Transformative Brand & Creative Leadership
KateHarmer
Transformative Brand & Creative Leadership
Approach
I triangulate customer insights, competitive landscape, and product-fit to build brand narratives that truly resonate with the right audience. Then test, refine, and scale what works — across demand gen campaigns, OOH, content marketing, social, thought leadership, and more.
I build the infrastructure that maintains brand consistency from awareness to in-product experience, raising the bar through creative systems and deep collaboration with Product and cross-functional partners.
The right idea deserves the right production model. I strategically orchestrate a system of in-house talent, agency partners, and AI-enabled workflows to let great ideas come to life faster, at higher quality and greater scale.
Recruiting and developing world-class talent is an art-form in itself. I build multidisciplinary teams in which strategists, designers, content creators, and producers can thrive and are inspired to do their best work.
Case studies
When I arrived at BILL, the brand was punching below its weight. The creative skewed humble and soft — at odds with what our audience research revealed: BILL's customers weren't modest mom-and-pop shops. They were ambitious operators, bold risk-takers who wanted to eliminate busywork and scale their vision. Compounding the challenge, three siloed creative teams inherited from recent acquisitions were pulling in different directions. I merged them into a single creative engine, evolved the brand around audience insight, and launched integrated campaigns that finally reflected the company BILL had become.
At AWS, I built design systems deployed across worldwide brand and marketing organizations, and developed new ways of telling customer stories. Together, this work raised the creative bar at one of the most complex enterprise brands on earth. Before that, at Amazon Prime, the challenge was deceptively simple: build a brand that could sell anything, to anyone, anywhere. In practice, that meant bringing order to chaos — Prime was used by hundreds of teams across the company, each operating independently and making their own creative decisions. We developed a design system grounded in customer research, which revealed a clear insight: don't overcomplicate a highly complex offer. Simple, value-driven messaging outperformed everything else. The system was flexible enough to scale across every touchpoint — from the website and in-store experience to box tape and Super Bowl ads.
I founded Hum as a full-service creative agency in Seattle, growing it from the ground up into a nationally recognized studio with globally acclaimed talent. We worked with local icons and global companies alike — including Atlantic Records, Microsoft, Mindy Kaling, Patagonia, Penguin Books, REI, and Vulcan — finding surprising yet inevitable solutions to complex creative challenges. We weren't just vendors. We were our clients' biggest champions. Want to see more from Hum? Go back in time here and here.
I’ve worked with
Amazon, Atlantic Records, AWS, Bully Pulpit Interactive, KEXP, Microsoft, Pacific Science Center, Patagonia, Penguin Books, Pratt Fine Arts, REI, Sellen, Space Needle, Starbucks, Theo Chocolate, Thrive Market, Vulcan.
Awards & Accolades
Speaking & Press
Community
Education