Brand Strategy Fellow

The Short Version

You'll build brands from nothing for founders building companies from nothing. Not refreshes. Not extensions. Brands that didn't exist yesterday and need to be indelible by next quarter.

What Liminal Is

A Founders' Studio. We co-build with repeat founders, many of them unicorn founders, providing build expertise, capital, and unfair access from founding to Series B. We call ourselves a Founders' Studio because “venture studio” undersells what we do and oversells what most of them deliver.

What This Role Actually Is

Brand-building is applied semiotics. You're the person who catches the Baudrillard reference in a sneaker collab, clocks why a certain typeface is having a moment before the trend pieces land, and understands at a cellular level why some brands become cultural objects and others become wallpaper.

You'll embark on projects with our Founders, defining their brand identity for our Founders- in- Residence: the entire brand model, audience personas, positioning, personality, naming, messaging, and visual direction. You partner with designers to bring it all to life, but pushing pixels isn't the job. Strategy and storytelling first.

The Work

• Brand models and positioning. Build the strategic foundation for a venture from scratch: audience, competitive context, positioning frameworks, personality. The architecture every later creative decision hangs on.
• Narrative and messaging. Brand narratives, tone-of-voice guidelines, taglines, value propositions, core copy. Real writing. Precise, evocative, disciplined. A positioning statement that makes a founder's eyes light up. A homepage headline that makes a stranger stop scrolling.
• Naming. Develop and evaluate names linguistically, culturally, and legally. Phonetics, morphology, connotation, and domain availability. Why do some names stick and have cultural force, and others slide off? Harder than people think.
• Creative direction. Art-direct designers on visual identity: logo, color, typography, imagery, expression. Speak design fluently enough to direct with precision.
• Audience and cultural insight. Personas grounded in real cultural behavior, not demographic stereotypes. Anthropology, semiotics, behavioral psychology, your own cultural literacy.

Who You Are

• Deep cultural knowledge. We don't care about your degree (or if you have one). We care if you can explain why Glossier's brand architecture worked, why Liquid Death shouldn't work but does, and what Dieter Rams and Virgil Abloh have in common despite having nothing in common.
• Exquisite taste. Not good taste. Exquisite. The kind where you physically recoil at bad kerning. Where you have opinions about restaurant menus. Where you can articulate why something feels right three beats before anyone else in the room catches up.
• Strategic clarity. You can take a founder's 45-minute monologue and distill it into a positioning statement that makes them say “that's exactly what I meant.”
• Comfort with ambiguity. Zero-to-one environments. No existing brand guide. No precedent deck. A founder with a world-changing obsession and a blank page. That should thrill you, not paralyze you.
• Contrarian streak. Independent thinker. Arguments from first principles. Unafraid of unpopular positions. You believe the best ideas survive open debate. You know how to disagree and commit.

Unicorn Points If

You also have serious visual chops. A RISD degree. A stint designing typefaces at a foundry. Art direction at a magazine. Bonus, not the job. The job is cultural depth, exquisite taste, strategic clarity, and storytelling. But if you can move fluidly between strategy and execution without a handoff, you become unreasonably dangerous.

Fellowship, not internship

Twelve months. Meaningful stipend. Embedded in a core project alongside experienced builders. Not fetching coffee, that’s the leaders’ job. Not watching from the mezzanine. If you've been looking for a way into startup life or zero-to-one creative direction at the earliest stage, this is the door.