Today’s post is a wee bit selfish. Let me share some new real estate brand work we’re proud of. (And if we’ve done our job right, you’ll find it all inspiring for the quality of your own messaging + visuals, so keep scrolling).

This morning — hot cherry latte in hand — I’m sharing our work for two Realtors who trusted us to turn their brands into stories this summer.

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These new case studies may include the most elbow grease on our end, yet; I wanted to show more of the thought work that goes into each identity, instead of skipping so quickly to the end. 

Because you don’t get to see how tactile this work can be. That the background bits are messy and tedious because we deliberately choose to go the long + slow way with our clients’ brands, every time.

Said more directly — Chat GPT and AI-generated “artwork” (I just anger-cringedin my cardigan) are not our team members. Real, human, hot-blooded people with hot-blooded ideas are my team members. Like our in-house artist, Christine, who creates all artwork for our Realtors by hand in her moody little studio in Eastern Cape, South Africa.

She spreads her tools out on a massive table — paints, brushes, paper and sponges — and whenever we video chat, I feel like I can smell the paint drying on all the papers strewn across the room, layers of illustrative concepts in motion.

Or there’s Emilie, our lead strategy writer. She hammers out custom copy for our clients from a coffee shop or her kitchen table in Wanaka, New Zealand. Sometimes she sends over notes she’s taken after interviewing our Realtors, and we talk through the layers of personality and story for each one. Detangling the threads and tracing story patterns before she even goes to type.

There’s me at my desk in North Carolina, working on my Mac or note-taking in a blue pad with Mary Oliver quotes (she’s my favorite) printed inside.

Sometimes on calls with new leads, the pad open in front of me on the table, I’ll start reading and mindlessly rewriting bits of the poetry in the margin. If you’ve worked with us before, and recall that initial phone chat with me, you probably didn’t know that notes re: your real estate background and brand goals live alongside smudgy little lines I rewrote from Mary about wild geese, or how it feels to inhale the scent of wet morning grass. (Narrator: “She is, in fact, a NERD.”)

Often mid-project, I’ll print out pieces of a brand needing refinements and tape the visuals to the window blinds to stare and simmer, simmer and stare, while chatting with my designers in Slack about where we’re going with this and why. Ed Sheeran is usually playing on Spotify in the background. Sometimes the papers will stay up on the blinds for days (long after we’ve moved on as a team) and my 5-year-old will tape her dot marker artwork from school up alongside Erin’s Monogram Icon or Casey’s brand pattern, and say, “Look! We both made things!”

Point is — 

We’re creative people with real quirks and skills and processes that, grounded in much care, take as much time as it takes. Writing and erasing and painting and taping. Tapping our ballpoint pens against our foreheads while video-chatting from halfway across the world, talking through problems until the solutions sing out.

And that’s why you hire us.

That’s why Casey Menish chose us.

(And says that because she did, she no longer “feels like two kids stacked on top of each other under a trench coat,” in her real estate business.)

That’s why Erin chose us, too.

We’re not for everyone. But if you value good work from a real human team that takes the long way — lots more creativity + hutzpah in the long way — then you should join us. A tight-knit gaggle of pros, some of us have immense real estate domain knowledge, while others joined our studio with none.

Having one foot firmly planted in this space and one foot away allows us to give smart guidance unburdened by the often stale conventions of “real estate branding.”

This, I think, is a key ingredient in our secret sauce.

If you’re looking to finally define your image in real estate this year, and position yourself from a place of full strength, send a note to hello@blueprintbrandstudio.com and I’ll send you our Services Deck with more info.

P.S — What’s BLUEPRINT, again? 

We’re a gaggle of designers, writers, and creatives on a mission to change the branding narrative in real estate.

We offer a signature branding service and the industry’s most elegant and high-converting digital products to help modern, stylish Realtors do three things:

➝ Communicate their worth;

➝ Become the obvious choice;

➝ Tell the right stories to stand out + SELL more.

We love new friends, so hop on our email list for more value content, take our wildly popular real estate personality quiz, or follow us on The ‘Gram to join the family.