Karat Financial is a Series B fintech company building better financial products for digital creators & influencers.

I was responsible for evolving the brand, continually integrating it with business growth strategy, and connecting Karat’s goals with the artistic vision and emotions of consumers.

Scaled and managed the design and marketing team along with working cross-functionally with teams involving, data, product, engineering, and sales initiatives.

Brand Refresh

As soon I joined, I was tasked to elevate the brand guidelines that reflected closer to the emotions of Karat’s cardholder base including logo, color palette, use cases, etc.

Website Design Direction

As part of the rebranding, I also directed the design of the website to reflect Karat’s new look and feel. Was responsible for brand, design, and graphics.

Website Version 1 (Credits: With ALL-HANDS Studio - Webflow implementation)

Website Version 2 (Credits: With ALL-HANDS Studio - Webflow implementation)

Website Version 3 (Credits: With ALL-HANDS Studio - Webflow implementation)

As an extension of Karat’s branding, I decided to include merchandise to build brand awareness, grow the community, and generate marketing material that is evergreen.

Karat and its hoodies became synonymous as SEO data showed ‘Karat’ was followed up with ‘hoodie’ on Google Analytics as #1 searched.

Was responsible for the design, material sourcing, production, and distribution.

Merchandise F/W 2022

(Credits: Photography by Skylar Wagoner)
(Credits: Photography by Skylar Wagoner)
(Credits: Photography by Skylar Wagoner)
(Credits: Photography by Skylar Wagoner)
(Credits: Photography by Skylar Wagoner)
(Credits: Photography by Skylar Wagoner)
(Credits: Photography by Skylar Wagoner)

Events

Was responsible for reaching out to vendors, site planning, scheduling, budgeting, creative direction, design, photography, and videography.

Focused on a balanced bottoms-up approach where Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) expectations would meet a top-down approach from a brand POV.

Karat’s unique value proposition is networking and community—getting this right was crucial to their success metrics and contributes to Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Took events from 0 to 1 and eventually brought on a community lead and event coordinator to scale this further.

(Credits: Photography by Skylar Wagoner)

Growth

Worked cross-functionally to initiate new product launches and proposed billboards which have been one of Karats’ biggest growth engines.

In a world where attention is currency, I proposed to put a spin on OOH advertising by putting creators on the biggest billboards across LA and NY to prove two hypotheses:

1.) Creators are businesses and billboards would be a high-value prop to grow their brand

2.) Karat is still the underdog and in terms of reach, our cardholder base would create more impressions by posting to their socials versus the traditional route of advertising why X person should try our product.

Was responsible for coordination with vendors, graphics, and photography.

(Credits: Photography by Beige Productions)

Billboards - New York

Billboards - New York, Times Square

Marketing / Socials

Character Archetypes

With the understanding that astrology and tarot cards are popular with the younger generation, I designed character archetypes to categorize customer insights and visually distinguish income revenue streams to drive customers to new product initiatives.

Made using Stable Diffusion A1111 with custom LORA based on traditional tarot cards and custom safe tensors in the style of my personal artwork database.