising it.
Creative Direction • Brand Systems • Campaign Design • Team Leadership
WE WERE SIX PEOPLE. I WAS THE CREATIVE DEPARTMENT.
When I joined Snappy Kraken, I was employee number five on the six-person founding team. There wasn’t an established creative department, system or playbook waiting for me. We were building the company while we were building the brand.
And because Snappy Kraken was a financial marketing company, creative had two jobs from the beginning: make our own brand impossible to mistake for everyone else in the industry, and create marketing for financial advisors that helped them do the same.
As the company grew, so did everything creative had to support.
WE NEEDED A SYSTEM. NOT A FORMULA.
As Snappy Kraken grew, consistency became a much bigger problem than simply making more creative.
We were marketing to financial advisors while also creating campaigns for them—across audiences with very different expectations. So I developed a framework I called corporate whimsy: a sliding scale that let us move more corporate or more whimsical depending on the audience, without losing the personality that made Snappy Kraken recognizable.
The goal wasn’t to make everything the same. It was to give us enough structure to scale without standardizing all the creativity out of it.
THEN I HAD TO STOP BEING THE SYSTEM.
The system only worked if it could exist without me.
As the team grew, my job shifted from making every decision to building people who could make strong ones themselves. I gave designers room to own ideas, challenge mine and develop their own point of view—while protecting the creative standard we’d established.
Eventually, I wasn’t the keeper of the brand anymore. We were.
AND SOMEHOW PEOPLE STARTED COMING TO CREATIVE FIRST.
Somewhere along the way, creative stopped being the department people came to when they needed something made.
People started bringing us in earlier. They wanted to run ideas by us. We’d earned their trust to help make things better—not just prettier.
For me, that’s still one of the best markers of what we’d built.
6 to 100+
EMPLOYEES GREW AS THE COMPANY GREW
5 Person
CREATIVE TEAM AT ITS LARGEST
1 to 4-5
DIGITAL CAMPAIGNS PRODUCED MONTHLY
$10M+
COMPANY VALUATION WITHIN 7 YEARS
TURNS OUT, CREATIVITY IS FOR EVERY INDUSTRY
“Patrice is a creative genius - full stop. She doesn’t just think outside the box; she redefines it. She has an incredible ability to dive deep and create ideas that are not only innovative but genuinely resonate. Every project with her feels like the beginning of something groundbreaking, as she brings fresh, inspired vision to everything she touches.”
Robert Sofia
CEO, Snappy Kraken