It’s been an extra busy project season here at the studio – hence the radio silence from me in your Inbox / here on the blog lately.

I’ll try to redeem myself today with a recent story. You may not believe it, but my husband and close friends can all attest that about three Fridays ago, I came home from the spa, shellshocked, unsure of what had just happened to me, and told them everything.

“You’ll write about this in your newsletter soon,” said Christine. “You have to. I just want to see how the heck you’ll tie it back to, you know, Realtors and branding.”

Buckle up for this one. 

I need to tell you about Joyce.

It’s a rainy Friday afternoon, and after a particularly stressful work week, my bones and keyboard spine feel like they need a good cry. I schedule the next available massage appointment at a local spa – they have an opening that evening, and I’ve relieved – and arrive later that evening ready to zone out completely. 

The room is vaguely beach-themed. Driftwood here, driftwood there. The wafting sounds of waves. Dim light, soft lamps.

My bodyworker, Joyce, has a strong handshake and wants to know if I have any areas of concern. “WELL my neck has been cracking incessantly for the past month,” I say. “I work in front of a computer all day with terrible posture, so I’m not surprised. But there’s so much tension in my neck and shoulders.”

“I’ll fix you right up,” says Joyce, motioning towards the draped sheets on the bed. “Never fear.”

Little did I know I had great reason to fear. Joyce stepped out and I wriggled under the sheets, face down, eyes closed, ready for my 90 minute Swedish relaxation massage.

Joyce begins with vigorous efficiency. I lie and say the pressure is fine. But just a few minutes in, the spring allergies rush to my head and I can feel, with a sinking sense of dread, the sinus congestion taking over. Suddenly I’m struggling to breathe normally through my nose; suddenly Joyce has leaned in to ask if I’m okay. 

“Oh yes, it’s just allergies. I promise I’m not down here crying,” I reply, laughingly. 

Her moving hands stop.

“Allergies?” she whispers. “Every year? Let me tell you something that will change your life.”

It starts off alright. She wants to share a natural allergy remedy with me, and would I care to listen? I’m not too crunchy, I tell her, but sure, go ahead, I’ll listen. 

“Once upon a time,” Joyce begins – this should have been the first warning siren I heard in the distance, that something was wrong – “I suffered from seasonal allergies, just like you. Nothing and no one could bring relief. Then someone was kind enough to tell me about the deer in the forest and the red berry that, let me tell you, SO FEW PEOPLE believe is real. But I’m here to tell you that both that deer, and that red berry, are as real as me standing here today.” 

She pauses to relish her own moment. Covers my back in so much coconut oil that I feel freshly born.

I break the silence (big mistake): “Tell me more.”

There once was a deer in the forest. A wandering hiker observed said deer eating poisonous red berries from a bush — “they were THOUGHT to be poisonous by the native Americans of the land, that is” — and then NOT dying. Deer trotted off happily. Alarmed but intrigued, and somehow willing to tempt fate, Hiker approached the same bush and ate a mouthful of the same berries. 

“And he did. Not. Die.”

There’s more. The next morning, Hiker noticed sudden relief from his chronic muscle pain. A certain lightness to his gait. He returned to the bush for more berries, and yet more. Months later he opened up shop selling juices and tinctures derived from the red berry, and evangelizing whoever would listen with the story of its healing powers. Every person who believed and drank of the red juice experienced similar miracles.

“INCLUDING relief from their chronic seasonal allergies.”

Joyce moves down my arms, focusing on my carpal tunnel wrists and exhausted hands, pulling each finger quickly and militantly, like one might pull weeds. She describes a kind of revolutionary nationwide movement of individuals who, like her, are blooming with health, and who now carry on the legacy of Hiker and his tincture. It’s now rebranded as The Red Blend Everything Tincture and only available through a sort of underground network, safe from the eyes of Big Pharma. 

“Don’t bother Googling the name,” says Joyce. For like the files and its lists of transgressions by powerful men, “the real story of the deer and the berries has been blotted out.”

At this point I feel my brain squishing into mush. I am sliding into childhood memories of my mother describing, in excruciating detail, her latest natural remedy craze, always related to garlic, apple cider vinegar, or silver. Joyce starts moving to my ribs and abdomen. As I try to breathe through the congestion, I feel my muscles tensing beneath her hands.

