Cold-pressed juice with a cause: donkey rescue.
Golden Locks Creative Co.
A three-person student agency I co-founded for the semester. We pitched, planned, and executed every deliverable end-to-end — research, strategy, brand voice, audience personas, mixed media. No client-account hierarchy, no faculty hand-holding. Just a small team running a real account.
A brand with two stories.
Zen Donkey Farms is a Kansas City cold-pressed juice company — and the proceeds support a working donkey rescue. Two distinct stories living under one brand: a clean, premium juice product, and a mission-driven nonprofit operation. Most marketing collapses one into the other. The brand needed both to coexist without diluting either.
This was a semester-long Message Development course where I co-founded a three-person student agency, Golden Locks Creative Co., and Zen Donkey Farms was assigned as our client. The mandate: build an integrated marketing plan that strengthens the connection between the juice business and the rescue, drives engagement, and gives the brand a voice it can actually use day-to-day across channels.
Four deliverables, one system.
Voice book
A full social media voice book outlining personality, target audience, tone, and platform-specific messaging strategies — with clear do’s and don’ts for keeping the brand consistent across every channel. Designed so a future intern, freelancer, or new hire could pick it up and post in the brand’s voice on day one.
Strategic message planner
An SMP that mapped out the brand’s positioning, key messages, and the relationship between the juice product and the rescue mission. Defined what came first in every piece of copy — and how to frame the cause without making it feel like a guilt-trip.
Audience persona
A research-backed audience persona — visual, narrative, and grounded in actual KC consumer behavior. Not a generic “millennial woman, 25-34, likes wellness.” A real person with real reasons to choose this juice over the dozen others on the shelf, and real reasons to care that her purchase feeds a donkey.
Blog + social posts
Production: a brand blog (built in Adobe Express) and a series of platform-specific social posts and ad mockups. Took everything we built in the voice book and SMP and turned it into actual content the client could publish — proving the strategy held up against the messy reality of a content calendar.
Golden Locks Creative Co.
A three-person student agency I co-founded for the semester. We pitched, planned, and executed every deliverable end-to-end — research, strategy, brand voice, audience personas, mixed media. No client-account hierarchy, no faculty hand-holding. Just a small team running a real account.
A look at the creative.
Brands with two stories don’t need to pick one. They need a system that lets both breathe — and a voice book is the document that holds it all together.
- Voice books are leverage. Hours of strategy compressed into a doc that scales across every future post, hire, and freelancer. Spend the time once.
- Personas beat demographics. “25-34, female, KC” tells you nothing. The right persona tells you which juice she buys when her kid is in the cart with her.
- Cause-marketing without guilt. The donkey rescue is a feature, not a hostage situation. Lead with the product, let the cause earn the close.
- Small agency, real account. Three people running an integrated brand engagement is faster than five people in a vacuum. Less politics, more shipping.
The full voice book.
22 pages. Public.