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.
The challenge at Amazon Prime 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. My next role took that ambition global. At AWS I built design systems deployed across worldwide brand and marketing organizations — raising the creative bar for one of the most complex enterprise brands on earth.
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.
Education
Speaking
Community