“Relax!” she hisses. “This is your time to relax!”

She slips momentarily into silence, rocking my spine back and forth like a grief spell, and I dare to hope. This is it. She’s done talking. It’s probably only been 30 minutes…I still have an hour left to relax.

Again she speaks: “And LET ME TELL you something else, the tincture changed the life of my first husband and my many children, too.”

It was at this moment that I envisioned myself at a kind of crossroads.

To my left — a path that potentially led to peace. The peace one assumes for oneself when one books a Swedish massage. Say nothing. Do not move. Do not engage Joyce a moment longer. But my sweet Southern sensibilities raised an eyebrow at this. Would Joyce consider me rude? Is she desperately lonely and needs a friend? What if I’m the only person who has given her the time of day today? 

And so, lacking in good boundaries (remind me to bring this up in therapy), I look to my right and consider the second path, which admittedly holds intrigue for my journalistic self. She said FIRST husband. How many husbands has she had? And how many children is MANY?

Again a trigger moment. I am one of 10 children. I am flat on my back now and for a moment I barely open my eyes, terrified that perhaps it is my own mother leaning over me. Joyce is looking down with an air of benevolence. 

“…and all it took was a month of the tincture before his arthritis DISAPPEARED. Imagine that.” She giggles.

I’ve missed a story in my dissociated haze. But I snap back and hear myself blurting out, against my better judgement, “HOW many children, did you say?”

“Fourteen.”

“FourTEEN?”

“Fourteen.”

There is no going back now. I surrender both my brain and body to Joyce – relinquishing all hope of feeling relaxation this night – and as she presses into the arches of my feet, she launches into a new series of family stories, each one more intimate and shocking than the one before.

Her first husband (the one whose arthritis had melted into gold, via the tincture) gave her four children, then ran off with another woman but left behind his cat, Hoshi, who became her beloved companion amidst the upending that followed. 

One day Hoshi died of cancer. Joyce’s friends showed up with bottles of wine and piles of dark chocolate, baby succulents and mugs filled with tea, to console her. This led to a monthly meet-up of them as women, always at her home, where they’d drink and gossip and advise each other on a myriad of topics. One of these friends was named Jenny. Jenny had a husband. “They were on the ROCKS and everybody knew it. Every month I listened to the stories of her marriage falling apart.”

One thing led to another and a year later, Jenny had run off to Costa Rica and Joyce was “suddenly married” to Jenny’s husband, “whose name I will not name to you.”

“Why not?” I ask. You know you would, too.

“Because this man brought four of his own children into the marriage. Then gave me another three. So then I had eleven…” 

Okay we’re at eleven. Just three children left unaccounted for…

“…And then one night he tried to murder someone, so that was the end of THAT.” 

Joyce works my calf muscles. I wait. She continues calmly. “I kicked him out. It’s okay. He had an F-upped attachment style anyways. He dripped his toxic chaos everywhere like a beat-up Buick with a bad leak.”

I’m speechless. My inner Marketing Writer Voice whispers, “Make a note of that phrase. You’re going to write about this later. The people will LOVE IT.”

He dripped his toxic chaos everywhere like a beat-up Buick with a bad leak. He dripped his toxic chaos….beat-up Buick….bad leak.

And so her life story continues and for the remaining 40-ish minutes I vacillate between generous, enraptured listening and the kind of dark, brooding sulk you feel when you imagine $180 curled into a ball and flushed down the drain. I picture going home and telling Joe that I’d ended a hellish work week by laying on a table in ambient light, in a room that smelled faintly of citrus and lemon cream, listening to a 90-minute podcast I refused to pause. Because I am an older-daughter people-pleaser who WILL sacrifice hard-earned relaxation for stories of miracle cures, many children, and murder.

The clock begins to run out. I know this because in the middle of Joyce describing her third husband – he loved sushi like she does, but refused to do the work of inner healing, but he was musical and tender, so she stayed with him a good long time – she cuts herself off to whisper, “And nooowwwww the clock is running out.”

“Oh boy,” I say.

There are still three of her fourteen children unaccounted for. I am mad and resentful but my curiosity is stronger, so I mutter, “And so you had three more children after that?”

“I know,” she says, with an obnoxious little sigh to herself. “What a time.” Giggles.

She wants to know who my spirit guides are. What to say? Father, Son and Holy Ghost? My grandmother, Mary Oliver, and maybe the sweet Moroccan lady who runs the food truck that makes the best chicken gyros I’ve ever had?

“That’s great, that’s so great,” she says. We’re ending with a scalp massage (I had, regrettably, paid her extra for this) and she’s working my temples in rhythm with her affirmations to me, then taps a finger lightly on my nose. “ZAP! Yep. There you go. I knew our shimmering energies were similar.”

A few days after this experience, which I cannot in good conscience call a “massage,” I told my friends everything that happened, down to the last detail, as I’ve just told you.

Aisha leans back. Appalled. Sips her sparkling watermelon juice and begins to gently question me, like a therapist would. Why had I accepted this from my bodyworker? Why hadn’t I felt permission to shut her down? Would I let this happen to me again? In what other areas of life do I hesitate to stand up for myself? 

I don’t have the answer to all those questions. What I do know is that I sacrificed myself on the table that ill-fated night in order to make it back alive, glean something from the trauma, and now evangelize it – force it on you now, à la Joyce. 

Because here’s what I can’t stop thinking about.

The massage itself wasn’t half-bad. It pains me to admit it, but my neck hasn’t cracked since. I was good-sore for three days after; Joyce knows her stuff.

The problem was something else entirely.

I came for calm, and got chaos.

Your brand creates expectations before you ever meet the client.

You’re positioned as the “calm agent expert,” but your marketing materials are disorganized, or your messaging is incohesive, or your visuals are lawless. 

You’re the “neighborhood guide,” but first of all, that isn’t a strong positioning statement in and of itself, and second, nothing in your marketing ecosystem speaks to this as a point of differentiation. 

You’re “analytical and data-driven” because your pre-real-estate work experience is finance or law or forensics (we’ve worked with agents at this studio who have prior backgrounds in all these fields), but you haven’t articulated exactly how that mental framework carries over into real estate. 

You can beg to be viewed a certain way in your work all you want, but no one can be lectured into loving you, and if the brand expectation you’re setting doesn’t match the actual brand experience in real time — then you won’t be the obvious choice. 

Joyce solved a problem with my muscle tension, and left me with such profound disappointment that I’m sitting here, three coffees in at my keyboard, still talking about it today.

Most of you have great service. But many of you have a brand mismatch.

Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to get those two things – service promise, and brand experience – to match. When you do that, everything is easier. You have marketing tailwind. And you’ll never be working twice as hard to build trust again.

By the way, I’d be remiss if I didn’t add this final takeaway – silence is part of the service, too. 

If only Joyce had known.

The best practitioners understand what to add, AND what to remove, to the experience. All I wanted on the table that day was…the luxury of quiet.

All your people want is clarity. A truly crafted brand. Simpler communication, both visual and verbal, that stays consistent. Fewer confusing steps. Razor-sharp positioning they can safely find their place in.

If your brand is sending mixed signals, then that’s exactly the kind of chaos we thrive in wrangling here at the studio.

Because we start with what matters. 

Branding and positioning are wonderfully complex acts (and if someone tells you otherwise, they’re trying to sell you a marketing quick-fix). Instead of jumping to implementation, we first bring order to the chaos by detangling your core strategic threads. Through research and iteration, creative liberty and clear process, we get real about your people and your sweet spots, instead of trying to please everyone.

Shoot me an email if that sounds like support you need right now. We’re booking into June, and I’d love to chat.

(Oh, and before you book your next Swedish massage, I recommend you ask in advance if it’s the quiet kind. Maybe give your therapist a quick Google-in-advance, too. My friends looked Joyce up for me later; she has a literal mug shot online. We don’t know the details, other than she was arrested five years ago at a local grocery store. Yes. I know. I swear it’s the gospel truth and yes, I’m still shaken.) 

Until my next sordid-but-true tale…

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P.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.

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